strikingly, proceeding naturally, ending happily--like the course of a
famed river, which gushes from the mouth of some obscure and romantic
grotto--then gliding on, never pausing, never precipitating its
course, visiting, as it were, by natural instinct, whatever worthy
subjects of interest are presented by the country through which it
passes--widening and deepening in interest as it flows on; and at
length arriving at the final catastrophe as at some mighty haven,
where ships of all kinds strike sail and yard?

_Author._ Hey! hey! what the deuce is all this? Why,'tis Ercles' vein,
and it would require some one much more like Hercules than I, to
produce a story which should gush, and glide, and never pause, and
visit, and widen, and deepen, and all the rest on't. I should be chin-
deep in the grave, man, before I had done with my task; and, in the
meanwhile, all the quirks and quiddities which I might have devised
for my reader's amusement, would lie rotting in my gizzard, like
Sancho's suppressed witticisms, when he was under his master's
displeasure.--There never was a novel written on this plan while the
world stood.

_Captain._ Pardon me--Tom Jones.

_Author._ True, and perhaps Amelia also. Fielding had high notions of
the dignity of an art which he may be considered as having founded. He
challenges a comparison between the Novel and the Epic. Smollett, Le
Sage, and others, emancipating themselves from the strictness of the
rules he has laid down, have written rather a history of the
miscellaneous adventures which befall an individual in the course of
life, than the plot of a regular and connected epopeia, where every
step brings us a point nearer to the final catastrophe. These great