If we would think of the Italian spirit we remember the _Decameron_; if of the French, we remember Ronsard's 'Mignonne, allons voir si la rose,' or Marot's 'Mignonne, je vous donne le bon jour.' But if a Frenchman tries to describe an Englishman his model is not a Chaucer but a Jean Bull, and the only adequate portraits of Jean Bull are to be found in the novels of Fielding and Smollett. [Illustration: HENRY FIELDING] [Two points of view.] Out of this general efflorescence were to spring two branches of story-telling different and hostile from the start. The novel was given sex. Richardson had scarcely invented the feminine novel before Fielding and Smollett were at work producing books of a masculinity correspondingly pronounced. Fielding was the first to mark the difference, and Richardson to the end of his life hated him for writing _Joseph Andrews_. It often happens that one philosopher hates another whose system though less elaborate is obviously founded on a broader basis than his own. Fielding could afford to laugh at Richardson, but Richardson could never laugh at Fielding. He could only enjoy the lesser satisfaction of holding his rival accursed. Their upbringings had been as different as the resulting books. Eton, law studies at Leyden and the Middle Temple, were a different training for the art of story-telling than the Dick Whittington youth of the little business man. Richardson saw the game of life from the outside. Harry Fielding knew the rough and tumble. Richardson was all for virtue; so was Fielding, but, as he would have put it himself, for virtue that is virtue. Virtue at the expense of nature he could no more understand than Benvenuto Cellini, who, if the facts in the case of Pamela had been set before him, would have thought her a devilish artful young woman, and, if he had met her, congratulated her upon her capture. Fielding had a short, rough and ready creed, and that was that a good heart goes farther than a capful of piety towards keeping the world a habitable place. [_Pamela_ and _Joseph Andrews_.]