If there is an almost preposterous cheerfulness about Buncle, the necessary alternative can be amply supplied by the next book to which we come.  The curious way in which Johnson almost invariably managed to hit the critical nail on the head is well illustrated by his remark to Frances Sheridan, author of the Memoirs of Miss Sydney Bid[d]ulph (1761), that he “did not know whether she had a right, on moral principles, to make her readers suffer so much.”  Substitute “aesthetic” for “moral” and “heroine” for “readers,” and the remark retains its truth on another scheme of criticism, which Johnson was not ostensibly employing, and which he might have violently denounced.  The book, though with its subsequent prolongation too long, is a powerful one:  and though actually dedicated to Richardson and no doubt consciously owing much to his influence, practically clears off the debt by its own earnings.  But Miss Bidulph (she started with only one d, but acquired another), whose journal to her beloved Cecilia supplies the matter and method of the novel, is too persistently unlucky and ill-treated, without the smallest fault of her own, for anything but really, not fictitiously, real life.  Her misfortunes spring from obeying her mother (but there was neither moral nor satire in this then), and husbands, lovers, rivals, relations, connections—­everybody—­conspire to afflict her.  Poetical justice has been much abused in both senses of that verb:  Sydney Biddulph shows cause for it in the very act of neglect.

But the eighteenth century, on the whole, loathed melancholy.  The Spiritual Quixote (1772) of the Reverend Richard Graves (1715-1804) has probably been a little injured by the ingenuous proclamation of indebtedness in the title.  It is, however, an extremely clever and amusing book:  and one of the best of the many imitations of its original, which, indeed, it follows only on broad and practically independent lines.  During his long life (for more than half a century of which he was rector of Claverton near Bath) Graves knew many interesting persons, from Shenstone and Whitefield (with both of whom he was at Pembroke College, Oxford, though he afterwards became a fellow of All Souls) to Malthus, who was a pupil of his; and he had some interesting private experiences.  He wove a good deal that was personal into his novel, which, as may easily be guessed, is a satire upon Methodism, and in which Whitefield is personally and not altogether favourably introduced.  But even on him Graves is by no means savage:  while his treatment of his hero, Geoffrey Wildgoose, a young Oxford man who, living in retirement with his mother in the country, becomes an evangelist, very mainly from want of some more interesting occupation, is altogether good-humoured.  Wildgoose promptly falls in love with a fascinating damsel-errant, Julia Townsend; and the various adventures, religious, picaresque, and amatory, are embroiled and disembroiled with very fair skill in character and fairer still in narrative.  Nor is the Sancho-Partridge of the piece, Jerry Tugwell, a cobbler (who thinks, though he is very fond of his somewhat masterful wife, that a little absence from her would not be unrefreshing), by any means a failure.  Both Scott and Dickens evidently knew Graves well,[11] and knowledge of him might with advantage be more general.