The clever publisher knows well that the public for whose distraction he caters is divided into many classes, and that these classes must be attracted each in a special way. For the purposes of my argument I group these under five different heads, which are probably not exhaustive and certainly not mutually exclusive, but correspond, I think, to the five chief means of exciting and distracting the multitude. The two largest classes constantly overlap, consisting: firstly, of those whose love of sensation is satisfied by violent incident; and secondly, of those who are especially susceptible to the sentimental appeal. To a third class belong those who take pleasure in the agitations of sex feeling; and to a fourth, those whose sense of humour is tickled by the sallies of the literary clown. The fifth class--a very large one--consists of those who are of a habit of mind to be excited by sensations which can be associated with religion and morality. It is useless to name as a sixth class those who are moved by intellectual ideas, for so small a class is not the objective of the popular author. I. All novels must to some extent depend upon incident and arrangement of incident, but there is a kind of novel which only interests through the excitement of events in their nature fictitious, even when accidentally true. Any really good book which may be spoken of as a "novel of incident" will invariably prove to be very much more. To take the case of Fielding's _Tom Jones_, one observes that it is an imitation of life which is neither a slavish copying nor a make-believe, but a vivid representation of eighteenth-century England as Fielding saw it; it is a book which presents characters, and itself has a character. Its atmosphere is quite unmistakable. It is not a "slice" out of the eighteenth century--there can be no real "slice out of life" excepting in life itself. It is Fielding's rendering of the eighteenth century, in particular it is his assertion of the _physicality_ (if I may use the term) of life, a direct assertion of the boisterous physical vitality which, as Fielding presents it and as Marlowe presented it, acquires value for the spirit and is acceptable to the imagination. It is the original pagan assertion of life, which finds its opposite in Euripides' conception of the ascetic Hippolytus; an assertion which Propertius repeated in the language of mockery when he speaks of a _lena_ as "Docta vel Hippolytum Veneri mollire negantem." Even Euripides himself was so infected with the pagan view that he sees a sort of Nemesis pursuing the hero whom the slighted Aphrodite reproaches with lack of reverence--religious reverence--for her power. This primitive pagan view, crude, non-moral, but essentially sincere, animates the story of Tom Jones and gives it a character which is lacking in the popular "novel of incident."