it is needless to say, was satisfied by a second advance from the bookseller. But who shall condemn the man of whom such a story can be told? The literary work of Fielding is so inextricably interwoven with what is known of his life that most of it has been examined in the course of the foregoing narrative. What remains to be said is chiefly in summary of what has been said already. As a dramatist he has no eminence; and though his plays do not deserve the sweeping condemnation with which Macaulay once spoke of them in the House of Commons, they are not likely to attract any critics but those for whom the inferior efforts of a great genius possess a morbid fascination. Some of them serve, in a measure, to illustrate his career; others contain hints and situations which he afterwards worked into his novels; but the only ones that possess real stage qualities are those which he borrowed from Regnard and Moliere. _Don Quixote in England_, _Pasquin_, the _Historical Register_, can claim no present consideration commensurate with that which they received as contemporary satires, and their interest is mainly antiquarian; while _Tom Thumb_ and the _Covent-Garden Tragedy_, the former of which would make the reputation of a smaller man, can scarcely hope to be remembered beside _Amelia_ or _Jonathan Wild_. Nor can it be admitted that, as a periodical writer, Fielding was at his best. In spite of effective passages, his essays remain far below the work of the great Augustans, and are not above the level of many of their less illustrious imitators. That instinct of popular selection, which retains a faint hold upon the _Rambler_, the _Adventurer_, the _World_, and the _Connoisseur_, or at least consents to give them honourable interment as "British Essayists" in a secluded corner of the shelves, has made no pretence to any preservation, or even any winnowing, of the _Champion_ and the _True Patriot_. Fielding's papers are learned and ingenious; they are frequently humorous; they are often earnest; but it must be a loiterer in literature who, in these days, except for antiquarian or biographical purposes, can honestly find it worth while to consult them. His pamphlets and projects are more valuable, if only that they prove him to have looked curiously and sagaciously at social and political problems, and to have striven, as far as in him lay, to set the crooked straight. Their import, to-day, is chiefly that of links in a chain--of contributions to a progressive literature which has travelled into regions unforeseen by the author of the _Proposal for the Poor_, and the _Inquiry into the Causes of the late Increase of Robbers_. As such, they have their place in that library of Political Economy of which Mr. McCulloch has catalogued the riches. It is not, however, by his pamphlets, his essays, or his plays that Fielding is really memorable; it is by his triad of novels, and the surpassing study in irony of _Jonathan Wild_. In _Joseph Andrews_ we