It was not Smollett's notion of art to present the elaborate academies of Richardson, or the almost uncanny duplications of Nature which Fielding could achieve.

He must embolden, in fact grotesque, the line; heighten, in fact splash and plaster, the colour.

But he has not left Nature behind here: he has only put her in a higher light.
One means of doing so has been condemned in him, as in others, as in its great earlier master, Swift, and its greatest later one, Thackeray, by some purists.

They call it cheap and inartistic: but this is mere pedantry and prudery.

Mis-spelling is not a thing to be employed every day or for every purpose: if you do that, you get into the ineffably dreary monotony which distinguishes the common comic journalist.