Fielding pursued the plan he had formed _ab incepto_, or whether he
cavalierly neglected it, or whether the current of his own genius
carried him off his legs and landed him, half against his will, on the
shore of originality, are questions for the Schools, and, as I venture
to think, not for the higher forms in them. We have _Joseph Andrews_ as
it is; and we may be abundantly thankful for it. The contents of it, as
of all Fielding's work in this kind, include certain things for which
the moderns are scantly grateful. Of late years, and not of late years
only, there has grown up a singular and perhaps an ignorant impatience
of digressions, of episodes, of tales within a tale. The example of this
which has been most maltreated is the "Man of the Hill" episode in _Tom
Jones_; but the stories of the "Unfortunate Jilt" and of Mr Wilson in
our present subject, do not appear to me to be much less obnoxious to
the censure; and _Amelia_ contains more than one or two things of the
same kind. Me they do not greatly disturb; and I see many defences for
them besides the obvious, and at a pinch sufficient one, that
divagations of this kind existed in all Fielding's Spanish and French
models, that the public of the day expected them, and so forth. This
defence is enough, but it is easy to amplify and reintrench it. It is
not by any means the fact that the Picaresque novel of adventure is the
only or the chief form of fiction which prescribes or admits these
episodic excursions. All the classical epics have them; many eastern and
other stories present them; they are common, if not invariable, in the
abundant mediaeval literature of prose and verse romance; they are not
unknown by any means in the modern novel; and you will very rarely hear
a story told orally at the dinner-table or in the smoking-room without
something of the kind. There must, therefore, be something in them
corresponding to an inseparable accident of that most unchanging of all
things, human nature. And I do not think the special form with which we
are here concerned by any means the worst that they have taken. It has