and of being felt without it; the human dialogue;
the admirable phrase in that dialogue and out of it, in the digressions, in
the narrative, above, and through, and about, and below it all--these
things and others (for it is practically impossible to exhaust the
catalogue) fill up the cup to the brim, and keep it full, for the
born lover of the special novel-pleasure.

In one point only was Fielding a little unfortunate perhaps: and even
here the "perhaps" has to be underlined. He came just before the end of
a series of almost imperceptible changes in ordinary English speech
which brought about something like a stationary state. His maligner and
only slightly younger contemporary, Horace Walpole, in some of his
letters, writes in a fashion which, putting mere slang aside, has hardly
any difference from that of to-day. Fielding still uses "hath" for "has"
and a few other things which seem archaic, not to students of literature
but to the general. In the same way dress, manners, etc., though much
more picturesque, were by that fact distinguished from those of almost
the whole nineteenth century and the twentieth as far as it has gone:
while incidents were, even in ordinary life, still usual which have long
ceased to be so. In this way the immense advance--greater than was made
by any one else till Miss Austen--that he made in the pure novel of this
ordinary life may be missed. But the intrinsic magnificence, interest,
nature, abundance of _Tom Jones_ can only be missed by those who were
predestined to miss them. It is tempting--but the temptation must be
resisted--to enliven these pages with an abstract of its astonishing
"biograph-panorama." But nothing save itself can do it justice. "Take
and read" is the only wise advice.

No such general agreement has been reached in respect of Fielding's last
novel, _Amelia_. The author's great adversary, Johnson--an adversary
whose hostility was due partly to generous and grateful personal
relations with Richardson, partly to political disagreement (for
Fielding was certainly "a vile Whig"), but most of all perhaps to a sort
of horrified recoil from the novelist's easy handling of temptations
which were no easy matter to his critic--was nearly if not quite
propitiated by it: and the enthusiasm for it of such a "cynic" as
Thackeray is well known. Of the very few persons whom it would not be
ridiculous to name with these, Scott--whose competence in criticising
his own art is one of