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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Henry Fielding: A Memoir, by G. M. Godden
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
+other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
+whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of
+the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
+www.gutenberg.org.  If you are not located in the United States, you'll have
+to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook.
+
+Title: Henry Fielding: A Memoir
+
+Author: G. M. Godden
+
+Posting Date: February 21, 2015 [EBook #8136]
+Release Date: May, 2005
+First Posted: June 17, 2003
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HENRY FIELDING: A MEMOIR ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Charles Aldarondo, Tiffany Vergon, Robert
+Connal and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+HENRY FIELDING
+
+_A MEMOIR_
+INCLUDING NEWLY DISCOVERED LETTERS
+AND RECORDS WITH ILLUSTRATIONS
+FROM CONTEMPORARY PRINTS
+
+BY
+
+G. M. GODDEN
+
+
+
+
+"I am a man myself, and my heart is interested in whatever can befall the
+rest of mankind."
+
+JOSEPH ANDREWS.
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+New material alone could justify any attempt to supplement the _Fielding_
+of Mr Austin Dobson. Such material has now come to light, and together
+with reliable facts collected by previous biographers, forms the subject
+matter of the present volume. As these pages are concerned with Fielding
+the man, and not only with Fielding the most original if not the greatest
+of English novelists, literary criticism has been avoided; but all
+incidents, disclosed by hitherto unpublished documents, or found hidden in
+the columns of contemporary newspapers, which add to our knowledge of
+Fielding's personality, have been given.
+
+The new material includes records of Fielding's childhood; documents
+concerning his estate in Dorsetshire; the date and place, hitherto
+undiscovered, of that central event in his life, the death of his beloved
+wife, whose memorial was to be the imperishable figure of "Sophia
+Western"; letters, now first published, adding to our knowledge of his
+energies in social and legislative reform, and of the circumstances of his
+life; many extracts from the columns of the daily press of the period;
+notices, hitherto overlooked, from his contemporaries; and details from
+the unexplored archives of the Middlesex Records concerning his strenuous
+work as a London magistrate. The few letters by Fielding already known to
+exist have been doubled in number; and a reason for the extraordinary
+rarity of these letters has been found in the unfortunate destruction,
+many years ago, of much of his correspondence. The charm of the one
+intimate letter that we possess from the pen of the 'Father of the English
+Novel,' that written to his brother John, during the voyage to Lisbon,
+enhances regret at the loss of these letters.
+
+Among the contemporary prints now first reproduced that entitled the
+_Conjurors_ is of special interest, as being the only sketch of Fielding,
+drawn during his lifetime, known to exist. Rough as it is, the
+characteristic figure of the man, as described by his contemporaries and
+drawn from memory in Hogarth's familiar plate, is perfectly apparent. The
+same characteristics may be distinguished in a small figure of the
+novelist introduced into the still earlier political cartoon, entitled the
+_Funeral of Faction_.
+
+Such in brief are the reasons for the existence of this volume. It remains
+to express my warmest acknowledgment of Mr Austin Dobson's unfailing
+counsel and assistance. My thanks are also due to Mr Ernest Fielding for
+permission to reproduce the miniature which appears as the frontispiece;
+to Mr Aubrey Court, of the House of Lords; to Mr E. S. W. Hart, for his
+help throughout the necessary researches among the Middlesex Records; to
+Mrs Deane of Gillingham; and to Mr Frederick Shum of Bath. And I am
+indebted to Mr Sidney Colvin, Keeper of the Department of Prints and
+Drawings in the British Museum, in regard to almost every one of the
+thirty-two rare prints and cartoons now reproduced.
+
+G. M. GODDEN.
+
+_October_ 26, 1909.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+YOUTH
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+PLAY-HOUSE BARD
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+MARRIAGE
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+POLITICAL PLAYS
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+HOMESPUN DRAMA
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+BAR STUDENT--JOURNALIST
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+COUNSELLOR FIELDING
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+_Joseph Andrews_
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+THE _Miscellanies_ AND _Jonathan Wild_
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+PATRIOTIC JOURNALISM
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+_Tom Jones_
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+MR JUSTICE FIELDING
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+FIELDING AND LEGISLATION
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+_Amelia_
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+JOURNALIST AND MAGISTRATE
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+POOR LAW REFORM
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+VOYAGE TO LISBON--DEATH
+
+
+
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
+_From photographs by Marie Léon_.
+
+Henry Fielding
+_From a miniature now in the possession of Mr Ernest Fielding._
+
+Sharpham House, showing the room in which Fielding was born
+_from a print published in 1826_.
+
+Sir Henry Gould
+_From a mezzotint by J. Hardy_.
+
+Eton--1742
+_From an engraving of a drawing by Cozens_.
+
+Anne Oldfield
+_From a mezzotint of a painting by J. Richardson_.
+
+Leyden--1727
+_From an engraving of a drawing by C. Pronk_.
+
+Kitty Clive as Philida
+_From a mezzotint of a painting by Veter van Bleeck, junr. 1735._
+
+Frontispiece to Fielding's "Tom Thumb"
+_By Hogarth_.
+
+The Close, Salisbury--1798
+_From an acquatint of a drawing by E. Dayes_.
+
+Charlcombe Church, near Bath
+_From an engraving of a drawing made in 1784_.
+
+Fielding's house, East Stour, Dorsetshire
+_From a print published in Hutchins' "History of Dorsetshire," 1813_.
+
+Sir Robert Walpole--1740
+_From a contemporary cartoon_.
+
+"Pasquin"
+_From a cartoon depicting a scene in "Pasquin" in which Harlequinades,
+etc., triumph aver legitimate drama. Pope is leaving a box. The Signature
+"W. Hogarth" is doubtful_.
+
+Cartoon celebrating the success of "Pasquin"
+_From a contemporary cartoon showing Fielding, supported by
+Shakespeare, receiving an ample reward, while to Harlequin and his other
+opponents is accorded a halter_.
+
+The Little Theatre in the Haymarket
+_From an engraving by Dale, showing the demolition of the Little
+Theatre in 1821_.
+
+The Green Room, Drury Lane
+_From the painting by Hogarth, in the possession of Sir Edward
+Tennant_.
+
+The Temple--1738
+_From an engraving of a drawing by J. Nicholas_.
