p, 'if I had five thousand a year,'--and
the history of Sir Charles Grandison might have suggested the remark. To
be young, handsome, healthy, active, with a fine estate and a grand old
house; to be able, by your eloquence, to send a sinner into a fit (as
Sir Charles did once); to be the object of a devoted passion from three
or four amiable, accomplished, and beautiful women--each of whom has a
fine fortune, and only begs you to throw your handkerchief towards her,
whilst she promises to bear no grudge if you throw it to her
neighbour--all these are favourable conditions for virtue--especially if
you mean the virtues of being hospitable, generous, a good landlord and
husband, and in every walk of life thoroughly gentlemanlike in your
behaviour. But the whole design is rather too much in accordance with
the device in enabling Sir Charles to avoid duels by having a marvellous
trick of disarming his adversaries. 'What on earth is the use of my
fighting with you,' says King Padella to Prince Giglio, 'if you have got
a fairy sword and a fairy horse?' And what merit is there in winning the
battle of life, when you have every single circumstance in your favour?
We are more attracted by Fielding's rather questionable hero, Captain
Booth, though he does get into a sponging-house, and is anything but a
strict moralist, than by this prosperous young Sir Charles, rich with
every gift the gods can give him, and of whom the most we can say is
that the possession of all those gifts, if it has made him rather
pompous and self-conscious, has not made him close-fisted or
hard-hearted. Sir Charles, then, represents a rather carnal ideal; he
suggest to us those well-fed, almost beefy and corpulent angels, whom
the contemporary school of painters sometimes portray. No doubt they are
angels, for they have wings and are seated in the clouds; but there is
nothing ethereal in their whole nature. We have no love for asceticism;
but a few hours on the column of St. Simon Stylites, or a temporary diet
of locusts and wild honey, might have purified Sir Charles's exuberant
self-satisfaction. For all this, he is not without a certain solid
merit, and the persons by whom he is surrounded--on whom we have not
space to dwell--have a large share of the vivacity which amuses us in
the real men and women of their time. Their talk may not be equal to
that in Boswell's 'Johnson;' but it is animated and amusing, and they
compose a gallery of portraits which wo