ABSTRACT
Laughing at the minute and interminable details, despising the conventional decencies and real indecorums, wearied by the want of all manly passion in Richardson’s Pamela, that novel of the pattern morality of its day, Fielding at last revenged himself by a burlesque, which was meant to show how compatible the specious virtue of Mrs Pamela might be, with the absence of every virtue except the one by which she gained for a husband the man who had done his best to ruin her. But Fielding had too great an imagination to allow of his filling up one book with a mere parody of another. From Richardson his satire extended to the fashionable world: and there was in him that genial cordiality which made him soon forget, or sink into secondary importance, the joke he at first had contemplated. The manly character of his hero, the sublime bonhomie of Parson Adams, the ripe beauty and exquisite goodness of Fanny, became a thousand times more congenial to him than mere burlesque or sneering ever could; and the prominent subjects of his novel, which fetter attention and dwell for ever in the memory, are those true and living beauties in it which perhaps he had never dreamed of, when he sate down to revenge himself on Richardson’s emasculated fiction by turning its wit ‘the seamy side without’.
