But even on him Graves is by no means savage: while his treatment of his hero, Geoffrey Wildgoose, a young Oxford man who, living in retirement with his mother in the country, becomes an evangelist, very mainly from want of some more interesting occupation, is altogether good-humoured.

Wildgoose promptly falls in love with a fascinating damsel-errant, Julia Townsend; and the various adventures, religious, picaresque, and amatory, are embroiled and disembroiled with very fair skill in character and fairer still in narrative.

Nor is the Sancho-Partridge of the piece, Jerry Tugwell, a cobbler (who thinks, though he is very fond of his somewhat masterful wife, that a little absence from her would not be unrefreshing), by any means a failure.
Both Scott and Dickens evidently knew Graves well,[11] and knowledge of him might with advantage be more general.
[11] Julia Mannering reminds me a little of Julia Townsend: and if this be doubtful, the connection of Jerry's "Old madam gave me some higry-pigry" and Cuddie's "the leddy cured me with some hickery-pickery" is not.

While, for Dickens, compare the way in which Sam Weller's landlord in the Fleet got into trouble with the Tinker's Tale in _Spiritual Quixote_, bk.iv.chap.

ii.
The novels that have been noticed since those contrasted ones of Mrs.
Haywood's, which occupy a position by themselves, all possess a sort of traditional fame; and cover (with the proper time allowed for the start given by Richardson and Fielding) nearly the same period of thirty years--in this case 1744 (_David Simple_) to 1772 (_The Spiritual Quixote_)--which is covered by the novels of the great quartette themselves.