d _Clarissa Harlowe_ and _Tom Jones_ with unstinted
admiration; but we feel that we are in a confined atmosphere. There are
regions of thought and feeling which seem to lie altogether beyond their
province. Fielding, in his way, was a bit of a philosopher, though he is
too much convinced that Locke and Hoadley have said the last words in
theology and philosophy. Parson Adams is a most charming person in his
way, but his intellectual outlook is decidedly limited. That may not
trouble us much; but we have also the general feeling that we are living
in a little provincial society which somehow takes its own special
arrangements to be part of the eternal order of nature. The worthy
Richardson is aware that there are a great many rakes and infamous
persons about; but it never occurs to him that there can be any
speculation outside the Thirty-nine Articles; and though Fielding
perceives a great many abuses in the actual administration of the laws
and the political system, he regards the social order, with its squires
and parsons and attorneys as the only conceivable state of things. In
other words they, and I might add their successor Smollett, represent
all the prejudices and narrow assumptions of the quiet, respectable, and
in many ways worthy and domestically excellent, middle-class of the day;
which, on the whole, is determined not to look too deeply into awkward
questions, but to go along sturdily working out its own conceptions and
plodding along on well-established lines.

Another literary movement is beginning which is to lead to the sense of
this deficiency. The nobleman, growing rich and less absorbed in the
political world, has time and leisure to cultivate his tastes, becomes,
as I have said, a dilettante, and sends his son to make the grand tour
as a regular part of his education. Some demon whispers to him, as Pope
puts it, Visto, have a taste! He buys books and pictures, takes to
architecture and landscape-gardening, and becomes a 'collector.' The
instinct of 'collecting' is, I suppose, natural, and its development is
connected with some curious results. One of the favourite objects of
ridicule of the past essayists was the virtuoso. There was something to
them inexpressibly absurd in a passion for buying odds and ends. Pope,
Arbuthnot, and Gay made a special butt of Dr. Woodward, possessor of a
famous ancient shield and other antiquities. Equally absurd, they
thought, was his passion for fossils. He made one of