Whatever
were the charms of rank, he has elevated our humanity; thus far, and thus
far only, has he sympathized with the Frenchmen who attacked the
corruptions of the age, but who assaulted also its faith and its
reverence.
HENRY FIELDING.--The path of prose fiction, so handsomely opened by
Richardson, was immediately entered and pursued by a genius of higher
order, and as unlike him as it was possible to be. Richardson still clung
to romantic sentiment, Fielding eschewed it; Richardson was a teacher of
morality, Fielding shielded immorality; Richardson described artificial
manners in a society which he did not frequent, Fielding, in the words of
Coleridge, "was like an open lawn on a breezy day in May;" Richardson was
a plebeian, a carpenter's son, a successful printer; Fielding was a
gentleman, the son of General Fielding, and grandson of the Earl of
Denbigh; Richardson steadily rose, by his honest exertions, to independent
fortune, Fielding passed from the high estate of his ancestors into
poverty and loose company; the one has given us mistaken views of high
life, the other has been enabled, by his sad experience, to give us
truthful pictures of every grade of English society in his day from the
lord, the squire, and the fop to the thief-taker, the prostitute, and the
thief.
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