+
+Henry Fielding holding the Banner of the "Champion" newspaper
+_From a contemporary cartoon showing Sir Robert Walpole laughing at the
+"Funeral" of an Opposition Motion in Parliament_.
+
+Cartoon showing Fielding, in Wig and Gown, as a supporter of the
+Opposition
+_From a print of 1741_.
+
+Henry Fielding reading at the Bedford Arms
+_From the frontispiece to Sir John Fielding's "Jests."_
+
+Assignment for "Joseph Andrews"
+_From the autograph now in the South Kensington Museum_.
+
+Beaufort Buildings, Strand, in 1725
+_From a watercolour drawing by Paul Sandby, 1725_.
+
+Prior Park, near Bath, the seat of Ralph Allen, 1750
+_From an engraving of a contemporary drawing_.
+
+George, First Baron Lyttelton
+_From a portrait by an unknown artist_.
+
+Theatre Ticket for Fielding's "Mock Doctor"
+_The signature "W. Hogarth" is doubtful_.
+
+Lady Mary Wortley Montagu--1710
+_From an engraving by Caroline Watson, from a miniature in the
+possession of the Marquis of Bute_.
+
+The Bow Street Police Court, Sir John Fielding presiding
+_From the "Newgate Calendar"_, 1795.
+
+Edward Moore
+_From a frontispiece in Chalmers' "British Essayists"_ 1817.
+
+Sir John Fielding
+_From a mezzotint of a painting by Nathaniel Hone, R.A._
+
+Ralph Allen
+_From a chalk drawing by W. Hoare, R.A._
+
+Henry Fielding
+_From an engraving of a pen and ink sketch, made by Hogarth after
+Fielding's death_.
+
+Henry Fielding, defending Betty Canning from her accusers, the Lord
+Mayor, Dr Hill, and the Gipsy
+_From a contemporary print, now first reproduced, and the only known
+sketch of Fielding made during his lifetime_.
+
+Justice Saunders Welch
+_From an engraving of a sketch by Hogarth_.
+
+Ryde--1795
+_From an engraving of a drawing by Charles Tomkins_.
+
+Lisbon--1793
+_From a mezzotint of a drawing by Noel_.
+
+The design on the cover is a copy, slightly enlarged, of an impression of
+Fielding's seal, attached to an autograph letter in the British Museum.
+
+
+
+
+HENRY FIELDING
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+YOUTH
+
+    "I shall always be so great a pedant as to call a man of no
+    learning a man of no education."--_Amelia_.
+
+
+Henry Fielding was born at Sharpham Park, near Glastonbury, on the 22nd
+of April 1707. His birth-room, a room known as the Harlequin Chamber,
+looked out over the roof of a building which once was the private chapel
+of the abbots of Glastonbury; for Sharpham Park possessed no mean
+history. Built in the sixteenth century by that distinguished prelate,
+scholar, and courtier Abbot Richard Beere, the house had boasted its
+chapel, hall, parlour, chambers, storehouses and offices; its fishponds
+and orchards; and a park in which might be kept some four hundred head of
+deer. It was in this fair demesne that the aged, pious, and benevolent
+Abbot Whiting, Abbot Richard's successor, was seized by the king's
+commissioners, and summarily hung, drawn, and quartered on the top of the
+neighbouring Tor Hill. Sharpham thereupon "devolved" upon the crown; but
+the old house remained, standing in peaceful seclusion where the pleasant
+slope of Polden Hill overlooks the Somersetshire moors, till the birth of
+the 'father of the English Novel' brought a lasting distinction to the
+domestic buildings of Abbot Beere. In the accompanying print, published
+in 1826, the little window of the Harlequin Chamber may be seen, above
+the low roofs of the abbots' chapel.
+
+That Henry Fielding should have been born among buildings raised by
+Benedictine hands is not incongruous; for no man ever more heartily
+preached and practised the virtue of open-handed charity; none was more
+ready to scourge the vices of arrogance, cruelty and avarice; no English
+novelist has left us brighter pictures of innocence and goodness. And it
+was surely a happy stroke of that capricious Fortune to whom Fielding so
+often refers, to allot a Harlequin Chamber for the birth of the author of
+nineteen comedies; and yet more appropriate to the robust genius of the
+Comic Epic was the accident that placed on the wall, beneath the window
+of his birth-room, a jovial jest in stone. For here some
+sixteenth-century humorist had displayed the arms of Abbot Beere in the
+form of a convivial rebus or riddle--to wit, a cross and two beer flagons.
+
+Soon after the Civil Wars, Sharpham passed into the hands of the
+'respectable family' of Gould. By the Goulds the house was considerably
+enlarged; and, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, was in the
+possession of a distinguished member of the family, Sir Henry Gould,
+Knight, and Judge of the King's Bench. Sir Henry had but two children, a
+son Davidge Gould, and a daughter Sarah. This only daughter married a
+well-born young soldier, the Hon. Edmund Fielding; a marriage which,
+according to family assertions, was without the consent of her parents and
+"contrary to their good likeing." [1] And it was in the old home of the
+Somersetshire Goulds that the eldest son of this marriage, Henry Fielding,
+was born.
+
+Thus on the side of his mother, Sarah Gould, Fielding belonged to just
+that class of well-established country squires whom later he was to
+immortalise in the beautiful and benevolent figure of Squire Allworthy,
+and in the boisterous, brutal, honest Western. And the description of
+Squire Allworthy's "venerable" house, with its air of grandeur "that
+struck you with awe," its position on the sheltered slope of a hill
+enjoying "a most charming prospect of the valley beneath," its
+surroundings of a wild and beautiful park, well-watered meadows fed with
+sheep, the ivy-grown ruins of an old abbey, and far-off hills and sea,
+preserves, doubtless, the features of the ancient and stately domain
+owned by the novelist's grandfather.
+
+If it was to the 'respectable' Goulds that Fielding owed many of his
+rural and administrative characteristics, such as that practical zeal and
+ability which made him so excellent a magistrate, it is in the family of
+his father that we find indications of those especial qualities of
+vigour, of courage, of the generous and tolerant outlook of the well-born
+man of the world, that characterise Henry Fielding. And it is also in
+these Fielding ancestors that something of the reputed wildness of their
+brilliant kinsman may be detected.
