Beginning in a spirit of sheer burlesque, Fielding soon became interested
in his characters, and in the actual result produced a rough but masterful
picture of contemporary life. The coarse Parson Trulliber and the admirable
Parson Adams are among the famous characters of fiction. But even in the
later part of the book Fielding did not altogether abandon his ridicule of
Richardson. He introduced among the characters the 'Squire B----' of
'Pamela,' only filling out the blank by calling him 'Squire Booby,' and
taking pains to make him correspondingly ridiculous.

Fielding now began to pay the penalty for his youthful dissipations in
failing health, but he continued to write with great expenditure of time
and energy. 'The History of Jonathan Wild the Great,' a notorious ruffian
whose life Defoe also had narrated, aims to show that great military
conquerors are only bandits and cutthroats really no more praiseworthy than
the humbler individuals who are hanged without ceremony. Fielding's
masterpiece, 'The History of Tom Jones,' followed hard after Richardson's
'Clarissa,' in 1749. His last novel, 'Amelia,' is a half autobiographic
account of his own follies. His second marriage, to his first wife's maid,
was intended, as he frankly said, to provide a nurse for himself and a
mother for his children, but his later years were largely occupied with
heroic work as a police justice in Westminster, where, at the sacrifice of
what health remained to him, he rooted out a specially dangerous band of
robbers. Sailing for recuperation, but too late, to Lisbon, he died there
at the age of forty-seven, in 1754.

The chief characteristics of Fielding's nature and novels, mostly directly
opposite or complementary to those of Richardson, are these:

1. He is a broad realist, giving to his romantic actions a very prominent
background of actual contemporary life. The portrayal is very illuminating;