he citadel of his
honor is analogous to that of Mr. B.,--who naturally becomes
Squire Booby in Fielding's hands--upon the long suffering
Pamela. Thus, Lady Booby, in whose employ Joseph is footman,
after an invitation to him to kiss her which has been gently but
firmly refused, bursts out with: "Can a boy, a stripling, have
the confidence to talk of his virtue?"

"Madam," says Joseph, "that boy is the brother of Pamela and
would be ashamed that the chastity of his family, which is
preserved in her, should be stained in him."

The chance for fun is palpable here. But something unexpected
happened: what was begun as burlesque, almost horse-play, began
to pass from the key of shallow, lively satire, broadening and
deepening into a finer tone of truth. In a few chapters, by the
time the writer had got such an inimitable personage as Parson
Adams before the reader, it was seen that the book was to be
more than a jeu d'esprit: rather, the work of a master of
characterization. In short, Joseph Andrews started out
ostensibly to poke good-natured ridicule at sentimental Mr.
Richardson: it ended by furnishing contemporary London and all
subsequent readers with a notable example of the novel of
mingled character and incident, entertaining alike for its
lively episodes and its broadly genial delineation of types of
the time. And so he soon had the town laughing with him at his
broad comedy.

In every respect Fielding made a sharp contrast with Richardson.
He was gentle-born, distinguished and fashionable in his
connections: the son of younger sons, impecunious, generous, of
strong often unregulated passions,--what the world calls a good
fellow, a man's man--albeit his affairs with the fair sex were
numerous. He knew high society when he choose to depict it: his
education compared with Richardson's was liberal and he based
his style of fiction upon models which the past supplied,
whereas Richardson had no models, blazed his own trail.
Fielding's literary ancestry looks back to "Gil Blas" and "Don
Quixote," and in English to "Robinson Crusoe." In other words,
his type, however much he departs from it, is the picturesque
story of adventure. He announced, in fact, on his title-page
that he wrote "in imitation of the manner of Cervantes."

Again, his was a genius for comedy, where Richardson, as we have
seen, was a psychologist. The cleansing effect of wholesome
laughter and an outdoor gust of hale west wind is offered by
him,