He also gave it the attraction of pure comedy, only legitimately salted with farce, in such personages as Adams and Partridge; of lower and more farcical, but still admirable comedy in Slipslop and Trulliber and Squire Western; of comedy almost romantic and certainly charming in Sophia; of domestic drama in Amelia; of satiric portraiture in a hundred figures from the cousins (respectable and disreputable), Miss Western and Lady Bellaston, downwards.

He stocked it with infinite miscellanies of personage, and scene, and picture, and phrase.

As has happened in one or two other cases, he carried, at least in the opinion of the present writer, the particular art as far as it will go.

He did not indeed leave nothing for his successors to do--on the contrary he left them in a sense everything--for he showed how everything could be done.

But if he has sometimes been equalled, he has never been surpassed: and it is not easy to see even how he can be surpassed.