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some transparent conciliation of the sensitive author they are addressing, is a remarkably just appreciation of Fielding's masterpiece. It was, in fact, a great deal too just for their correspondent, who, though he still claims to have been discouraged from reading the book, does not on that account scruple in his rejoinder to criticise the hero, the heroine, and the plot with such asperity as to draw tears of mortification from the fine eyes of Minerva and Astræa, who cannot endure that Mr. Richardson should think it possible that they could approve of Any thing, in Any work, that had an Evil Tendency.' They have still the courage, however, to maintain (through their father) that, when Mr. Richardson has time to study Tom Jones' for himself, he will find 'a Thread of Moral Meaning' in it. Whether he did eventually peruse it, history has not recorded. For the moment he preferred to write another long letter condemning it on hearsay, but he refrained from prejudicing his judgment by making its acquaintance at first hand. That he would ever have approved it, is scarcely to be hoped. The wound inflicted by 'Joseph Andrews' remained incurable. It was nulla medicabilis herba.

To-day the rivals lie far enough apart: the one

on the hill at Lisbon, the other in St. Bride's. It is a favourite commonplace of literature to fable that, in some Lucianic and ultra-Stygian Land of Shadows, the great ones who have departed meet again, and adjust their former differences. But whatever may come to pass in another sphere, it is not easy to conceive of any circumstances

ours.

in which these two could ever have lived harmoniously on this particularly earthy planet of No men were ever more absolutely antipathetic-more fundamentally and radically opposed-than Richardson with his shrinking, prudish, careful, self-searching nature, and Fielding with his large, reckless, generous, exuberant temperament. Their literary methods were no less at variance. The one, with the schooling of a tradesman, was mainly a spectator ab intra; the other, with the education of a gentleman, mainly a spectator ab extra. If one had an unrivalled knowledge of Woman, the other had an unrivalled experience of Man. To Richardson's subjective gifts were added an extraordinary persistence of mental application, and a merciless power of cumulative details; to Fielding's objective faculty, the keen perceptions of a humorist, and a matchless vein of irony. Both were reputed to have written le premier roman du monde.' Each has

been called by his admirers 'the Father of the English Novel.' It would be more exact to divide the paternity-to speak of Richardson as the Father of the Novel of Sentiment, and Fielding as the Father of the Novel of Manners.

'LITTLE ROUBILLAC.'

WHEN, circa 1760, Goldsmith's Chinese Philosopher visited this country, he made

it

He

part of his duty to seek out famous living men. In one of his letters he records the result. looked for them in the book-shops, and could not find them; he looked for them in the windows of the print-sellers, and neither were they there. They were, in short, nowhere discoverable- eo clariores quia imagines eorum non deferebantur,' says this accomplished Oriental, quoting Tacitus, and thereby unkindly anticipating the " 'conspicuous by their absence' of a latter-day Prime Minister. Failing of the living, he fell back upon the dead, and repaired to Westminster Abbey. But at that time the national Valhalla was not more discriminating than the popular voice. He discovered, indeed, numerous new monuments to notabilities of whose existence he was totally ignorant, and whose names he speedily forgot; although he afterwards well remembered that Roubillac was the statuary who carved them. "I could not help smiling at two modern epitaphs in

particular; one of which praised the deceased for being ortus ex antiqua stirpe; the other commended the dead, because hanc ædem suis sumptibus reædificavit: the greatest merit of one, consisted in his being descended from an illustrious house; the chief distinction of the other, that he had propped up an old house that was falling. Alas, alas, cried I, such monuments as these confer honour, not upon the great men, but upon little Roubillac.'

This passage from the Citizen of the World,' written a few months before Roubillac's death, is almost too ambiguous to prove much in the way of an acquaintance between Goldsmith and the sculptor.' It has been called a friendly mention, but it might also be explained as a contemptuous one. Yet, with a line in the poems of Churchill's friend, Lloyd, and a reference in Foote's comedy of 'Taste,' it apparently makes up the sum of what eighteenth-century belles-lettres has devoted to the most popular artist in stone who flourished under the second George. Lord Chesterfield, whose bust Roubillac modelled, is said to have declared that he was the only statuary of his day, and that all the rest were nothing more than stonecutters. But

There is a popular anecdote connecting the pair, but its authenticity is not above suspicion.

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