You will have difficulty in finding a wiser book anywhere; but although it is quite true that a novel need not be foolish, wisdom is certainly not its determining _differentia_.

Yet for our purposes _Rasselas_ is almost as valuable as _Tom Jones_ itself: because it shows how imperative and wide-ranging was the struggle towards production of this kind in prose.

The book is really--to adapt the quaint title of one of the preceding century--_Johnson al Mondo_: and at this time, when Johnson wanted to communicate his thoughts to the world in a popular form, we see that he chose the novel.
The lesson is not so glaringly obvious in the _Vicar of Wakefield_, because this _is_ a novel, and a very delightful one.

The only point of direct contact with _Rasselas_ is the knowledge of human nature, though in the one book this takes the form of melancholy aphorism and apophthegm, in the other that of felicitous trait and dialogue-utterance.

There is plenty of story, though this has not been arranged so as to hit the taste of the martinet in "fable;" the book has endless character; the descriptions are Hogarth with less of _peuple_ about them; the dialogue is unsurpassable.