From Defoe to Kingsley its history boasts of a noble army of social reformers; yet the work which these writers have achieved has had little to do with the morals--commonly valueless, if not false and sentimental--which they have severally believed themselves to convey. Defoe's notion of a moral seems to have been the vulgar one that vice must be palpably punished and virtue rewarded; he recommends his "Moll Flanders" to the reader on the ground that "there is not a wicked action in any part of it but is first or last rendered unhappy and[22] unfortunate." The moral of Fielding's novels, if moral it can be called, is simply the importance of that prudence which his heroes might have dispensed with, but for the wildness of their animal license. Yet both Defoe and Fielding had a real lesson to teach mankind. The thieves and harlots whom Defoe prides himself on punishing, but whose adventures he describes with the minuteness of affection, are what we ourselves might have been; and in their histories we hear, if not the "music," yet the "harsh and grating cry" of suffering humanity. Fielding's merit is of the same kind; but the sympathies which he excites are more general, as his scenes are more varied, than those of Defoe. His coarseness is everywhere redeemed by a genuine feeling for the contumelious buffets to which weakness is exposed. He has the practical insight of Dickens and Thackeray, without their infusion of sentiment. He does not moralise over the contrast between the rich man's law and the poor man's, over the "indifference" of rural justice, over the lying and adultery of fashionable life. He simply makes us see the facts, which are everywhere under our eyes, but too close to us for discernment. He shows society where its sores lie, appealing from the judgment of the diseased class itself to that public intelligence which, in spite of the cynic's sneer on the task of "producing an honesty from the combined action of knaves," has really power to over-ride private selfishness. The same sermon has found many preachers since, the unconscious missionaries being perhaps the greatest. Scott was a Tory of the purest water. His mind was busy with the revival of a pseudo-feudalism: no thought of reforming abuses probably ever entered it. Yet his genial human insight made him a reformer against his will. He who makes man better known to man takes the first steps toward healing the wounds which man inflicts on man. The permanent value of Scott's novels lies in his pictures of the Scotch peasantry. He popularised the work which the Lake poets had begun, of re-opening the primary springs of human passion. "Love he had found in huts where poor men lie," and he announced the discovery; teaching the "world" of English gentry what for a century and a half they had seemed to forget, that the human soul, in its strength no less than in its weakness, is independent of the accessories of fortune. He