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With the professional reviewers, a certain Criticulus in the Gentleman's excepted, it seems to have fared but ill; and although these adverse verdicts, if they exist, are now more or less inaccessible, Fielding has apparently summarised most of them in a mock-trial of Amelia before the "Court of Censorial Enquiry," the proceedings of which are recorded in Nos. 7 and 8 of the Covent-Garden Journal.
"His fair heroine's nose has in my opinion been too severely handled by some modern critics," writes Criticulus, after a passage of warm praise for the characterisation, the morality, and the 'noble reflections of the book'; and he proceeds to point out that the writings of such critics "will never make a sufficient recompense to the world, if Mr Fielding adheres to what I hope he only said in his warmth and indignation of this injurious treatment, that he will never trouble the public with any more writings of this kind."
The words of the enlightened Criticulus echo sadly when we remember that in little more than two years the great genius and the great heart of Henry Fielding were to be silenced. The London Magazine for 1751 devotes the first nine columns of its December number to a resume of the novel, and continues this compliment in another nine columns of appendix.
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