What there is of truth in these criticisms and others (which it would be long even to summarise) may perhaps be put briefly under two heads.

It is never so easy to arouse interest in virtue as it is in vice: or in weak and watered vice as in vice rectified (or _un_rectified) to full strength.
And the old requirement of "the quest" is one which will hardly be dispensed with.

Here (for we know perfectly well that Amelia's virtue is in no danger) there is no quest, except that of the fortune which ought to be hers, which at last comes to her husband, and which we are told (and hope rather doubtfully) that husband had at last been taught--by the Fool's Tutor, Experience--not utterly to throw away.

But this fortune drops in half casually at the last by a series of stage accidents, not ill-machined by any means, but not very particularly interesting.
Such, however, are the criticisms which Fielding himself has taught people to make, by the very excellence of his success in the earlier novels: and there is a certain comparative and relative validity in them.

But consider _Amelia_ in itself, and they begin to look, if not positively unfounded, rather unimportant.