Once more, the astonishing truth and variety of scene and character make themselves felt--even more felt--even felt in new directions.

The opening prison scenes exceed anything earlier even in Fielding himself, much more in any one else, as examples of the presentation of the unfamiliar.

Miss Matthews--whom Fielding has probably abstained from working out as much as he might lest she should, from the literary point of view, obscure Amelia--is a marvellous outline; Colonels James and Bath are perfectly finished studies of ordinary and extraordinary "character" in the stage sense.

No novel even of the author's is fuller of _vignettes_--little pictures of action and behaviour, of manners and society, which are not in the least irrelevant to the general story, but on the contrary extra-illustrate and carry it out.
While, therefore, we must in no way recede from the position above adopted in regard to Richardson, we may quite consistently accord an even higher place to Fielding.

He relieved the novel of the tyranny and constraint of the Letter; he took it out of the rut of confinement to a single or a very limited class of subjects--for the themes of _Pamela_ and _Clarissa_ to a very large extent, of _Pamela_ and _Grandison_ to a considerable one, and of all three to an extent not small, are practically the same.