It is interesting to ask if Henry Fielding, barrister, journalist, tinker of plays and man-about-town, would ever have turned novelist, had it not been for Richardson, his predecessor. So slight, so seemingly accidental, are the incidents which make or mar careers and change the course of literary history. Certain it is that the immediate cause of Fielding's first story was the effect upon him of the fortunes of the virtuous Pamela. A satirist and humorist where Richardson was a somewhat solemn sentimentalist, Fielding was quick to see the weakness, and--more important,--the opportunity for caricature, in such a tale, whose folk harangued about morality and whose avowed motive was a kind of hard-surfaced, carefully calculated honor, for sale to the highest bidder. It was easy to recognize that Pamela was not only good but goody-goody. So Fielding, being thirty-five years of age and of uncertain income--he had before he was thirty squandered his mother's estate,--turned himself, two years after "Pamela" had appeared, to a new field and concocted the story known to the world of letters as: "The Adventures of Joseph Andrews and His Friend Abraham Adams." This Joseph purports to be the brother of Pamela (though the denouement reveals him as more gently born) and is as virtuous in his character of serving-man as the sister herself; indeed, he outvirtues her. Fielding waggishly exhibits him in the full exercise of a highly-starched decorum rebuffing the amatory attempts of sundry ladies whose assault upon the citadel of his honor is analogous to that of Mr. B.,--who naturally becomes Squire Booby in Fielding's hands--upon the long suffering Pamela. Thus, Lady Booby, in whose employ Joseph is footman, after an invitation to him to kiss her which has been gently but firmly refused, bursts out with: "Can a boy, a stripling, have the confidence to talk of his virtue?" "Madam," says Joseph, "that boy is the brother of Pamela and would be ashamed that the chastity of his family, which is preserved in her, should be stained in him." The chance for fun is palpable here. But something unexpected happened: what was begun as burlesque, almost horse-play, began to pass from the key of shallow, lively satire, broadening and deepening into a finer tone of truth. In a few chapters, by the time the writer had got such an inimitable personage as Parson Adams before the reader, it was seen that the book was to be more than a jeu d'esprit: rather, the work of a master of characterization. In short, Joseph Andrews started out ostensibly to poke good-natured ridicule at sentimental Mr. Richardson: it ended by furnishing contemporary London and all subsequent readers with a notable example of the novel of mingled character and incident, entertaining alike for its lively episodes and its broadly genial delineation of types of the time. And so he soon had the town laughing with him at his broad comedy.