It is recorded that Fielding received from Andrew Millar £1000 for the copyright of _Amelia_. But the reception of the new novel, after the first rush for copies, seems to have done little credit either to the brains or to the heart of the public. And in the month following _Amelia's_ appearance, Fielding satirises the comments of the Town, in two numbers of his _Covent Garden Journal_; protesting that though he does not think his child to be entirely free from faults--"I know nothing human that is so,"--still "surely she does not deserve the Rancour with which she hath been treated by the Public." As ironic specimens of the faults complained of in his heroine, he quotes the accusations that her not abusing her husband "for having lost Money at Play, when she saw his Heart was already almost broke by it, was _contemptible Meanness_"; that she condescends to dress her husband's supper, and to dress her children, to whom moreover she shows too much kindness; that she once mentions the DEVIL; that she is a _low_ character; and that the beauty of her face is hopelessly flawed by a carriage accident. Such are some of the charges brought against the lovely Amelia by the "Beaus, Rakes, fine Ladies, and several formal Persons with bushy wigs and canes at their Noses," who, in Fielding's satire, crowd the Court where his book is placed on trial for the crime of dullness. Then Fielding himself steps forward, and after pleading for this his 'favourite Child,' on whom he has bestowed "a more than ordinary Pains in her Education," he declares, with the same hasty petulance that characterised that previous outburst in the preface to _David Simple_, that indeed he "will trouble the World no more with any children of mine by the same Muse." Two months later the _Gentleman's Magazine_ prints a spirited appeal against this resolution. "His fair heroine's nose has in my opinion been too severely handled by some modern critics," [4] writes Criticulus, after a passage of warm praise for the characterisation, the morality, and the 'noble reflections of the book'; and he proceeds to point out that the writings of such critics "will never make a sufficient recompense to the world, if _Mr Fielding_ adheres to what I hope he only said in his warmth and indignation of this injurious treatment, that he will never trouble the public with any more writings of this kind." The words of the enlightened _Criticulus_ echo sadly when we remember that in little more than two years the great genius and the great heart of Henry Fielding were to be silenced.