And the very fact that it is a following of something else is interesting, in connection with the infinitely more important work that preceded it in publication, _The Adventures of Joseph Andrews and his Friend Mr.Abraham Adams_ (1742).
Nobody has ever had much difficulty in accounting for the way in which Fielding availed himself of the appearance and popularity of _Pamela_.
And though Richardson would have been superhuman instead of very human indeed (with an ordinary British middle-class humanity, and an extraordinary vein of genius) if he had done otherwise, few have joined him in thinking _Joseph_ a "lewd and ungenerous engraftment." We have not ourselves been very severe on the faults of _Pamela_, the reason of lenity being, among other things, that it in a manner produced Fielding, and all the fair herd of his successors down to the present day.

But those faults are glaring: and they were of a kind specially likely to attract the notice and the censure of a genial, wholesome, and, above all, masculine taste and intellect like Fielding's.

Even at that time, libertine as it was in some ways, and sentimental as it was in others, people had not failed to notice that Pamela's virtue is not quite what was then called "neat" wine--the pure and unadulterated juice of the grape.

The _longueurs_ and the fiddle-faddle, the shameless and fulsome preface-advertisements and the rest lay open enough to censure.

So Fielding saw the handles, and gripped them at once by starting a _male_ Pamela--a situation not only offering "most excellent differences," but in itself possessing, to graceless humanity at all times it may be feared, and at that time perhaps specially, something essentially ludicrous in minor points.