And even if we can neither commend nor recommend heroes like _Tom Jones_, such young men really existed, and the likeness is speakingly drawn: we bear with his faults because of his reality. Perhaps our verdict may be best given in the words of Thackeray. "I am angry," he says, "with Jones. Too much of the plum-cake and the rewards of life fall to that boisterous, swaggering young scapegrace. Sophia actually surrenders without a proper sense of decorum; the fond, foolish, palpitating little creature. 'Indeed, Mr. Jones,' she says, 'it rests with you to name the day.' ... And yet many a young fellow, no better than Mr. Thomas Jones, has carried by a _coup-de-main_ the heart of many a kind girl who was a great deal too good for him." When _Joseph Andrews_ appeared, and Richardson found that so profane a person as Fielding had dared to burlesque his _Pamela_, he was angry; and his little tea-drinking coterie was warm in his defence; but Fielding's party was then, and has remained, the stronger. In his novel of _Amelia_, we have a general autobiography of Fielding. Amelia, his wife, is lovely, chaste, and constant. Captain Booth--Fielding himself--is errant, guilty, generous, and repentant. We have besides in it many varieties of English life,--lords, clergymen, officers; Vauxhall and the masquerade; the sponging-house and its inmates, debtors and criminals,--all as Fielding saw and knew them. The condition of the clergy is more clearly set forth in Fielding's novels than in the pages of Echard, Oldham, Wood, Macaulay, or Churchill Babington. So changed was their estate since the Reformation, that few high-born youths, except the weak or lame, took holy orders. Many clergymen worked during the week. One, says South, was a cobbler on weekdays, and preached on Sundays. Wilmot says: "We are struck by the phenomenon of a learned man sitting down to prove, with the help of logic, that a priest or a chaplain in a family is not a servant,"--Jeremy Collier: _Essays on Pride and the Office of a Chaplain_.