immediate predecessor.




CHAPTER V.

TOM JONES.


Writing from Basingstoke to his brother Tom, on the 29th October 1746,
Joseph Warton thus refers to a visit he paid to Fielding:--

"I wish you had been with me last week, when I spent two evenings with
Fielding and his sister, who wrote David Simple, and you may guess I was
very well entertained. The lady indeed retir'd pretty soon, but Russell
and I sat up with the Poet [Warton no doubt uses the word here in the
sense of 'maker' or 'creator'] till one or two in the morning, and were
inexpressibly diverted. I find he values, as he justly may, his Joseph
Andrews above all his writings: he was extremely civil to me, I fancy,
on my Father's account." [Footnote: i.e. the Rev. Thomas Warton, Vicar
of Basingstoke, and sometime Professor of Poetry at Oxford.]

This mention of _Joseph Andrews_ has misled some of Fielding's
biographers into thinking that he ranked that novel above _Tom Jones_.
But, in October 1746, _Tom Jones_ had not been published; and, from the
absence of any reference to it by Warton, it is only reasonable to
conclude that it had not yet assumed a definite form, or Fielding, who
was by no means uncommunicative, would in all probability have spoken of
it as an effort from which he expected still greater things. It is