+
+For in her wilful choice of Edmund Fielding for a husband, Sir Henry
+Gould's only daughter brought, assuredly, a disturbing element into the
+quiet Somersetshire home. The young man was of distinguished birth, even
+if he was not, as once asserted, of the blood royal of the Hapsburgs.
+[2] His ancestor, Sir John Fielding, had received a knighthood for bravery
+in the French wars of the fourteenth century. A Sir Everard Fielding led a
+Lancastrian army during the Wars of the Roses. Sir William, created Earl
+of Denbigh, fell fighting for the king in the Civil Wars, where, says
+Clarendon, "he engaged with singular courage in all enterprises of
+danger"; a phrase which recalls the description of Henry Fielding "that
+difficulties only roused him to struggle through them with a peculiar
+spirit and magnanimity." Lord Denbigh fell, covered with wounds, when
+fighting as a volunteer in Prince Rupert's troop; while his eldest son,
+Basil, then a mere youth, fought as hotly for the Parliament. Lord
+Denbigh's second son, who like his father was a devoted loyalist, received
+a peerage, being created Earl of Desmond; and two of his sons figure in a
+wild and tragic story preserved by Pepys. "In our street," says the
+Diarist, writing in 1667, "at the Three Tuns Tavern I find a great hubbub;
+and what was it but two brothers had fallen out and one killed the other.
+And who s'd. they be but the two Fieldings; one whereof, Bazill, was page
+to my Lady Sandwich; and he hath killed the other, himself being very
+drunk, and so is sent to Newgate." It was a brother of these unhappy
+youths, John Fielding, a royal chaplain and Canon of Salisbury, who by his
+marriage with a Somersetshire lady, became father of Edmund Fielding.
+
+Such was Henry Fielding's ancestry, and it cannot be too much insisted on
+that, throughout all the vicissitudes of his life, he was ever a man of
+breeding, no less than a man of wit. "His manners were so gentlemanly,"
+said his friend Mrs Hussey, "that even with the lower classes with which
+he frequently condescended to chat, such as Sir Roger de Coverley's old
+friends, the Vauxhall watermen, they seldom outstepped the limits of
+propriety." And a similar recognition comes from the hand of a great, and
+not too friendly, critic. To "the very last days of his life," wrote
+Thackeray, "he retained a grandeur of air, and although worn down by
+disease his aspect and presence imposed respect on the people around him."
+
+This Denbigh ancestry recalls a pleasant example of Fielding's wit,
+preserved in a story told by his son, and recorded in the pages of that
+voluminous eighteenth-century anecdotist, John Nichols. "Henry Fielding,"
+says Nichols, "being once in company with the Earl of Denbigh, and the
+conversation's turning on Fielding's being of the Denbigh family, the
+Earl asked the reason why they spelt their names differently; the Earl's
+family doing it with the E first (Feilding), and Mr Henry Fielding with
+the I first (Fielding). 'I cannot tell, my Lord,' answered Harry, 'except
+it be that my branch of the family were the first that knew how to
+spell.'"
+
+In accordance with the fighting traditions of his race, Edmund Fielding
+went into the army; his name appearing as an ensign in the 1st Foot
+Guards. Also, as became a Fielding, he distinguished himself, we are
+told, in the "Wars against France with much Bravery and Reputation"; and
+it was probably owing to active service abroad that the birth of his
+eldest son took place in his wife's old Somersetshire home. The date fits
+in well enough with the campaigns of Ramilies, Oudennarde and Malplaquet.
+Soon after Henry's birth, however, his father had doubtless left the Low
+Countries, for, about 1709, he appears as purchasing the colonelcy of an
+Irish Regiment. This regiment was ordered, in 1710, to Spain; but before
+that year the colonel and his wife and son had a separate home provided
+for them, by the care of Sir Henry Gould. At what precise date is
+uncertain, but some time before 1710, Sir Henry had purchased an estate
+at East Stour in Dorsetshire, consisting of farms and lands of the value
+of £4750, intending to settle some or the whole of the same on his
+daughter and her children. And already, according to a statement by the
+colonel, the old judge had placed his son-in-law in possession of some or
+all of this purchase, sending him oxen to plough his ground, and
+promising him a "Dairye of Cows." Sir Henry moreover had, said his
+son-in-law, declared his intention "to spend the vacant Remainder of his
+life," sometimes with his daughter, her husband, and children at Stour,
+and sometimes with his son Davidge, presumably at Sharpham. But in March,
+1710, Sir Henry's death frustrated his planned retirement in the Vale of
+Stour; although three years later, in 1713, his intentions regarding a
+Dorsetshire home for his daughter were carried out by the conveyance to
+her [3] and her children of the Stour estate, for her sole enjoyment. The
+legal documents are careful to recite that the rents and profits should be
+paid to Mrs Fielding or her children, and her receipt given, and that the
+said Edmund "should have nothing to do nor intermeddle therewith."
+
+In this settlement of the East Stour farms, to the greater part of which
+Henry Fielding, then six years old, would be joint heir with his sisters,
+Colonel Fielding himself seems to have had to pay no less than £1750,
+receiving therefor "a portion of the said lands." So by 1713 both Edmund
+Fielding and his wife were settled, as no inconsiderable landowners,
+among the pleasant meadows of Stour; and there for the next five years
+Henry's early childhood was passed. Indeed, Mrs Fielding must have been
+at Stour when her eldest son was but three years old, for the baptism of
+a daughter, Sarah, appears in the Stour registers in November 1710. This
+entry is followed by the baptism of Anne in 1713, of Beatrice in 1714, of
+Edmund in 1716, and by the death of Anne in the last-named year, Henry
+being then nine years old.
