vamped-up virtues could deceive so many persons. On the other hand, his
father, Captain John Blifil, has all the look of life. Nor can there be
any doubt about the vitality of Squire Western. Whether the germ of his
character be derived from Addison's Tory Foxhunter or not, it is certain
that Fielding must have had superabundant material of his own from which
to model this thoroughly representative, and at the same time,
completely individual character. Western has all the rustic tastes, the
narrow prejudices, the imperfect education, the unreasoning hatred to
the court, which distinguished the Jacobite country gentleman of the
Georgian era; but his divided love for his daughter and his horses, his
good-humour and his shrewdness, his foaming impulses and his quick
subsidings, his tears, his oaths, and his barbaric dialect, are all
essential features in a personal portrait. When Jones has rescued
Sophia, he will give him all his stable, the Chevalier and Miss Slouch
excepted; when he finds he is in love with her, he is in a frenzy to
"get _at un_" and "spoil his Caterwauling." He will have the surgeon's
heart's blood if he takes a drop too much from Sophia's white arm; when
she opposes his wishes as to Blifil, he will turn her into the street
with no more than a smock, and give his estate to the "_zinking_ Fund."
Throughout the book he is _qualis ab incepto_,--boisterous, brutal,
jovial, and inimitable; so that when finally in "Chapter the Last," we
get that pretty picture of him in Sophy's nursery, protesting that the
tattling of his little granddaughter is "sweeter Music than the finest
Cry of Dogs in _England_," we part with him almost with a feeling of
esteem. Scott seems to have thought it unreasonable that he should have
"taken a beating so unresistingly from the friend of Lord Fellamar," and
even hints that the passage is an interpolation, although he wisely
refrains from suggesting by whom, and should have known that it was in
the first edition. With all deference to so eminent an authority, it is
impossible to share his hesitation. Fielding was fully aware that even