Without e’er a wife?
I was spending a week-end last summer with some friends who have a large library consisting chiefly of the classical English authors. I had been out one afternoon, and as I returned to the house, was met halfway by my hostess. She had a distraught look, and before I could inquire what had happened, she said, “I am frightfully upset! What do you think I found Tommy doing just now in the library? Reading that nasty old book, Fielding’s Tom Jones!”
Her son Tommy was twelve years old. “What have you done about it?” I asked, trying to suppress a smile.
“I took it from him and put it in the stove!”
She refused to believe me when I told her that Tom Jones, Clarissa Harlowe, and Pamela were read aloud in the evening to all members of the family in Puritan New England, and Miss Rosalie V. Halsey relates that when certain passages became too affecting, the more sensitive listeners retired to their rooms to weep! Sometime later I showed her my copy of Tom Jones, abridged especially for youthful reading, with its crude little woodcut facing the title page, and this explanatory verse beneath:—
This print describes a good man’s heart
Who meant to take the orphan’s part,
And may distress forever find
A friend like him to be so kind.