+
+According to Arthur Murphy, Fielding's earliest and too often inaccurate
+biographer, the boy received "the first rudiments of his education at
+home, under the care of the Revd. Mr Oliver." Mr Oliver was the curate of
+Motcombe, a neighbouring village; and we have the authority of Murphy and
+of Hutchins, the historian of Dorset, for finding 'a very humorous and
+striking portrait' of this pedagogue in the Rev. Mr Trulliber, the
+pig-breeding parson of _Joseph Andrews_. If this be so, Harry Fielding's
+first tutor at Stour was of a figure eminently calculated to foster the
+comic genius of his pupil. "He" (Trulliber), wrote that pupil, some thirty
+years later, "was indeed one of the largest Men you should see, and could
+have acted the part of Sir _John Falstaff_ without stuffing. Add to this,
+that the Rotundity of his Belly was considerably increased by the
+shortness of his Stature, his shadow ascending very near as far in height
+when he lay on his Back, as when he stood on his Legs. His Voice was loud
+and hoarse, and his Accents extremely broad; to complete the whole he had
+a Stateliness in his Gait when he walked, not unlike that of a Goose, only
+he stalked slower." It appears that the widow of the Motcombe curate
+denied the alleged portrait; but the house where Mr Oliver lived, "seemed
+to accord with Fielding's description ... and an old woman who remembered
+him observed that 'he dearly loved a bit of good victuals, and a drop of
+drink.'" Bearing in mind the great novelist's own earnest declaration that
+he painted "not men but manners," we may fairly assume that his
+Dorsetshire tutor belonged to that class of coarse farmer-parson so justly
+satirised in the person of Trulliber. According to another sketch of
+Fielding's life, his early education was also directed by the rector of
+Stour Provost, "his Parson Adams." [4]
+
+While Harry Fielding was thus learning his first rudiments, his father,
+the colonel, seems to have been engaged in less useful pursuits in
+London. The nature of these pursuits appears from a _Bill of Complaint_,
+which by a happy chance has been preserved, between "Edmund Fielding of
+East Stour, Dorsetshire," and one Robert Midford, pretending to be a
+captain of the army. In this _Bill_ [5] the said Edmund declares that in
+1716, being then resident in London, he often frequented Princes
+Coffee-house in the Parish of St James. At Princes he found his company
+sought by the reputed Captain Robert Midford, who "prevailed upon him to
+play a game called 'Faro' for a small matter of diversion, but by degrees
+drew him on to play for larger sums, and by secret and fraudulent means
+obtained very large sums, in particular notes and bonds for £500."
+Further, the colonel entered into a bond of £200 to one Mrs Barbara
+Midford, "sister or pretended sister of the said Robert"; and so finally
+was threatened with outlawry by 'Captain' Midford for, presumably, payment
+of these debts. How Colonel Edmund finally escaped from the clutches of
+these rogues does not appear; but it is clear enough that his Dorsetshire
+meadows were a safer place than Princes Coffee-house for a gentleman who
+could lose £500 at faro to a masquerading army captain. Also Sir Henry
+Gould's wisdom becomes apparent, in bequeathing his daughter an
+inheritance with which her husband was to have "nothing to doe."
+
+In 1718, two years after Colonel Fielding's experience at Princes, Mrs
+Fielding died, leaving six young children to her husband's care, two sons
+and four daughters, Henry, the eldest being but eleven years old. Her
+death is recorded in the East Stour registers as follows:--"Sarah, Wife
+of the Hon. Edmund Fielding Esqre. and daughter of Sir Henry Gould Kt.
+April 18 1718."
+
+About this time (the dates vary between 1716 and 1719) Edmund Fielding
+was appointed Colonel of the Invalids, an appointment which he appears to
+have held until his death. And within two years of the death of his first
+wife, Colonel Fielding must have married again, for in 1720 we find him
+and his then wife, _Anne_, selling some 153 acres with messuages,
+barns and gardens, in East and West Stour, to one Awnsham Churchill,
+Esquire. What relation, if any, this land had to the property of the
+colonel's late wife and her children does not appear.
+
+Some time in 1719, the year after his mother's death, or early in 1720,
+Henry was sent to Eton, as appears from his father's statement, made in
+February 1721, that his eldest son "who is now upwards of thirteen yeares
+old is and for more than a yeare last past hath been maintained ... at
+Eaton schoole, the yearely expence whereof costs ... upwards of £60." And
+the boy must have been well away from the atmosphere of his home, in
+these first years after his mother's death, if the allegations of his
+grandmother, old Lady Gould, may be believed.
+
+These hitherto unknown records of Henry Fielding's boyhood are to be
+found in the proceedings of a Chancery suit begun by Lady Gould, on
+behalf of her six grandchildren, Henry, Edmund, [6] Katherine, Ursula,
+Sarah and Beatrice, three years after the death of their mother--namely,
+on the 10th of February 1721, and instituted in the name of Henry Fielding
+as complainant. Lady Gould opens her grandchildren's case with a
+comprehensive indictment of her son-in-law. After reciting that her
+daughter Sarah had married Edmund Fielding "without the consent of her
+Father or Mother and contrary to their good likeing," Lady Gould mentions
+her husband's bequest to their daughter, Sarah Fielding, of £3000 in trust
+to be laid out in the purchase of lands for the benefit of her and her
+children "with direction that the said Edmund Fielding should have nothing
+to do nor intermeddle therewith." And how Sir Henry did in his lifetime
+purchase "Eastover" estate for his daughter, but died before the trust was
+completed; and that in 1713 his trustees, Edmund Fielding consenting,
+settled the said estate upon trust for Sarah Fielding and her children
+after her, the rents and profits to be paid for her, and acknowledged by
+her receipt "without her Husband." And that if Sarah Fielding died
+intestate the estate be divided among her children. The bill then shows
+that Sarah Fielding did die intestate; and that then Henry and his sisters
+and brother "being all Infants of tender years and uncapable of managing
+their own affairs and to take Care thereof, well hoped that ... their
+Trustees would have taken Care to receive the Rents of the said premises,"
+and have applied the same for their maintenance and education. One of
+these trustees, we may note, was Henry Fielding's uncle, Davidge Gould.
