Excerpt from The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews and His Friend Mr. Abraham Adams, Vol. 1 of 2: Written in Imitation of the Manner of Cervantes The epic, as well as the drama, is divided into tragedy and comedy. Homer, who was the father of this, species of poetry, gave us a pattern of both these, though that of the latter kind is entirely lost: which Aristotle tells us, bore the same relation to comedy which his Iliad bears to tragedy. And perhaps, that we have no more instances of it among the writers of antiquity is owing to the loss of this great pattern, which, had it survived, would have found its imitators equally with the other poems of this great original. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.