Fielding after Richardson was like emerging from a sick room, heated by stoves into an open lawn on a breezy May morning. Richardson, indeed, wrote more for women than men. Fielding was coarser, but more manly; he had humour, but no moral purpose at all. The natural result was that Fielding and his set looked on Richardson as a grave, dull, respectable old prig; Richardson on Fielding as a low rake, who wrote like a man who had been an ostler born in a stable, or a runner in a sponging-house. "The virtues of Fielding's heroes," the vain old printer used to say to his feminine clique, "are the vices of a truly good man." Dr. Johnson, who had been befriended by Richardson, was never tired of depreciating Fielding and crying up the author of "Pamela." "Sir," he used to thunder out, "there is as much difference between the two as between a man who knows how a watch is made and a man who can merely tell the hour on the dial-plate." He called Fielding a "barren rascal." "Sir, there is more knowledge of the heart in one letter of Richardson's than in all 'Tom Jones.'" Some one present here mildly suggested that Richardson was very tedious. "Why, sir," replied Johnson, "if you were to read Richardson for the story, your impatience would be so great that you would hang yourself. But you must read him for the sentiment, and consider the story as only giving occasion to the sentiment." After all, it must be considered that, old-fashioned as Richardson's novels have now become, the old printer dissected the human heart with profound knowledge and exquisite care, and that in the back shop in Salisbury Court, amid the jar of printing-presses, the quiet old citizen drew his ideal beings with far subtler lines and touches than any previous novelist had done. [Illustration: FLEET STREET, THE TEMPLE, ETC., FROM A MAP OF LONDON, PUBLISHED 1720.] On one occasion at least Hogarth and Johnson met at Richardson's house.