+This reasonable hope of the six "Infants" was however, according to their
+grandmother, wholly disappointed. For their uncle Davidge and his
+co-trustee, one William Day, allowed Edmund Fielding to receive the rents,
+nay "entered into a Combination and Confederacy to and with the said
+Edmund Fielding," refusing to intermeddle with the said trust, whereby the
+children were in great danger of losing their means of maintenance and
+education. And this was by no means all. Lady Gould proceeds to point out
+that her son-in-law had, since his wife's death, "intermarried with
+one ... Rapha ... Widow an Italian a Person of the Roman Catholick
+Profession who has severall children of her own and one who kept an eating
+House in London, and not at all fitt to have the care of [the
+complainants'] Education and has now two daughters in a Monastery beyond
+Sea." It is not difficult to conceive the attitude of Lady Gould of
+Sharpham Park to an Italian widow who kept an eating-house; but worse yet,
+in the view of those 'No Popery' days, was to follow. "Not only so," says
+her ladyship, "the said Edmund Fielding ... threatens to take your
+[complainants] from school into his own custody altho' [their] said
+Grandmother has taken a House in the City of New Sarum with an intent to
+have [her granddaughters] under her Inspection and where ... Katherine,
+Ursula and Sarah are now at school"; and "the said Mr Fielding doth give
+out in speeches that he will do with [the complainants] what he thinks
+fitt, and has openly commended the Manner of Education of young persons in
+Monasteryes."
+
+This comprehensive indictment against Colonel Fielding received a prompt
+counter, the "Severall Answere of Edmund Fielding Esqre ... to the Bill
+of Complaint of Henry Fielding, Katherine Fielding, Ursula Fielding,
+Sarah Fielding, and Beatrice Fielding, Infants, by Dame Sarah Gould,
+their Grandmother and next Friend," being dated February 23 1721, but
+thirteen days after Lady Gould had opened her attack. Out of "a dutiful
+Regard to the said Lady Gould his Mother-in-Law," Colonel Fielding
+declares himself unwilling to "Controvert anything with her further than
+of necessity." But he submits that, in the matter of his marriage, he was
+"afterwards well approved of and received" by Sir Henry Gould and his
+family; that he was also so happy as to be in favour with Lady Gould
+"till he marryed with his now wife"; which he believes "has Occasioned
+some Jealosye and Displeasure in the Lady Gould, tho' without Just
+Grounds." Edmund Fielding then draws a pastoral picture of himself in
+occupation of the East Stour estate, placed there by his father-in-law;
+of his oxen and dairy; and of the judge's intention of spending half the
+remainder of his days with his son-in-law on this Dorsetshire farm. He
+admits his share in the trust settlement after Sir Henry's death; and
+points out that his brother-in-law, Davidge Gould, made him pay heavily
+on a portion of the estate. And he believes that, as his wife died
+intestate, all his children are "Intituled to the said Estate in Equall
+proportions."
+
+Then follows the colonel's main defence. His eldest son Henry not being
+yet fourteen years of age, he has, ever since the death of his wife,
+continued in possession of the premises, taking the rents and profits
+thereof, which amount to about £150; and he positively declares that he
+has expended more annually on the maintenance and education of the said
+complainants, ever since the death of their mother, than the clear income
+of the said estate amounts to, and that he shall continue to take "a
+Tender and affectionate care of all his said Children." Further, he
+professes himself a "protestant of the Communion of the Church of
+England," and asserts that he shall and will breed his said children
+Protestants of that communion. He protests that his second wife is not an
+Italian; nor did she keep an eating-house. He suggests that Lady Gould
+took her house at Salisbury "as well with an Intent to convenience
+herselfe by liveing in a Towne" as for the inspection of his children. He
+"denyeth that he ever Comended the Manner of Education of young persons
+in monasterys if it be meant in Respect of Religion." Finally, he says
+that he has spent much money on improving the estate; that the income
+from the estate is hardly sufficient to maintain his children according
+to their station in the world since he is "nearly related to many Noble
+Familys"; and he "veryly believes in his conscience he can better provide
+for his said Children by reason of his relation to and Interest in the
+said noble Familys than their said Grandmother (who is now in an advanced
+age, being seventy yeares old or thereabouts)."
+
+Here, it is plain, was a very pretty family quarrel. No man likes his
+mother-in-law to say that he has married the keeper of an Italian
+eating-house, especially if the fact is correct; or that he is perverting
+his young children's trust money. Neither was Lady Gould likely to be
+pacified by her son-in-law's remark that she was now "in an advanced
+age"; while his suggestion that his "noble" family would be of far more
+advantage to his children than that of the respectable Goulds would have
+the added sting of undeniable truth.
+
+The next extant move in the fray bears date five months later, July 18
+1721, and includes a petition by 'Dame Sarah Gould' that the children be
+not removed from the places where they then were until the case be heard;
+and Lady Gould adds that if the children's persons or estates be "under
+ye management or power of ye said Mr Fielding and his now wife ye Estate
+would not be managed to ye best advantage and their Education would not
+be taken care of and there would be a great hazard that ye children might
+be perverted to ye Romish Religion." Then follows an order in Chancery,
+under the same date, "that ye eldest son of ye Defend't. Fielding ... be
+continued at Eaton School where he now is and that ye rest of ye children
+be continued where they now are."
+
+The next document merely records the inclusion of Henry's five-year-old
+brother Edmund among the plaintiffs. And this is followed by a brief
+Chancery order of November 30 1721, that "ye, plaintiff Henry Fielding
+who is not [_sic_] at Eaton Schoole be at liberty to go to ye said Dame
+Sarah Gould, his Grandmother and next friend during ye usual time of
+recess from School at Xmas."
+
+After these Christmas holidays spent by Henry Fielding with Lady Gould,
+doubtless at her house in Salisbury, the Chancery records pass on to the
+April following, 1722, when the boy's uncle and trustee Davidge Gould
+makes a statement "sworn at Sharpham Park," which concludes that the
+witness hears and believes that Edmund Fielding "has already three
+children by his present wife who is reputed to be of the Romish church."
+In this same month comes another order from the court that Henry be at
+liberty to leave Eton for the Whitsun holidays 1722, and to go to Lady
+Gould's house. In May Edmund Fielding appears as "of the Parish of Saint
+James, in the County of Middlesex," and also as his children's "next
+Friend and Guardian." But two days later the long suit is concluded by
+the decision of the court, and here Colonel Fielding is, as heretofore,
+defendant, Lady Gould being the children's "next friend."
