pulpitic

Updated: May 14, 2025

We shelve much of Smollett, much of Fielding, without great regret, but it is lamentable that works of powers and perceptions so supreme as "Moll Flanders" and "Colonel Jack" should be found unfit and unreadable, infinitely more perilous to the young than the coarser, but honester, freedoms of Smollett and Fielding, because of Defoe's base tradesman-like trick of representing in colors as tempting as possible the sins which with formal, pulpitic, hypocritical gravity he entreats you to avoid.

- Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 : A Series of Pen and Pencil Sketches of the Lives of More Than 200 of the Most Prominent Personages in History