But Lydia, though the _ingenue_, is not the real heroine of this book: her aunt and her aunt's maid divide that position between them.
A sufficiently ungracious critic may, if he chooses, see in Smollett's falling back on the letter-plan for _Humphry Clinker_ (1771) an additional proof of that deficiency in strictly inventive faculty which has been noticed.

The more generous "judge by results" will hardly care to consider so curiously in the case of such a masterpiece.

For a masterpiece it really is.

The comparative absence of "character" in the higher and literary sense as contrasted with "character-_parts_" in the technical meaning of the theatre has been admitted in the other books.
Here, with the aid of the letters, it is amply supplied, or perhaps (to speak with extreme critical closeness) the character-parts are turned into characters by this means.

There is no stint, because of the provision of this higher interest, of the miscellaneous fun and "business" which Smollett had always supplied so lavishly out of his experience, his observation, and, if not his invention, his combining faculty.