And now a word or two about our darling "Amelia," of which we have read through every single word in Mr. Roscoe's handsome edition. "As for Captain Booth, Madam," writes old Richardson to one of his toadies, "Captain Booth has done his business. The piece is short, is as dead as if it had been published forty years ago;" indeed, human nature is not altered since Richardson's time; and if there are rakes, male and female, as there were a hundred years since, there are in like manner envious critics now as then. How eager they are to predict a man's fall, how unwilling to acknowledge his rise! If a man write a popular work, he is sure to be snarled at; if a literary man rise to eminence out of his profession, all his old comrades are against him. Well, in spite of Richardson's prophecies, the piece which was dead at its birth is alive a hundred years after, and will live, as we fancy, as long as the English language shall endure. Fielding, in his own noble words, has given a key to the philosophy of the work. "The nature of man," cries honest Dr. Harrison, "is far from being in itself evil; it abounds with benevolence, and charity, and pity, coveting praise and honor, and shunning shame and disgrace. Bad education, bad habits, and bad customs debauch our nature, and drive it headlong into vice." And the author's tale is an exemplification of this text. Poor Booth's habits and customs are bad indeed, but who can deny the benevolence, and charity, and pity, of this simple and kindly being? His vices even, if we may say so, are those of a man; there is nothing morbid or mawkish in any of Fielding's heroes; no passionate pleasing extenuation, such as one finds in the pseudo-moral romances of the sentimental character; no flashy excuses like those which Sheridan puts forward (unconsciously, most likely), for those brilliant blackguards who are the chief characters of his comedies. Vice is never to be mistaken for virtue in Fielding's honest downright books; it goes by its name, and invariably gets its punishment. Besides the matchless character of Amelia, whose beauty and charming innocent consciousness of it (so delicately described by the novelist), whose tenderness and purity are such that they endear her to a reader as much as if she were actually alive, his own wife or mother, and make him consider her as some dear relative and companion of his own, about whose charms and virtues is scarcely modest to talk in public; besides Amelia, there are other characters, not so beautiful, but not less admirably true to nature. Miss Matthews is a wonderful portrait, and the vanity which inspires every one of the actions of that passionate, unscrupulous lady, the color as it were which runs through the whole of the picture is touched with a master's hand. Mrs. James, the indifferent woman, is not less skilful.