other kind of literature--that Fielding stands even here pre-eminent. No
one that I can think of, except his greatest successor in the present
century, has the same unfailing gift of breathing life into every
character he creates or borrows; and even Thackeray draws, if I may use
the phrase, his characters more in the flat and less in the round than
Fielding. Whether in Blifil he once failed, we must discuss hereafter;
he has failed nowhere in _Joseph Andrews_. Some of his sketches may
require the caution that they are eighteenth-century men and women; some
the warning that they are obviously caricatured, or set in designed
profile, or merely sketched. But they are all alive. The finical
estimate of Gray (it is a horrid joy to think how perfectly capable
Fielding was of having joined in that practical joke of the young
gentlemen of Cambridge, which made Gray change his college), while
dismissing these light things with patronage, had to admit that "parson
Adams is perfectly well, so is Mrs Slipslop." "They _were_, Mr
Gray," said some one once, "they were more perfectly well, and in a
higher kind, than anything you ever did; though you were a pretty
workman too."

Yes, parson Adams is perfectly well, and so is Mrs Slipslop. But so are
they all. Even the hero and heroine, tied and bound as they are by the
necessity under which their maker lay of preserving Joseph's
Joseph-hood, and of making Fanny the example of a franker and less
interested virtue than her sister-in-law that might have been, are
surprisingly human where most writers would have made them sticks. And
the rest require no allowance. Lady Booby, few as are the strokes given
to her, is not much less alive than Lady Bellaston. Mr Trulliber,
monster and not at all delicate monster as he is, is also a man, and
when he lays it down that no one even in his own house shall drink when
he "caaled vurst," one can but pay his maker the tribute of that silent