the bravest have their fits of panic. It must besides be remembered that
Lord Fellamar's friend was not an effeminate dandy, but a military man--
probably a professed _sabreur_, if not a salaried bully like Captain
Stab in the _Rake's Progress_; that he was armed with a stick and
Western was not; and that he fell upon him in the most unexpected
manner, in a place where he was wholly out of his element. It is
inconceivable that the sturdy squire, with his faculty for distributing
"Flicks" and "Dowses,"--who came so valiantly to the aid of Jones in his
battle-royal with Blifil and Thwackum,--was likely, under any but very
exceptional circumstances, to be dismayed by a cane. It was the
exceptional character of the assault which made a coward of him; and
Fielding, who had the keenest eye for inconsistencies of the kind, knew
perfectly well what he was doing.

Of the remaining _dramatis personae_--the swarming individualities with
which the great comic epic is literally "all alive," as Lord Monboddo
said--it is impossible to give any adequate account. Few of them, if
any, are open to the objection already pointed out with respect to
Allworthy and the younger Blifil, and most of them bear signs of having
been closely copied from living models. Parson Thwackum, with his
Antinomian doctrines, his bigotry, and his pedagogic notions of justice;
Square the philosopher, with his faith in human virtue (alas! poor
Square), and his cuckoo-cry about "the unalterable Rule of Eight and the
eternal Fitness of Things;" Partridge--the unapproachable Partridge,--
with his superstition, his vanity, and his perpetual _Infandum regina_,
but who, notwithstanding all his cheap Latinity, cannot construe an
unexpected phrase of Horace; Ensign Northerton, with his vague and
disrespectful recollections of "Homo;" young Nightingale and Parson
Supple:--each is a definite character bearing upon his forehead the mark
of his absolute fidelity to human nature. Nor are the female actors less