whose social position is scarcely above that of a footman, and who supports a wife and six children upon a cure of twenty-three pounds a year, which his outspoken honesty is continually jeopardising, he is a far finer figure than Pamela in her coach-and-six, or Bellarmine in his cinnamon velvet. If not, as Mr. Lawrence says, with exaggerated enthusiasm, “the grandest delineation of a pattern-priest which the world has yet seen,” he is assuredly a noble example of primitive goodness and practical Christianity. It is certain—as Mr. Forster and Mr. Keightley have pointed out—that Goldsmith borrowed some of his characteristics for Dr. Primrose, and it has been suggested that Sterne remembered him in more than one page of Tristram Shandy.
Next to Parson Adams, perhaps the best character in Joseph Andrews— though of an entirely different type—is Lady Booby’s “Waiting-Gentlewoman,” the excellent Mrs. Slipslop. Her sensitive dignity, her easy changes from servility to insolence, her sensuality, her inimitably distorted vocabulary, which Sheridan borrowed for Mrs. Malaprop, and Dickens modified for Mrs. Gamp, are all peculiarities which make up a personification of the richest humour and the most life-like reality. Mr. Peter Pounce, too, with his “scoundrel maxims,” as disclosed in that remarkable dialogue which is said to be “better worth reading than all the Works of Colley Cibber,” and in which charity is defined as consisting rather in a disposition to relieve distress than in an actual act of relief; Parson Trulliber with his hogs, his greediness, and his willingness to prove his Christianity by fisticuffs; shrewish Mrs. Tow-wouse with her scold’s tongue, and her erring but perfectly subjugated husband,—these
