Fielding was fully aware that even the bravest have their fits of panic. It must besides be remembered that Lord Fellamar's friend was not an effeminate dandy, but a military man-- probably a professed _sabreur_, if not a salaried bully like Captain Stab in the _Rake's Progress_; that he was armed with a stick and Western was not; and that he fell upon him in the most unexpected manner, in a place where he was wholly out of his element. It is inconceivable that the sturdy squire, with his faculty for distributing "Flicks" and "Dowses,"--who came so valiantly to the aid of Jones in his battle-royal with Blifil and Thwackum,--was likely, under any but very exceptional circumstances, to be dismayed by a cane. It was the exceptional character of the assault which made a coward of him; and Fielding, who had the keenest eye for inconsistencies of the kind, knew perfectly well what he was doing. Of the remaining _dramatis personae_--the swarming individualities with which the great comic epic is literally "all alive," as Lord Monboddo said--it is impossible to give any adequate account. Few of them, if any, are open to the objection already pointed out with respect to Allworthy and the younger Blifil, and most of them bear signs of having been closely copied from living models. Parson Thwackum, with his Antinomian doctrines, his bigotry, and his pedagogic notions of justice; Square the philosopher, with his faith in human virtue (alas! poor Square), and his cuckoo-cry about "the unalterable Rule of Eight and the eternal Fitness of Things;" Partridge--the unapproachable Partridge,-- with his superstition, his vanity, and his perpetual _Infandum regina_, but who, notwithstanding all his cheap Latinity, cannot construe an unexpected phrase of Horace; Ensign Northerton, with his vague and disrespectful recollections of "Homo;" young Nightingale and Parson Supple:--each is a definite character bearing upon his forehead the mark of his absolute fidelity to human nature. Nor are the female actors less accurately conceived. Starched Miss Bridget Allworthy, with her pinched Hogarthian face; Miss Western, with her disjointed diplomatic jargon; that budding Slipslop, Mrs. Honour; worthy Mrs. Miller, Mrs. Fitzpatrick, Mrs. Waters, Lady Bellaston,--all are to the full as real. Lady Bellaston especially, deserves more than a word. Like Lady Booby in _Joseph Andrews_, she is not a pleasant character; but the picture of the fashionable demirep, cynical, sensual, and imperious, has never been drawn more vigorously, or more completely--even by Balzac. Lastly, there is the adorable Sophia herself, whose pardon should be asked for naming her in such close proximity to her frailer sister. Byron calls her (perhaps with a slight suspicion of exigence of rhyme) too "emphatic;" meaning, apparently, to refer to such passages as her conversation with Mrs. Fitzpatrick, etc. But the heroine of Fielding's time--a time which