Hugh Fielding, while speculating upon certain obscure episodes in the history of a life otherwise familiar to an applauding public, and at a loss to understand them, caught eagerly at a simile.

Now Fielding came second to none in his scorn for the simile as an explanation, possibly because he was so well acquainted with its convenience.

'A fairy lamp' he would describe it, quite conscious of the irony in his method of description, 'effective as an ornament upon a table-cloth, but a poor light to eat your dinner by.' Nevertheless Fielding hugged this particular simile, applying it as a sort of skeleton key to the problem of Stephen Drake's career.
He compared Drake's career, or at all events that portion of it which was closed, to the writing of a book.

So many years represent the accumulation of material, a deliberate accumulation; at a certain date the book is begun with a settled design, _finis_ being clearly foreseen from the first word of the preface.

But once fairly started the book throws the writer on one side and takes the lead, drags him, panting and protesting, after it, flings him down by-ways out of sight of his main road, tumbles him into people he had no thought of meeting, and finally stops him dead, Heaven knows where--in front of a blank wall, most likely, at the end of a _cul de sac_.