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which is shocked too by the extraordinary brutality of the heroine’s 
family and the unnatural submission which is demanded from 
Clarissa by her parents and is only half-condemmed by Richardson. 
Deference to parents has been a diminishing quantity probably for 
some centuries past, and certainly, in some respects, it is as well it 
has diminished. That a father, or even a brother, should dispose 
of a girl’s hand contrary to her inclinations, and solely on pecuniary 
grounds, seems to have been accepted by both parents and children 
in those days as a necessary and ordinary part of the exercise of 
family government, and Richardson’s readers would probably see 
nothing more in Mr. Harlowe’s brutality than the injudicious 
straining of a just authority. 
Richardson’s great contemporary and rival, Henry Fielding, 
wrote much, and on many subjects, but, like Richardson, he is 
best known by three novels, ‘Joseph Andrews,” ‘Tom Jones,’ 
and “Amelia,” the first of which appeared in 1742, and the last in 
1751. There is life and humour in all that he wrote, and though 
you may not, after reading one of his stories, be conscious of as 
intimate an acquaintance with the anatomy and the secret workings 
of the hero and heroine’s moral self, as you would be if Richardson 
were the author, you will probably have realized them better as 
actual human beings with average virtues and at /cast average 
frailties: you have been amused with lively incidents, and you 
have taken in a picture of life and manners, the value of which 
must increase from generation to generation. M. Taine, in his 
history of English Literature, hits off in a sentence, though perhaps 
rather a harsh sentence, the strong and the weak points of Fielding 
as a novelist. ‘‘Fielding,” he says, “has painted Nature, but 
Nature without refinement, poetry, or chivalry.” I say a rather 
harsh sentence, because there is in “Parson Adams,” who is 
generally admitted to be his finest character, refinement, poetry, 
and chivalry of a rustic kind—Cavaileria Rusticana—if I may 
borrow the title of a recent popular opera. But allowing something 
for French vivacity and epigram, Taine’s criticism Js fairly just. 
Gibbon’s praise of ‘Tom Jones” is much less stinted, and though 
it is found in his autobiography, it has all the resonance and 
