One or two more traits are relevant. All the four were married, and married pretty early; two of them married twice. Richardson's first wife was, in orthodox fashion, his master's daughter: of his second little is known. Fielding's first (he had made a vain attempt earlier to abduct an heiress who was a relation) was, by universal consent, the model both of Sophia and Amelia, almost as charming as either, and as amiable; his second was her maid. Of Mrs. Smollett, who was a Miss Lascelles and a West Indian heiress in a small way, we know very little--the habit of identifying her with the "Narcissa" of _Roderick Random_ is natural, inconclusive, but not ridiculous. Sterne's matrimonial relations are the most famous of all: and though posterity has, with its usual charity, constructed a legend for the pair which is probably much worse than the reality, that reality is more than a little awkward. Mrs. Sterne was a Miss Lumley, of a good Yorkshire family, some, though small, fortune, and more friends who exerted themselves for her husband. By inexcusable levity, ignorance, misjudgment, or heartless cupidity their daughter Lydia published, after the death of both, letters some of which contain courtship of the most lackadaisical sentimentality and others later expressions (which occasionally reach the scandalous) of weariness and disgust on Sterne's part. Other evidence of an indisputable character shows that he was, at least and best, an extravagant and mawkish philanderer with any girl or woman who would join in a flirtation: and while there is no evidence against Mrs. Sterne's character in the ordinary sense, and hardly any of value against her temper, she seems (which is perhaps not wonderful) to have latterly preferred to live apart from her husband, and to have put him to considerable, if not unreasonable, expenses by her fancy for wandering about France with the daughter.
Finally, in general character, Richardson seems to have been a respectable person of rather feminine temperament and, though good-natured to his friends, endowed with a feminine spitefulness. Fielding, though by no means answering to the standard of minor and even major morals demanded
"by the wise ones, By the grave and the precise ones."