day? Its author, like every other great novelist, described life as he found it. Arcadia had passed away, and big libertine London offered a scant assortment of Arcadian virtues. Fielding had nothing to tell that might not have been heard any day at one of Sir Robert Walpole's dinner-parties. He had the merit—not too common now—of never confusing vice with virtue; though it must be confessed that, like Dumas and Scott and Thackeray, he took very kindly to his scamps; and we all know how angry a recent critic permits himself to be because Thackeray calls Rawdon Crawley "honest Rawdon." As far as can be seen, Fielding never realized the grossness of his books. He prefaced "Tom Jones" with a beautiful little sermon about "the solid inward comfort of mind which is the sure companion of innocence and virtue;" and he took immense credit to himself for having written "nothing prejudicial to the cause of religion and virtue, nothing inconsistent with the strictest rules of decency, nor which can offend even the chastest eye in the perusal." What more than this could be claimed by the authors of "The Old Homestead" and "Little Lord Fauntleroy"?
