subjected can deprive him of his native dignity; and as he stands before
us in the short great-coat under which his ragged cassock is continually
making its appearance, with his old wig and battered hat, a clergyman
whose social position is scarcely above that of a footman, and who
supports a wife and six children upon a cure of twenty-three pounds a
year, which his outspoken honesty is continually jeopardising, he is a
far finer figure than Pamela in her coach-and-six, or Bellarmine in his
cinnamon velvet. If not, as Mr. Lawrence says, with exaggerated
enthusiasm, "the grandest delineation of a pattern-priest which the
world has yet seen," he is assuredly a noble example of primitive
goodness and practical Christianity. It is certain--as Mr. Forster and
Mr. Keightley have pointed out--that Goldsmith borrowed some of his
characteristics for Dr. Primrose, and it has been suggested that Sterne
remembered him in more than one page of _Tristram Shandy_.

Next to Parson Adams, perhaps the best character in _Joseph Andrews_--
though of an entirely different type--is Lady Booby's "Waiting-
Gentlewoman," the excellent Mrs. Slipslop. Her sensitive dignity, her
easy changes from servility to insolence, her sensuality, her inimitably
distorted vocabulary, which Sheridan borrowed for Mrs. Malaprop, and
Dickens modified for Mrs. Gamp, are all peculiarities which make up a
personification of the richest humour and the most life-like reality.
Mr. Peter Pounce, too, with his "scoundrel maxims," as disclosed in that
remarkable dialogue which is said to be "better worth reading than all
the Works of _Colley Cibber_," and in which charity is defined as
consisting rather in a disposition to relieve distress than in an actual
act of relief; Parson Trulliber with his hogs, his greediness, and his
willingness to prove his Christianity by fisticuffs; shrewish Mrs. Tow-
wouse with her scold's tongue, and her erring but perfectly subjugated
husband,--these again are portraits finished with admirable spirit and