ABSTRACT
It is not easy to put one's finger exactly on the spot where simple praise turns into hyperbole. Indeed, it is possible that readers' responses might range from the meanspirited cynic, who finds a touch of vainglory as early as the phrase 'walked forth', to the innocent admirer of purple prose, who can accept' Firmament' and' Harbingers preceding his Pomp' as fine pieces of mythologizing in the antique mode and 'replete with Benevolence' as a decorously appropriate phrase for this human embodiment of enlightened morality. Perhaps such innocence is less often found in today' s readers than in their more classically educated eighteenth-century counterparts. But Fielding is really being highly self-conscious stylistically, for he is, as often in the novel, producing an exercise in the mock-heroic.
