With the retirement of Walpole, Fielding's vigorous figure vanishes from active political service. No more caustic Greek epics, translated from the original "by Homer," no more boisterous interludes with three-bottle Prime Ministers appearing in the part of principal boy, come from his pen. But scarcely is the ink dry on the page of his last known political pamphlet, when Fielding reappears, in this Spring of 1742, not as the ephemeral politician, but as the triumphant discoverer of a new continent for English literature; as the leader of a revolution in imaginative writing which has outlived the Ministries and parties, the reforms, the broils, and warfares of two centuries. For, to-day, the fierce old contests of Whig and Tory, the far-off horrors of eighteenth-century gibbets, jails, and streets, the succession of this and that Minister, the French Wars and Pragmatic Sanctions of 1740 are all dead as Queen Anne. But the novel based on character, on human life, in a word on 'the vast authentic Book of Nature' is a living power; and it was by the publication, in February 1742, of _The Adventures of Mr Joseph Andrews and his Friend Mr Abraham Adams_, that Fielding reveals himself as the father of the English novel. Henceforth we can almost forget the hard-hitting political _Champion_; we may quite forget the facile 'hackney writer' of popular farces, and the impetuous studies of the would-be barrister. With the appearance of these two small volumes Henry Fielding reaches the full stature of his genius as the first, and perhaps the greatest, of English novelists. It is difficult, at the present day, to realise the greatness of his achievement. Fielding found, posturing as heroines of romance, the _Clelias, Cleopatras, Astraeas_; he left the living women, Fanny Andrews, Sophia Western, Amelia Booth. "Amelia," writes his great follower Thackeray, "... the most charming character in English fiction,--Fiction! Why fiction? Why not history? I know Amelia just as well as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu." Again, Fielding found a world of polite letters, turning a stiff back on all "low" naturalness of life. He taught that world (as his friend Lillo had already essayed to do in his tragedy of a _London Merchant_) that the life of a humble footman, of a poor parson in a torn cassock, of the poverty-hunted wife of an impoverished army-captain, of a country lad without known parentage, interest or fortune, may make finer reading than all the Court romances ever written; and, moreover, that "the highest life is much the dullest, and affords very little humour or entertainment." And, having rediscovered this world of natural and simple human nature, his genius proceeded to the creation of nothing less than an entirely new form of English literary expression, the medium of the novel.