that he did so in allusion to his own first wife, who was also a natural child.

A better reason may be discovered in the story itself; for, had Miss Bridget been privately married to the father of Tom Jones, there could have been no adequate motive assigned for keeping his birth secret from a man so reasonable and compassionate as Allworthy.

But even the high praise due to the construction and arrangement of the story is inferior to that claimed by the truth, force, and spirit of the characters, from Tom Jones himself, down to Black George the game-keeper, and his family. Amongst these, Squire Western stands alone; imitated from no prototype, and in himself an inimitable picture of ignorance, prejudice, irascibility, and rusticity, united with natural shrewdness, constitutional good-humour, and an instinctive affection for his daughter-all which qualities, good and bad, are grounded upon that basis of thorough selfishness natural to one bred up from infancy where no one dared to contradict his arguments, or to control his conduct. In one incident alone, we think Fielding has departed from this admirable sketch. As an English squire, Western ought not to have taken a beating so unresistingly from the friend of Lord Fellamar. We half suspect that the passage is an interpolation. It is in

consistent with the squire's readiness to engage in rustic affrays. We grant a pistol or sword might have appalled him, but Squire Western should have yielded to no one in the use of the English horsewhip—and as, with all his brutalities, we have a sneaking interest in the honest, jolly country-gentleman, we would willingly hope there is some mistake in this matter.

The character of Jones, otherwise a model of generosity, openness, manly spirit mingled with thoughtless dissipation, is in like manner unnecessarily degraded by the nature of his intercourse with Lady Bellaston; and this is one of the circumstances which incline us to believe that Fielding's ideas of what was gentleman-like and honourable, had sustained some depreciation, in consequence of the unhappy circumstances of his life, and of the society to which they condemned him.

A more sweeping and general objection was made against the History of a Foundling by the admirers of Richardson, and has been often repeated since. It is alleged that the ultimate moral of Tom Jones, which conducts to happiness, and holds up to our sympathy and esteem a youth who gives way to licentious habits, is detrimental to society, and tends to encourage the youthful reader in the practice of those follies, to which his natural passions and the usual course of the world but too

much direct him. French delicacy, which, on so many occasions, has strained at a gnat and swallowed a camel, saw this fatal tendency in the work, and, by an arrêt, discharged the circulation of a bungled abridgement by De la Place, entitled a translation. To this charge Fielding himself might probably have replied, that the vices into which Jones suffers himself to fall are made the direct cause of placing him in the distressful situation which he occupies during the greater part of the narrative while his generosity, his charity, and his amiable qualities, become the means of saving him from the consequences of his folly. But we suspect, with Doctor Johnson, that there is something of cant both in the objection and in the answer to it. « Men," says that moralist, « will not become highwaymen because Macheath is acquitted on the stage;"> and, we add, they will not become swindlers and thieves because they sympathize with the fortunes of the witty picaroon Gil Blas, or licentious debauchees, because they read Tom Jones. The professed moral of a piece is usually what the reader is least interested in; it is like the mendicant who cripples after some gay and splendid procession, and in vain solicits the attention of those who have been gazing upon it. Excluding from consideration those infamous works which address themselves directly to awakening the grosser

passions of our nature, we are inclined to think the worst evil to be apprehended from the perusal of novels is, that the habit is apt to generate an indisposition to real history and useful literature; and that the best which can be hoped is, that they may sometimes instruct the youthful mind by real pictures of life, and sometimes awaken their better feelings and sympathies by strains of generous sentiments, and tales of fictitious woe. Beyond this point they are a mere elegance, a luxury contrived for the amusement of polished life, and the gratification of that half love of literature which pervades all ranks in an advanced stage of society, and are read much more for amusement than with the least hope of deriving instruction from them. The vices and follies of Tom Jones are those which the world soon teaches to all who enter on the career of life, and to which society is unhappily but too indulgent; nor do we believe that, in any one instance, the perusal of Fielding's novel has added one libertine to the large list who would not have been such, had it never crossed the press. And it is with concern we add our sincere belief, that the fine picture of frankness and generosity exhibited in that fictitious character has had as few imitators as the career of his follies. Let it not be supposed that we are indifferent to morality, because we treat with scorn that affectation which, while in

common life it connives at the open practice of libertinism, pretends to detest the memory of an author who painted life as it was, with all its shades, and more than all the lights which it occasionally exhibits to relieve them. For particular passages of the work, the author can only be defended under the custom of his age, which permitted, in certain cases, much stronger language than ours. He has himself said that there is nothing which can offend the chastest eye in the perusal, and he spoke probably according to the ideas of his time. But, in modern estimation, there are several passages at which delicacy may justly take offence; and, we can only say, that they may be termed rather jocularly coarse than seductive, and that they are atoned for by the admirable mixture of wit and argument, by which, in others, the cause of true religion and virtue is supported and advanced.

Fielding considered his works as an experiment in British literature; and, therefore, he chose to prefix a preliminary chapter to each book, explanatory of his own views, and of the rules attached to this mode of composition. Those critical introductions, which rather interrupt the course of the story, and the flow of the interest at the first perusal, are found, on a second or third, the most entertaining chapters of the whole work.

The publication of Tom Jones carried Field