Michaud's History of the Crusades Book

First included in a collection of miscellanies, this early novel is a shambling patchwork of mischievous sarcasm and rollicking happenings in the Quixote mode. The story of a folk hero—a Nucky Thompson of the 1700s—whose widely mythologised thief-taking antics are sent up with a huge lashing of mocking humour, the work has none of the hallmarks of the novel form Fielding would help invent and popularise in Tom Jones, and frenziedly veers from antic to antic and character to character to extreme narrative detriment.