wine; and I should suppose that if the girl were kind and fairly
winsome, he would not have insisted that she should possess Helen's
beauty, that if the bottle of good wine were not forthcoming, he would
have been very tolerant of a mug of good ale. He may very possibly have
drunk more than he should, and lost more than he could conveniently pay.
It may be put down as morally ascertained that towards all these
weaknesses of humanity, and others like unto them, he held an attitude
which was less that of the unassailable philosopher than that of the
sympathiser, indulgent and excusing. In regard more especially to what
are commonly called moral delinquencies, this attitude was so decided
as to shock some people even in those days, and many in these. Just when
the first sheets of this edition were passing through the press, a
violent attack was made in a newspaper correspondence on the morality of
_Tom Jones_ by certain notorious advocates of Purity, as some say, of
Pruriency and Prudery combined, according to less complimentary
estimates. Even midway between the two periods we find the admirable
Miss Ferrier, a sister of Fielding's own craft, who sometimes had
touches of nature and satire not far inferior to his own, expressing by
the mouth of one of her characters with whom she seems partly to agree,
the sentiment that his works are "vanishing like noxious exhalations."
Towards any misdoing by persons of the one sex towards persons of the
other, when it involved brutality or treachery, Fielding was pitiless;
but when treachery and brutality were not concerned, he was, to say the
least, facile. So, too, he probably knew by experience--he certainly
knew by native shrewdness and acquired observation--that to look too
much on the wine when it is red, or on the cards when they are
parti-coloured, is ruinous to health and fortune; but he thought not
over badly of any man who did these things. Still it is possible to
admit this in him, and to stop short of that idea of a careless and
reckless _viveur_ which has so often been put forward. In particular,