Despite the recollection that "brews" of many kinds brought the singer's downfall, few are not appealed to by such songs as

"O, Willie brew'd a peck o' maut,

An' Rob an' Allan cam to see."

The list of his songs that might be called world favorites is large.

THE BURNS MAUSOLEUM AT DUMFRIES.

"Of all our poets, lyric and idyllic," says a noted American poet and critic, Edmund Clarence Stedman, "he is most nature's darling; his pictures were life; his voice was freedom; his heart was strength and tenderness."

Although two works of the Elizabethan Age - Sidney's Arcadia and Lyly's Euphues - may in a loose sense be called novels; and although Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver's Travels even more nearly approach the modern conception of

this type of literature, the defining of the type was yet to be done. It was done about the middle of the eighteenth century by four men already named; Samuel Richardson (16891761), Henry Fielding (1707-1754), Tobias George Smollett (1721-1771), and Laurence Sterne (1713-1768).

Novel and Romance. The possibilities of the Crusoe and Gulliver kind of story are rather limited. The entire interest is centred in the action; incident, adventure, is all-important; character-drawing is not even attempted, and every figure in both stories appeals to us not at all for what he is, but solely for what he does. Richardson discovered the much larger field, the novel of character. Between these two types a line is usually drawn by designating Defoe's the romance, and Richardson's the novel. To set forth fully the distinctive features of each would require more space than would be appropriate here. We will, therefore, content ourselves with Professor Cross's brief definitions:

"That prose-fiction which deals realistically with actual life is called preeminently the novel. That prose-fiction which deals with life in a false or fantastic manner, or represents it in the setting of strange, improbable, or impossible adventures, or idealizes the virtues and the vices of human nature, is called romance."1

Richardson's Works. Richardson was a London printer who got into literature quite by accident. Early in life he had been employed by some unlettered young women to write love-letters for them; and when later in life a publish. ing firm discovered his gift, they suggested that he write a volume of letters to serve as models for the uneducated. The idea came to Richardson that the letters would gain in interest if connected by a thread of story; and acting on this

1 The Development of the English Novel, page xv.

idea he published at the age of fifty-one Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded, a realistic story told in letters. Pamela Andrews is a lady's maid who is persecuted by the lady's son; in the end he reforms, and becomes a model husband to Pamela. In the correspondence the characters express themselves entirely without restraint, and thus seemed wonderfully real to readers of the day.

Eight years after Pamela came Clarissa Harlowe. The heroine is of higher rank than Pamela; and instead of reforming the libertine hero, Lovelace, she becomes his victim and dies of a broken heart. Despite the pleas of sentimental readers, communicated to the author during the publication of the story in serial form, he refused to convert the brilliant but soulless Lovelace, and allowed him to die in a duel with a defender of Clarissa's name. In his last novel, Sir Charles Grandison, Richardson aimed to portray a fashionable gentleman possessed of every virtue, who is in the end happily mated to a young woman of corresponding perfection.

Richardson's Influence.

All of these novels suffer from length, from an excess of moral purpose, and from too much fine-spun sentimentalism. In the analysis and portrayal of character, however, and as a general thing, in the logical sequence of incidents, they must be regarded as fixing the type of novel in which George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and George Meredith in the following century used their great talents with such marked success.

Fielding's Works. Henry Fielding, after a prosperous career as playwright, and a short and uncertain one as lawyer, entered the field of the novel to satirize Richardson. Joseph Andrews, published two years after Pamela, has for its hero the brother of Richardson's heroine, possessed, as is his

sister, of inordinate virtue, which successfully repels the advances of an immoral suitor. Fielding, once interested in his story, forgot his purpose in beginning it, burlesqued various kinds of writing, ancient and modern, and created in Parson Adams a figure ranking high among the characters of fiction.

Fielding wrote three other novels: Jonathan Wild, the story of an utterly depraved criminal; Amelia, a social satire

FIELDING.

dealing with the shady side of London life and the inadequacy of English criminal laws; and Tom Jones: the History of a Foundling, written on a large scale, and equally great on the side of plot, character, and philosophy of life set forth by the author in his own person.

"Tom Jones: Plot and Method.-Coleridge once said that the three greatest plots he knew were Eschylus's Edipus Tyrannus, Ben Jonson's The Alchemist, and Fielding's Tom Jones. Great as is Tom Jones on the side of plot, a fact which cannot be adequately set forth in small space, it is even more remarkable considered from other points of view. To each " book," or main division of the novel, there is an introductory chapter, which is, in Thackeray's words, "a sort of confidential talk between writer and reader." Here Fielding discusses in the first person and at considerable length his methods and aims, a procedure followed with great success regularly by his pro

fessed disciple Thackeray, and occasionally by George Eliot.1

Influence of Fielding's Character-drawing. - Another respect in which Tom Jones is remarkable is the fulness and faithfulness with which the hero is presented. The "unvarnished truthfulness" of the picture did not prove altogether acceptable to the next generation; and Thackeray in the preface to Pendennis (1850) says: "Since the author of Tom Jones was buried, no writer of fiction among us has been permitted to depict to his utmost power a MAN." Fielding's example, however, in throwing aside conventional modes of characterization, and presenting a hero just as he would have been and acted in real life, was of immense value to the master-writers of fiction of the next century.

Smollett. Of Smollett and Sterne not so much need be said. The former admitted his indebtedness to Spanish and French models, wrote several "picaresque "2 novels in each of which the hero is a clever rascal, and the incidents are told with savage realism. A second point to be observed in Smollett is that in his three best novels, Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, and Humphrey Clinker, he introduced a new interest in fiction the sea, drawing at length on five years' experience as a surgeon's mate. Defoe had laid scenes on an imaginary sea: Smollett laid them on a real sea, and brought real English seamen into the action. Still another notable feature of Smollett's works is his characterization by peculiarities of speech or manner, a method familiar in the work of his most famous disciple, Charles Dickens.

1 See, e.g., Adam Bede, Chap. XVII.

2 Word derived from Spanish picaro, rogue.