the unapproachable Partridge,— with his superstition, his vanity, and his perpetual Infandum regina, but who, notwithstanding all his cheap Latinity, cannot construe an unexpected phrase of Horace; Ensign Northerton, with his vague and disrespectful recollections of “Homo;” young Nightingale and Parson Supple:—each is a definite character bearing upon his forehead the mark of his absolute fidelity to human nature. Nor are the female actors less accurately conceived. Starched Miss Bridget Allworthy, with her pinched Hogarthian face; Miss Western, with her disjointed diplomatic jargon; that budding Slipslop, Mrs. Honour; worthy Mrs. Miller, Mrs. Fitzpatrick, Mrs. Waters, Lady Bellaston,—all are to the full as real. Lady Bellaston especially, deserves more than a word. Like Lady Booby in Joseph Andrews, she is not a pleasant character; but the picture of the fashionable demirep, cynical, sensual, and imperious, has never been drawn more vigorously, or more completely—even by Balzac. Lastly, there is the adorable Sophia herself, whose pardon should be asked for naming her in such close proximity to her frailer sister. Byron calls her (perhaps with a slight suspicion of exigence of rhyme) too “emphatic;” meaning, apparently, to refer to such passages as her conversation with Mrs. Fitzpatrick, etc. But the heroine of Fielding’s time—a time which made merry over a lady’s misadventures in horsemanship, and subjected her to such atrocities as those of Lord Fellamar—required to be strongly moulded; and Sophia Western is pure and womanly, in spite of her unfavourable surroundings. She is a charming example—the first of her race—of an unsentimentalised flesh-and-blood heroine; and Time
