he has known more happy moments than any prince upon earth.  His natural spirits gave him rapture with his cook-maid and cheerfulness in a garret.”  Here is a kit-kat showing the man indeed:  all his fiction may be read in the light of it.  The main interest in “Amelia” is found in its autobiographical flavor, for the story, in describing the fortunes—­or rather misfortunes—­of Captain Booth and his wife, drew, it is pretty certain, upon Fielding’s own traits and to some extent upon the incidents of his earlier life.  The scenes where the Captain sets up for a country gentleman with his horses and hounds and speedily runs through his patrimony, is a transcript of his own experience:  and Amelia herself is a sort of memorial to his well-beloved first wife (he had married for a second his honest, good-hearted kitchen-maid), who out of affection must have endured so much in daily contact with such a character as that of her charming husband.  In the novel, Mrs. Booth always forgives, even as the Captain ever goes wrong.  There would be something sad in such a clear-eyed comprehension of one’s own weakness, if we felt compelled to accept the theory that he was here drawing his own likeness; which must not be pushed too far, for the Captain is one thing Fielding never was—­to wit, stupid.  There is in the book much realism of scene and incident; but its lack of animal spirits has always militated against the popularity of “Amelia”; in fact, it is accurate to say that Fielding’s contemporary public, and the reading world ever since, has confined its interest in his work to “Joseph Andrews” and “Tom Jones.”

The pathos of his ending, dying in Portugal whither he had gone on a vain quest for health, and his companionable qualities whether as man or author, can but make him a more winsome figure to us than proper little Mr. Richardson; and possibly this feeling has affected the comparative estimates of the two writers.  One responds readily to the sentiment of Austin Dobson’s fine poem on Fielding: 

“Beneath the green Estrella trees,
No artist merely, but a man
Wrought on our noblest island-plan,
Sleeps with the alien Portuguese.”

And in the same way we are sympathetic with Thackeray in the lecture on the English humorists:  “Such a brave and gentle heart, such an intrepid and courageous spirit, I love to recognize in the manly, the English Harry Fielding.”  Imagine any later critic calling Richardson “Sam!” It is inconceivable.

* * * * *

Such then were the two men who founded the English Novel, and such their work.  Unlike in many respects, both as personalities and literary makers, they were, after all, alike in this:  they showed the feasibility of making the life of contemporary society interesting in prose fiction.  That was their great common triumph and it remains the keynote of all the subsequent development in fiction.  They accomplished this, each in his own way:  Richardson by sensibility