By June 11, 1748, the book was far enough advanced for the publisher, Andrew Millar, to pay £600 for it, as appears from a receipt now in the possession of Mr. Alfred Huth. [5] And it is eminently characteristic of the finances of a man who, as Lady Mary said, would have wanted money had his estates been as extensive as his imagination, that the receipt for this £600 is dated more than six months before the publication of the book. For it was not till February 28, 1749, that the _General Advertiser_ announced This day is published, in six vols., 12 mo THE HISTORY OF TOM JONES, A FOUNDLING _Mores hominum multorum vidit_. _By_ HENRY FIELDING, _Esqre_ Henceforth Fielding ceases to be the boisterous politician, the witty dramatist; his poverty and his struggles for subsistence fall back, at his own bidding, among the accidents of life; and he stands revealed as the supreme genius, the creator of the English novel, the inheritor of that lasting fame which he had dared so confidently to invoke. The immediate success of the book, in that eighteenth-century world into which it was launched, is attested by the notice in the _London Magazine_ of the very month of its publication. Under the heading of a "Plan of a late celebrated NOVEL," the _Magazine_ devotes its five opening pages to a summary of a book "which has given great Amusement and we hope Instruction to the polite Part of the Town." The summary is preceded by a description of _Tom Jones_ as a novel "calculated to recommend religion and virtue, to shew the bad consequences of indiscretion, and to set several kinds of vice in their most deformed and shocking light." The reviewer declares that "after one has begun to read it, it is difficult to leave off before having read the whole." And he concludes, "Thus ends this pretty novel, with a most just distribution of rewards and punishments, according to the merits of all the persons who had any considerable share in it." [6] Three months later Horace Walpole wrote, "Millar the bookseller has done very generously by him [Fielding]: finding Tom Jones, for which he had given him £600, sell so greatly, he has since given him another hundred." An admirer breaks out into rhyme, in the _Gentleman's Magazine_ for August 1749,-- "let Fielding take the pen! Life dropt her mask, and all mankind were men."