But it shows, even from our present limited point of view, of what immense and exalted application the novel-method was capable: and it shows also the astonishing powers of its author.

"Genial," in the usual sense, it certainly cannot be called; in the proper sense as equalling "what is the production of genius" there are few books which deserve the term better.

But it is an exercise in a by-way of the novel road-system, though an early proof of the fact that such by-ways are endlessly open.
But the time was coming, though it did not (and could hardly) come very quickly, when Fielding was to discard all kinds of adventitious aids and suggestions--all crutches, spring-boards, go-carts, tugs, patterns, tracings--and go his own way--and the Way of the Novel--with no guidance but something of the example of Cervantes directly and Shakespeare indirectly among the moderns, and of the poetic fiction-writers of old.
It is perfectly clear that he had thought widely (and perhaps had read not a little) on the subject of literary criticism, in a sense not common in his day, and that the thinking had led him to a conception of the "prose epic" which, though it might have been partly (not wholly by any means) pieced out of the Italian and Spanish critics of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, had never been worked out as a complete theory, much less applied in practice and to prose.

The Prose Epic aims at--and in Fielding's case has been generally admitted to have hit--something like the classical unity of main action.

But it borrows from the romance-idea the liberty of a large accretion and divagation of minor and accessory plot:--not the mere "episode" of the ancients, but the true minor plot of Shakespeare.