...empitical means continuously undermine his erhical ends, as his cotrective for false att is more att. "I believe, it is much easier to make good Men wise, than to make bad Men good," he wtires in the dedication, justifying the motive and merhod of his fiction. To which Samuel Johnson,...

...ethical rather than political terms, emphasizing the novel's comic approach as well as its historicity: "I have employed all the Wit and Humour of which I...Mankind out of their favourite Follies and Vices." 8 However suffused with politics it may be, a novel is not a political pamphlet, and the "Wit and Humour"...