ther of Pamela, was a
young footman in the employ of Lady Booby, from whom his virtue
suffered a like assault to that made upon Pamela's by her master. This
reversal of the natural situation was in itself full of laughable
possibilities, had the book gone on simply as a burlesque. But the
exuberance of Fielding's genius led him beyond his original design.
This hero, leaving Lady Booby's service, goes traveling with good
Parson Adams, and is soon engaged in a series of comical and rather
boisterous adventures.

Fielding had seen life, and his characters were painted from the life
with a bold, free hand. He was a gentleman by birth, and had made
acquaintance with society and the town in 1727, when he was a handsome,
stalwart young fellow, with high animal spirits and a great appetite
for pleasure. He soon ran himself into debt and began writing for the
stage; married, and spent his wife's fortune, living for awhile in much
splendor as a {208} country gentleman, and afterward in a reduced
condition as a rural justice with a salary of 500 pounds of "the
dirtiest money on earth." Fielding's masterpiece was _Tom Jones_,
1749, and it remains one of the best of English novels. Its hero is
very much after Fielding's own heart, wild, spendthrift, warm-hearted,
forgiving, and greatly in need of forgiveness. The same type of
character, with the lines deepened, re-appears in Captain Booth, in
_Amelia_, 1751, the heroine of which is a portrait of Fielding's wife.
With Tom Jones is contrasted Blifil, the embodiment of meanness,
hypocrisy, and cowardice. Sophia Western, the heroine, is one of
Fielding's most admirable creations. For the regulated morality of
Richardson, with its somewhat old-grannified air, Fielding substituted
instinct. His virtuous characters are virtuous by impulse only, and
his ideal of character is manliness. In _Jonathan Wild_ the hero is a
highwayman. This novel is ironical, a sort of prose mock-heroic, and
is one of the strongest, though certainly the least pleasing, of
Fielding's writings.

Tobias Smollett was an inferior Fielding with a difference. He was a
Scotch ship-surgeon and had spent some time in the West Indies. He
introduced into fiction the now familiar figure of the British tar, in
the persons of Tom Bowling and Commodore Trunnion, as Fielding had
introduced, in Squire Western, the equally national type of the
hard-swearing, deep-drinking, fox-hunting Tory squire. Both Fielding
an