The preface to _Joseph Andrews_ shows that Fielding was perfectly conscious of the greatness of his adventure. Such a species of writing, he says, "I do not remember to have seen hitherto attempted in our language." We can but wonder at, and admire, the superb energy and confidence which could thus embark on the conscious production of this new thing, amid want, pain, and distress. And wonder and admiration increase tenfold on the further discovery that this fresh creation in literature, fashioned in circumstances so depressing, is overflowing with an exuberance of healthy life and enjoyment. Having entered on his fair inheritance of this new world of human nature, Fielding pourtrays it from the standpoint of his own maxim, that life "everywhere furnishes an accurate observer with the ridiculous." So, into this, his newly-cut channel for imaginative expression (to use Mr Gosse's happy phrase) he poured the strength of a genius naturally inclined to that "exquisite mirth and laughter," which as he declared in his preface to these volumes, "are probably more wholesome physic for the mind and conduce better to purge away spleen, melancholy, and ill affections than is generally imagined." No book ever more thoroughly carried out this wholesome doctrine. The laughter in _Joseph Andrews_ is as whole-hearted, if not as noisy, the practical jokes are as broad, as those of a healthy school-boy; and the pages ring with a spirit and gusto recalling Lady Mary's phrase concerning her cousin "that no man enjoyed life more than he did." To quote again from Mr Gosse: "A good deal in this book may offend the fine, and not merely the superfine. But the vitality and elastic vigour of the whole carry us over every difficulty... and we pause at the close of the novel to reflect on the amazing freshness of the talent which could thus make a set of West country scenes, in that despised thing, a novel, blaze with light like a comedy of Shakespeare." So original in creation, so humane, so full of a brave delight in life, was the power that, mastering every gloomy obstacle of circumstance, broke into the stilted literary world of 1742; and Murphy's Irish rhetoric is not too warm when he talks of this sunrise of Fielding's greatness "when his genius broke forth at once, with an effulgence superior to all the rays of light it had before emitted, like the sun in his morning glory."