+
+The case came before the Lord Chancellor on the 28th of May 1722, and was
+"debated in the presence of learned Counsels." The trust was upheld, and
+Edmund Fielding was required to deliver possession of the estate,
+rendering account of the rents and profits thereof since the death of his
+first wife; but he was to have "any and what" allowance for improvements,
+and for the children's maintenance and education. And it was further
+ordered that the children then at school continue at such schools till
+further order, and that "upon any breaking up at ye usuall times they do
+go and reside with ye Lady Gould their Grandmother that they may not be
+under the influence of ye Defendant Fielding's Wife, who appeared to be a
+papist." [7]
+
+So Lady Gould, for all her seventy years, won her case at every point.
+And Colonel Edmund Fielding did not only lose the guardianship of his six
+children, and the administration of their estate. For there was, we
+learn, in court, during the hearing, one Mrs Cottington, the plaintiffs
+aunt, "alleadging that there was a debt of £700 due from ye Defendant
+Fielding to her"; which debt she offered should be applied for the
+benefit of her nephews and nieces. Whereupon the court ordered that if
+Mrs Cottington proved the same, a Master in Chancery should purchase
+therewith lands to be settled for the "Infants" in like manner as the
+trust estate.
+
+It may be only a coincidence, but £700 is the sum specifically mentioned
+in the proceedings brought by Colonel Fielding in October 1722, five
+months after the loss of his Chancery suit, against the cardsharper,
+Robert Midford, who was then apparently threatening him with outlawry for
+the recovery of the gambling debt begun, as we have seen, at Princes'
+Coffee-house six years before. Had the colonel borrowed the £700 from Mrs
+Cottington, with intent to discharge those debts; and, on being brought
+to law by her (on her nephews' and nieces' behalf) for that debt, did it
+occur to him to escape from the clutches of the psuedo "Captain" Midford
+by pleading, as he now does in this Bill of 1722, that he "was tricked,"
+and also "that gaming is illegal"? The latter plea has something of
+unconscious humour in the mouth of a gentleman who had lately lost £500
+at faro. With this last echo of the coffee-house of St James's, and of
+the colonel's financial difficulties, that brave soldier, if somewhat
+reckless gambler, the Hon. Edmund Fielding vanishes from sight, as far as
+the life of his eldest son is concerned.
+
+At the triumphant conclusion of his grandmother's suit Henry Fielding
+would be just fifteen years of age, and it is impossible not to wonder
+what side he took in these spirited family conflicts. No evidence,
+however, on such points appears in the dry legal documents; and all that
+we have for guide as to the effect in this impressionable time of his
+boyhood of the long months of contest, and of his strictly ordered
+holidays with his grandmother, is the declaration on the one hand that
+"filial piety ... his nearest relations agree was a shining part of his
+character," and on the other, the undeniably strong Protestant bias that
+appears in his writing. Of his aunt, Mrs Cottington, we get one later
+glimpse, when in 1723 she is made his trustee, in place of his uncle,
+Davidge Gould, Mrs Cottington being then resident in Salisbury. At the
+end of the following year, however, in December 1724, Davidge Gould
+resumes his trusteeship, and with the record of that fact the disclosures
+yielded by these ancient parchments as to Henry Fielding's stormy boyhood
+come to an end.
+
+From these records it becomes possible to gain some idea of the
+surroundings of the great novelist's early youth. Before his mother's
+death, indeed, when he was a boy of eleven, we already knew him as
+suffering the rough jurisdiction of his Trulliberian tutor, Parson Oliver
+of Motcombe village, and perhaps as under the wise and kindly guidance of
+the good scholar-parson, who was later to win the affection and respect
+of thousands of readers under the name of "Parson Adams." But now, for
+the first time, we learn of the disastrous second marriage by which
+Colonel Fielding, within two years of his first wife's death, placed a
+lady of at least disputable social standing at the head of his household,
+and one, moreover, whose Faith roused the bitter religious animosities of
+that day. What wonder that the old Lady Gould strove fiercely to remove
+Henry Fielding, and his sisters and young brother, from East Stour, when
+a Madame Rasa was installed in her daughter's place. And accordingly, as
+we have seen, even before the conclusion of the suit, Henry was
+provisionally ordered by the Court of Chancery to spend his holidays with
+his grandmother. Fielding would then be fourteen years old; and the
+judge's decision six months later that future holidays should be passed
+with Lady Gould, away from the influence of the second Mrs Fielding,
+doubtless severed the lad's connection with his dubious stepmother for
+the next six years. His home life, then, during the latter part of his
+Eton schooling would be under Lady Gould's care; and was probably spent
+at Salisbury.
+
+Of his Eton life, from his entrance at the school, when twelve years old,
+we know practically nothing. From the absence of his name on the college
+lists, it may be inferred that he was an Oppidan. It is said that he gave
+"distinguished proofs of strong and peculiar parts"; and that he left the
+school with a good reputation as a classical scholar. And it is not
+surprising to learn that here, as he himself tells us, his vigorous
+energies made acquaintance with that 'birchen altar' at which most of the
+best blood in England has been disciplined. "And thou," he cries, "O
+Learning (for without thy Assistance nothing pure, nothing correct, can
+Genius produce) do thou guide my Pen. Thee, in thy favourite Fields,
+where the limpid gently rolling _Thames_ washes thy _Etonian_ banks, in
+early Youth I have worshipped. To thee at thy birchen Altar, with true
+_Spartan_ Devotion, I have sacrificed my Blood." [8] That the sacrifice
+was not made in vain appears from the reputation with which Fielding left
+Eton of being "uncommonly versed in the Greek authors and an early master
+of the Latin classics"; and also from the yet better evidence of his own
+pages. Long after these boyish days we find him, in the words of "The man
+of the Hill," thus eloquently acknowledging the debt of humanity, and
+doubtless his own, to those inestimable treasures bequeathed to the world
+by ancient Greece: "These Authors, though they instructed me in no Science
+by which Men may promise to themselves to acquire the least Riches, or
+worldly Power, taught me, however, the Art of despising the highest
+Acquisitions of both. They elevate the Mind, and steel and harden it
+against the capricious Invasions of Fortune. They not only instruct in the
+Knowledge of Wisdom, but confirm Men in her Habits, and demonstrate
+plainly, that this must be our Guide, if we propose ever to arrive at the
+greatest worldly Happiness; or to defend ourselves, with any tolerable
+Security, against the Misery which everywhere surrounds and invests us."
