enough, despite his constitutional confusion, and he is not likely to have given an additional L100 to the author of any book without good reason. But the indications of that success are not very plainly impressed upon the public prints. The Gentleman’s Magazine for 1749, which, as might be expected from Johnson’s connection with it, contains ample accounts of his own tragedy of Irene and Richardson’s recently-published Clarissa, has no notice of Tom Jones, nor is there even any advertisement of the second edition issued in the same year. But, in the emblematic frontispiece, it appears under Clarissa (and sharing with that work a possibly unintended proximity to a sprig of laurel stuck in a bottle of Nantes), among a pile of the books of the year; and in the “poetical essays” for August, one Thomas Cawthorn breaks into rhymed panegyric. “Sick of her fools,” sings this enthusiastic but scarcely lucid admirer—
“Sick of her fools, great Nature broke the jest, And Truth held out each character to test, When Genius spoke: Let Fielding take the pen! Life dropt her mask, and all mankind were men.”
There were others, however, who would scarcely have echoed the laudatory sentiments of Mr. Cawthorn. Among these was again the excellent Richardson, who seems to have been wholly unpropitiated by the olive branch held out to him in the Jacobite’s Journal. His vexation at the indignity put upon Pamela by Joseph Andrews was now complicated by a twittering jealousy of the “spurious brat,” as he obligingly called Tom Jones, whose success had been so “unaccountable.” In these circumstances, some of the letters of his correspondents
