accurately conceived. Starched Miss Bridget Allworthy, with her pinched
Hogarthian face; Miss Western, with her disjointed diplomatic jargon;
that budding Slipslop, Mrs. Honour; worthy Mrs. Miller, Mrs.
Fitzpatrick, Mrs. Waters, Lady Bellaston,--all are to the full as real.
Lady Bellaston especially, deserves more than a word. Like Lady Booby in
_Joseph Andrews_, she is not a pleasant character; but the picture of
the fashionable demirep, cynical, sensual, and imperious, has never been
drawn more vigorously, or more completely--even by Balzac. Lastly, there
is the adorable Sophia herself, whose pardon should be asked for naming
her in such close proximity to her frailer sister. Byron calls her
(perhaps with a slight suspicion of exigence of rhyme) too "emphatic;"
meaning, apparently, to refer to such passages as her conversation with
Mrs. Fitzpatrick, etc. But the heroine of Fielding's time--a time which
made merry over a lady's misadventures in horsemanship, and subjected
her to such atrocities as those of Lord Fellamar--required to be
strongly moulded; and Sophia Western is pure and womanly, in spite of
her unfavourable surroundings. She is a charming example--the first of
her race--of an unsentimentalised flesh-and-blood heroine; and Time has
hated no jot of her frank vitality or her healthy beauty. Her
descendants in the modern novel are far more numerous than the family
which she bore to the fortunate--the too fortunate--Mr. Jones.

And this reminds us that in the foregoing enumeration we have left out
Hamlet. In truth, it is by no means easy to speak of this handsome, but
very un-heroic hero. Lady Mary, employing, curiously enough, the very
phrase which Fielding has made one of his characters apply to Jones,
goes so far as to call him a "sorry scoundrel;" and eminent critics have
dilated upon his fondness for drink and play. But it is a notable
instance of the way in which preconceived attributes are gradually
attached to certain characters, that there is in reality little or