+[9] And that this was no mere figure of speech appears from that touching
+picture which Murphy has left us of the brilliant wit, the 'wild' Harry
+Fielding, when under the pressure of sickness and poverty, quietly reading
+the _De Consolations_ of Cicero. His Plato accompanied him on the last sad
+voyage to Lisbon; and his library, when catalogued for sale on behalf of
+his widow and children, contained over one hundred and forty volumes of
+the Greek and Latin classics.
+
+Thus, supreme student and master as he was of "the vast authentic book of
+nature," there is abundant proof that Fielding fulfilled his own axiom
+that a "good share of learning" is necessary to the equipment of a
+novelist. Let the romance writer's natural parts be what they may,
+learning, he declared, "must fit them for use, must direct them in it,
+lastly must contribute part at least of the materials." [10] Looking back
+on such utterances by the 'father of the English Novel,' written at the
+full height of his power, it is but natural to wonder if the boy's eager
+application to Greek and Latin drudgery had in it something of
+half-conscious preparation for the great part he was destined to play in
+the history of English literature.
+
+It is clear that Henry Fielding flung his characteristic energies
+zealously into the acquirement of the classical learning proffered him at
+Eton; but a fine scholarship, great possession though it be, was not the
+only gain of his Eton years. Here, says Murphy in his formal
+eighteenth-century phrasing, young Fielding had "the advantage of being
+early known to many of the first people in the kingdom, namely Lord
+Lyttelton, Mr Fox, Mr Pitt, Sir Charles Hanbury Williams, and the late Mr
+Winnington, etc."
+
+Of these companions at Eton, George Lyttelton, afterwards known as the
+"good Lord Lyttelton," statesman and orator, stands foremost by virtue of
+the generous warmth of a friendship continued throughout the novelist's
+chequered life. To Lyttelton _Tom Jones_ was dedicated; it was his
+generosity, as generously acknowledged, that supplied Fielding, for a
+time, with the very means of subsistence; and to him was due the
+appointment, subsequently discharged with so much zealous labour, of
+Magistrate for Westminster and Middlesex. It is recorded that George
+Lyttelton's school exercises "were recommended as models to his
+schoolfellows." Another Eton friend, Thomas Winnington, made some figure
+in the Whig political world of the day; he was accredited by Horace
+Walpole with having an inexhaustible good humour, and "infinitely more wit
+than any man I ever knew." Of the friendship with Sir Charles Hanbury
+Williams, of which we first hear at Eton, little is known, save the
+curious episode of the recovery, many years after its author's death, of
+Fielding's lost play _The Good-Natured Man>_, which had apparently been
+submitted to Sir Charles, whose celebrity was great as a brilliant
+political lampoonist. Of the acquaintance with Henry Fox, first Baron
+Holland, we hear nothing in later life; but the name of the greatest of
+all these Eton contemporaries, that of the elder Pitt, recurs in after
+years as one of the party at Radway Grange, in Warwickshire, to whom
+Fielding, after dinner, read aloud the manuscript of _Tom Jones_.
+[11] A reference to his fellow-Etonian may be found in one of the
+introductory chapters of that masterpiece, where Fielding, while again
+advocating the claims of learning, takes occasion to pay this sonorous
+tribute to Pitt's oratory: "Nor do I believe that all the imagination,
+fire, and judgment of Pitt, could have produced those orations that have
+made the senate of England in these our times a rival in eloquence to
+Greece and Rome, if he had not been so well read in the writings of
+Demosthenes and Cicero, as to have transferred their whole spirit into his
+speeches and, with their spirit, their knowledge too."
+
+However excellent a knowledge of the classics the youthful scholar took
+away with him from Eton, the rigours of his studies do not appear to have
+diminished that zest for life with which the very name of Henry Fielding
+is invested. For the obscurity of these early years is for a moment
+lifted to disclose the young genius as having already, before he was
+nineteen, fallen desperately in love with a beautiful heiress in
+Dorsetshire; and, moreover, as threatening bodily force to accomplish his
+suit. The story, as indicated in the surviving outlines, might be the
+draft for a chapter of _Tom Jones_. The scene is Lyme Regis. The chief
+actors are Harry Fielding, scarce more than a schoolboy; a beautiful
+heiress, Miss Sarah Andrew; [12] and her uncle, one Mr Andrew Tucker, a
+timorous and crafty member of the local corporation. The handsome Etonian,
+who had been for some time resident in the old town, fell madly in love,
+it seems, with the lady, who is stated to have been his cousin on his
+mother's side. The views of her guardian were, however, opposed to the
+young man's suit, Mr Andrew Tucker mercenarily designing to secure the
+heiress for his own son. Thereupon Harry Fielding is said to have made a
+desperate attempt to carry the lady off by force, and that, moreover, "on
+a Sunday, when she was on her way to Church." Further, the efforts of the
+impetuous youth would seem to have extended to threatened assaults on the
+person of his fair cousin's guardian, Mr Tucker; for we find that
+affrighted worthy flying for protection to the arm of the law, as recorded
+in the _Register Book_ of Lyme Regis, under date of the 14th November
+1725:--"... Andrew Tucker, Gent., one of the Corporation, caused Henry
+Fielding, Gent., and his servant or companion, Joseph Lewis--both now for
+some time past residing in the borough--to be bound over to keep the
+peace, as he was in fear of his life or some bodily hurt to be done or to
+be procured to be done to him by H. Fielding and his man. Mr A. Tucker
+feared that the man would beat, maim, or kill him." No words could more
+aptly sum up this delightful story than those of Mr Austin Dobson: "a
+charming girl, who is also an heiress; a pusillanimous guardian, with
+ulterior views of his own; a handsome and high-spirited young suitor; a
+faithful attendant ready to 'beat, maim or kill' on his master's behalf; a
+frustrated elopement and a compulsory visit to the mayor--all these with
+the picturesque old town of Lyme for a background, suggest a most
+appropriate first act to Harry Fielding's biographical tragi-comedy."
+[13] It is possible that Fielding's own pen supplied the conclusion to
+this first act. For he tells us, in the preface to the _Miscellanies_,
+that a version, in burlesque verse, of part of Juvenal's sixth satire was
+originally sketched out before he was twenty, and that it was "all the
+Revenge taken by an injured Lover." The story loses none of its zest,
+moreover, when we remember that Harry Fielding was at this time still a
+Ward of Chancery.
