wife ("His conversation consisted chiefly of halloaing, singing, relations of sporting adventures, bawdy, and abuse of women and of the Government: these, however, were the only seasons when Mr Western saw his wife, for when he repaired to her bed he was generally so drunk that he could not see; and, in the sporting season, he always rose from her before it was light") and his attitude to her after she died ("When anything in the least soured him, as a bad scenting day, or a distemper among his hounds, or any other such misfortune, he constantly vented his spleen by invectives against the deceased, saying, 'If my wife was alive now, she would be glad of this.'")—all these pictures are lightning strokes of verisimilitude which prove how perfectly at home Fielding was in the great theatre of nature.

When we come to the lower classes, to Mrs Honour, with her "Marry, come up!" "Hoity toity!" prefaces to gossip, which is only rivalled and not excelled by her counterpart in Shakespeare, Juliet's nurse; to Partridge, with his pricelessly irrelevant tags from the classics: "infandum, regina, jubes renovare dolorem," "hinc illæ lachrymæ," "tempus edax rerum," and so on, we can only give ourselves up whole-heartedly to the enjoyment of them and wish that they may go on talking for ever.

Then there is the surgeon whose talk might well be set for dictation in schools: "I was once, I remember, called to a patient who had received a violent contusion in his tibia, by which the exterior cutis was lacerated, so that there was a profuse sanguinary discharge; and the interior membranes were so divellicated that the os or bone very plainly appeared through the aperture of the vulnus or wound. Some febrile symptoms intervening at the same time (for the pulse was exuberant, and indicated much phlebotomy), I apprehended an immediate mortification."

The fact is that Fielding, like the classical author he is so fond of quoting, finds everything and particularly everyone in the world amusing and interesting.

It was a stroke of genius to send Sophia and Tom wandering from inn to inn, for in no other way than by making his characters take to the open road could the author have introduced such a variety of characters or such exciting episodes.

"For though every good author will confine himself within the bounds of probability, it is by no means necessary that his characters, or his incidents, should be trite, common or vulgar; such as happen in every street, or in every house, or which may be met with in the home articles of a newspaper. Nor must he be inhibited from showing many persons and things, which may possibly have never fallen within the knowledge of great part of his readers."

In one point Fielding certainly does strain the bounds of probability beyond all bearing: there never was such a book for impossible coincidences as Tom Jones. Everybody appears to know everybody else and everybody else's business; people turn up in the most unexpected places (especially bedrooms) at the most unfortunate moments. It is like a musical comedy in this respect. There is much more of the surprising than there is of the credible in events, not in the people, who are, as I have said, only too natural.

It is not so much surprising that Partridge should read Erasmus, Ovid, Pope's Homer, The Spectator, Robinson Crusoe and Thomas à Kempis as that he should have ever met Tom Jones as he did and when he did.

It is not at all surprising that a barber should quote Latin tags irrelevantly, or that he should join Tom with the idea of fighting for the Jacobites, but not be "over-nice" when he found out that he was "booked" for the other side (though he was going to fight against his own cause, yet he would not drink against it); but it is impossible to believe that the same people should jump into and out of the story and meet again after a score of years or more.

There are readers who object to the interpolation of the episode of the Man of the Hill on the ground that it only retards the action. Such people ought not to read Tom Jones. The true reader is in no hurry to get on with the story, though he is thrilled with the intricacies of it; he is ready to turn aside into any by-path which will shed more light on the England of the eighteenth century. For after all it is from the Man of the Hill that we hear that "he could not only hit a standing mark with great certainty, but hath actually shot a crow as it was flying in the air"; that there were gentlemen farmers of three hundred pounds a year in 1657; that on five hundred pounds a year at Oxford a profligate could keep his horses and his whore and obtain what credit he pleased; that there were Justice Darlings even in those days ("I have travelled the circuit these forty years and never found a horse in my life ... thou art a lucky fellow ... for thou didst not only find a horse, but a halter too, I promise thee"); how to leave a restaurant without paying for one's food; how much more costly precious Burgundy used to be than simple claret; how philosophy elevates and steels the mind ("Men of true learning and almost universal knowledge always compassionate the ignorance of others; but fellows who excel in some little, low, contemptible art are always certain to despise those who are unacquainted with that art"); how the sane Englishman of the time regarded James II., and a thousand other things of equal interest.

And in spite of its apparent irrelevance, does not this episode develop our appreciation of the hero? Set against the misanthropic Man of the Hill, who sees marks of God's Power, Wisdom and Goodness everywhere but in his fellow-man, Tom Jones acts as an admirable foil.

"I have lived," he says, "but a short time in the world, and yet have known men worthy of the highest friendship, and women of the highest love."

It is by virtue of contrasts such as this just shown that Fielding would claim to be named among the geniuses.

"By genius I would understand that power, or rather those powers of the mind which are capable of penetrating into all things within our reach and knowledge, and of distinguishing their essential differences. These are no other than invention and judgment...."

Added to this there must be "conversation."

"So necessary is this to the understanding the characters of men that none are more ignorant of them than those learned pedants whose lives have been entirely consumed in colleges and among books; for however exquisitely human nature may have been described by writers, the true practical system can be learnt only in the world."

He also requires of his ideal author "refinement, elegance and liberality of spirit." He must have a good heart and be capable of feeling. "The author who will make me weep," says Horace, "must first weep himself. No man can paint a distress well which he doth not feel while he is painting it.... I am convinced I never make my reader laugh heartily but where I have laughed before him."

Who would deny the interest or importance of digressions like these when they shed such a flood of light on to the author's attitude to his own work?

The sergeant who resented the imputation against his character conveyed by the words non sequitur ("You are another," cries the sergeant, "an you come to that. No more a sequitur than yourself. You are a pack of rascals, and I'll prove it, for I will fight the best man of you all for twenty pounds"); the lightning-like flash of inspiration which made Mrs Waters repeat the cry, "Rape! Rape!" when she is discovered in bed with Tom; the logic of the landlady of the inn ("So easy and good-humoured were they that they found no fault with my Worcestershire perry, which I sold them for champagne; and it, to be sure, is as well tasted, and as wholesome, as the best champagne in the