ABSTRACT
The author takes up his heroine at the very point at which all his predecessors have dropped their capital personages. It has been heretofore a general practice to conduct the lover and his mistress to the door of matrimony, and there leave them, as if after that ceremony the whole interest in them was at end, and nothing could remain beyond it worthy of exciting or keeping up the curiosity of the reader. Instead of which, Mr. Fielding, in defiance of this established custom, has ventured to give the history of two persons already married, but whose adventures, hardships, and distressful situations form a chain of events, in which he has had the art of keeping up the spirit of his narration from falling into that languor and flatness which might be expected from the nature of the subject; for, virtuous and laudable as the tenderness and constancy of a wife to her husband must for ever be considered, these affections are, however, too often esteemed as merely matter of pure duty, and intirely in course; so that he who does not peruse this work, will hardly imagine how the relish of such conjugal endearments, as compose the basis of it, could be quickened enough to become palatable to the reader. The author, however, has interwoven such natural situations, such scenes of trial, taken also from nature, that the attention is for ever kept on the stretch, and one is led on by the attraction of a curiosity artfully provoked, to pursue the heroine through all her adventures, and an impatience to know how the married pair will be extricated out of the successive plunges in which they are represented, and in which the writer often successfully presses vice into the service of virtue.
