It assumes, necessarily and once for all, the licence of tragi-comedy, in that sense of the term in which _Much Ado About Nothing_ and _A Winter's Tale_ are tragi-comedies, and in which _Othello_ itself might have been made one.
And it follows further in the wake of the Shakespearean drama by insisting far more largely than ancient literature of any kind, and far more than any modern up to its date except drama had done, on the importance of Character.

Description and dialogue are rather subordinate to these things than on a level with them--but they are still further worked out than before.

And there is a new element--perhaps suggested by the _parabasis_ of ancient comedy, but, it may be, more directly by the peculiar method of Swift in _A Tale of a Tub_.

At various places in his narrative, but especially at the beginnings of books and chapters, Fielding as it were "calls a halt" and addresses his readers on matters more or less relevant to the story, but rather in the manner of a commentator and scholiast upon it than as actual parts of it.

Of this more later: for the immediate purpose is to survey and not to criticise.
The result of all this was _Tom Jones_--by practically universal consent one of the capital books of English literature.