" Fielding's masterpiece was _Tom Jones_,
1749, and it remains one of the best of English novels. Its hero is very
much after Fielding's own heart, wild, spendthrift, warm-hearted,
forgiving, and greatly in need of forgiveness. The same type of
character, with the lines deepened, re-appears in Captain Booth, in
_Amelia_, 1751, the heroine of which is a portrait of Fielding's wife.
With Tom Jones is contrasted Blifil, the embodiment of meanness,
hypocrisy, and cowardice. Sophia Western, the heroine, is one of
Fielding's most admirable creations. For the regulated morality of
Richardson, with its somewhat old-grannified air, Fielding substituted
instinct. His virtuous characters are virtuous by impulse only, and his
ideal of character is manliness. In _Jonathan Wild_ the hero is a
highwayman. This novel is ironical, a sort of prose mock-heroic, and is
one of the strongest, though certainly the least pleasing, of Fielding's
writings.
Tobias Smollett was an inferior Fielding with a difference. He was a
Scotch ship-surgeon, and had spent some time in the West Indies. He
introduced into fiction the now familiar figure of the British tar, in
the persons of Tom Bowling and Commodore Trunnion, as Fielding had
introduced, in Squire Western, the equally national type of the
hard-swearing, deep-drinking, fox-hunting Tory squire.
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