the kingdoms of the world, and the glory or vainglory of them. All
Fielding's critics have noted the manner, in a certain sense modest, in
another ostentatious, in which he seems to confine himself to the
presentation of things English. They might have added to the
presentation of things English--as they appear in London, and on the
Western Circuit, and on the Bath Road. 

But this apparent parochialism has never deceived good judges. It did
not deceive Lady Mary, who had seen the men and manners of very many
climes; it did not deceive Gibbon, who was not especially prone to
overvalue things English, and who could look down from twenty centuries
on things ephemeral. It deceives, indeed, I am told, some excellent
persons at the present day, who think Fielding's microcosm a "toylike
world," and imagine that Russian Nihilists and French Naturalists have
gone beyond it. It will deceive no one who has lived for some competent
space of time a life during which he has tried to regard his
fellow-creatures and himself, as nearly as a mortal may, _sub specie
aeternitatis_.

As this is in the main an introduction to a complete reprint of
Fielding's four great novels, the justification in detail of the
estimate just made or hinted of the novelist's genius will be best and
most fitly made by a brief successive discussion of the four as they are
here presented, with some subsequent remarks on the _Miscellanies_ here
selected. And, indeed, it is not fanciful to perceive in each book a
somewhat different presentment of the author's genius; though in no one
of the four is any one of his masterly qualities absent. There is
tenderness even in _Jonathan Wild_; there are touches in _Joseph
Andrews_ of that irony of the Preacher, the last echo of which is heard
amid the kindly resignation of the _Journey to Lisbon_, in the sentence,
"Whereas envy of all things most exposes us to danger from others, so
contempt of all things best secures us from them." But on the whole it
is safe to say that _Joseph Andrews_ best presents Fielding's
mischievous and playful wit; _Jonathan Wild_ his half-Lucianic
half-Swiftian irony; _Tom Jones_ his unerring knowledge of human nature,
and his constructive faculty; _Amelia_ his tenderness, his _mitis
sapientia_, his observation of the details of life. And first of
the first. 

_The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews and his friend Mr

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