Returning to bring up Fielding's novels, in 1743 appeared his _History of the Life of the late Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great_, in which the hero Jonathan Wild was a taker of thieves, or detective, who ended his own career by being hung; the book being written professedly as "an exposition of the motives that actuate the unprincipled great, in every walk and sphere of life, and which are common alike to the thief or murderer on the small scale and to the mighty villain and reckless conqueror who invades the rights or destroys the liberties of nations." In 1749 Fielding prints his _Tom Jones_, which some consider his greatest book. The glory of _Tom Jones_ is Squire Allworthy, whom we are invited to regard as the most miraculous product of the divine creation so far in the shape of man; but to your present lecturer's way of thinking, the kind of virtue represented by Squire Allworthy is completely summed in the following sentence of the work introducing him in the midst of nature: it is a May morning, and Squire Allworthy is pacing the terrace in front of his mansion before sunrise; "when," says Fielding, "in the full blaze of his majesty up rose the sun, than which one object alone in this lower creation could be more glorious, and that Mr. Allworthy himself presented--a human being replete with benevolence meditating in what manner he might render himself most acceptable to his Creator by doing most good to his creatures;" that is, in plain commercial terms, how he might obtain the largest possible amount upon the letter of credit which he found himself forced to buy against the inevitable journey into the foreign parts lying beyond the waters of death. Out of Fielding's numerous other writings, dramatic and periodical, it is perhaps necessary to mention farther only his _Amelia_, belonging to the year 1751, in which he praised his first wife and satirized the jails of his time.