The narrator dies, takes a stagecoach with several other shades, is examined at the gate by Minos, and finds the great men of history rather different from their reputations — after which Julian the Apostate recounts his own twenty transmigrations, as a slave, a bishop, a beau and a tailor. Fielding wrote farces until Walpole's licensing act shut his theater, and turned novelist out of necessity; this 1743 satire is his most reckless. Fifty-nine plates of roads and wayfarers by Munch, Doré and others turn the soul's journey into a painted pilgrimage across two centuries of European landscape.
