a barren rascal,” he read it through without stopping, and pronounced Mrs. Booth to be “the most pleasing heroine of all the romances.” Richardson, on the other hand, found “the characters and situations so wretchedly low and dirty” that he could not get farther than the first volume. With the professional reviewers, a certain Criticulus in the Gentleman’s excepted, it seems to have fared but ill; and although these adverse verdicts, if they exist, are now more or less inaccessible, Fielding has apparently summarised most of them in a mock-trial of Amelia before the “Court of Censorial Enquiry,” the proceedings of which are recorded in Nos. 7 and 8 of the Covent-Garden Journal. The book is indicted upon the Statute of Dulness, and the heroine is charged with being a “low Character,” a “Milksop,” and a “Fool;” with lack of spirit and fainting too frequently; with dressing her children, cooking and other “servile Offices;” with being too forgiving to her husband; and lastly, as may be expected, with the inconsistency, already amply referred to, of being “a Beauty without a nose.” Dr. Harrison and Colonel Bath are arraigned much in the same fashion. After some evidence against her has been tendered, and “a Great Number of Beaus, Rakes, fine Ladies, and several formal Persons with bushy Wigs, and Canes at their Noses,” are preparing to supplement it, a grave man steps forward, and, begging to be heard, delivers what must be regarded as Fielding’s final apology for his last novel:—
“If you, Mr. Censor, are yourself a Parent, you will view me with Compassion when I declare I am the Father of this poor Girl the Prisoner at the Bar; nay, when I go further and avow, that of all my Offspring she is my favourite Child. I can