+
+[1] Chancery Proceedings 1720 sqq. _Fielding_ v. _Fielding_. From the
+records of this Chancery suit, instituted on behalf of Henry Fielding and
+his brother and sisters, as minors, by their grandmother Lady Gould, are
+taken the hitherto unpublished facts concerning the novelist's boyhood,
+contained in this chapter. The original documents are preserved in the
+Record Office.
+
+[2] See Appendix A.
+
+[3] By means of a legacy of £3000 left by her father for his daughter's
+sole use, "her husband having nothing to doe with it."
+
+[4] _History and Antiquities of Leicestershire_. J. Nichols. 1810. Vol.
+iv. Part i. p. 292. Nichols does not state his authority for this
+statement, and it is not confirmed by local records. See Hutchins'
+_History of Dorset_ for the list of Stour Provost rectors.
+
+[5] Chancery Proceedings, 1722. _Fielding_ v. _Midford_. Record Office.
+
+[6] Edmund's name was added in October following.
+
+[7] _Chancery Decrees and Order Books_. Record Office.
+
+[8] Tom Jones, Book xiii. Introduction.
+
+[9] Ibid., Book viii., ch. xiii.
+
+[10] _Tom Jones_, Book ix. Introduction.
+
+[11] See _infra_, chap. xi.
+
+[12] Fifty years ago a portrait of the beautiful heiress, in the character
+of Sophia Western, was still preserved at the house of Bellairs, near
+Exeter, then the property of the Rhodes family. The present ownership of
+the picture has, so far, eluded inquiry.
+
+[13] _Fielding_, Austin Dobson, p. 202.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+PLAYHOUSE BARD
+
+    "I could not help reflecting how often the greatest abilities lie
+    wind-bound, as it were, in life; or if they venture out, and
+    attempt to beat the seas, they struggle in vain against wind and
+    tide."--_Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon_.
+
+It was but three years after the Lyme Regis episode that Henry Fielding,
+then a lad of one and twenty, won attention as a successful writer of
+comedy. Of this his first entry into the gay world there are little but
+generalities to record; but, inaccurate as Murphy is in some matters of
+fact, there seems no reason to doubt the truth of the engaging picture
+which he draws of the young man's _début_ upon the Town. We read of the
+gaiety and quickness of his fancy; the wild flow of his spirits; the
+brilliancy of his wit; the activity of his mind, eager to know the world.
+To the possession of genius allied to the happiest temper, a temper "for
+the most part overflowing into wit, mirth, and good-humour," young
+Fielding added a handsome face, a magnificent physique (he stood over six
+feet high), and the fullest vigour of constitution. "No man," wrote his
+cousin, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, "enjoyed life more than he did." What
+wonder that he was soon "in high request with the men of taste and
+literature," or that report affirms him to have been no less welcome in
+ranks of society not at all distinguished by a literary flavour.
+
+That a youth so gifted, so "formed and disposed for enjoyment," should
+find himself his own master, in London, almost presupposes a too liberal
+indulgence in the follies that must have so easily beset him. When the
+great and cold Mr Secretary Addison, no less than that "very merry
+Spirit," Dick Steele, and the splendid Congreve, drank more than was good
+for them, what chance would there be for a brilliant, ardent lad of
+twenty, suddenly plunged into the robust society of that age? If
+Fielding, like his elders, indisputably loved good wine, let us remember
+that none of the heroes of his three great novels, neither that rural
+innocent Joseph Andrews, nor the exuberant youth Tom Jones, nor erring,
+repentant Captain Booth are immoderate drinkers. The degradation of
+drinking is, in Fielding's pages, accorded to brutalised if honest
+country squires, and cruel and corrupt magistrates; and there is little
+evidence throughout his life to indicate that the great novelist drank
+more freely than did the genial heroes of his pen. As regards Murphy's
+general assertion that, at this his entrance into life, young Fielding
+"launched wildly into a career of dissipation" no other reputable
+contemporary evidence is discoverable of the "wildness" popularly
+attributed to Fielding. That his youth was headlong and undisciplined is
+a plausible surmise; but justice demands that the charge be recognised as
+a surmise and nothing more. How keenly, twenty years later, he could
+appreciate the handicap that such early indulgences impose on a man's
+future life may be gathered from a passage in _Joseph Andrews_ which is
+not without the ring of personal feeling. The speaker is a generous and
+estimable country gentleman, living in Arcadian retirement with his wife
+and children. Descended of a good family and born a gentleman, he narrates
+how his education was acquired at a public school, and extended to a
+mastery of the Latin, and a tolerable knowledge of the Greek, language.
+Becoming his own master at sixteen he soon left school, for, he tells his
+listeners, "being a forward Youth, I was extremely impatient to be in the
+World: For which I thought my Parts, Knowledge, and Manhood thoroughly
+qualified me. And to this early Introduction into Life, without a Guide, I
+impute all my future Misfortunes; for besides the obvious Mischiefs which
+attend this, there is one which hath not been so generally observed. The
+first Impression which Mankind receives of you, will be very difficult to
+eradicate. How unhappy, therefore, must it be to fix your Character in
+Life, before you can possibly know its Value, or weigh the Consequences of
+those Actions which are to establish your future Reputation?" [1] That the
+wise and strenuous Fielding of later years, the energetic student at the
+Bar, the active and patriotic journalist, the merciless exponent of the
+hypocrite, the spendthrift, and the sensualist, the creator of the most
+perfect type of womanhood in English fiction (so said Dr Johnson and
+Thackeray) should look back sadly on his own years of hot-blooded youth is
+entirely natural; but even so this passage and the well-known confession
+placed in the mouth of the supposed writer of the _Journey from this World
+to the Next_, [2] no more constitute direct evidence than do Murphy's
+unattested phrases, or the anonymous scurrilities of eighteenth-century
+pamphleteers.
+
+By birth and education Fielding's natural place was in the costly society
+of those peers and men of wealth and fashion who courted the brilliant
+young wit; but fortune had decreed otherwise, and at this his first
+entrance on the world he found, as he himself said, no choice but to be a
+hackney writer or a hackney coachman. True, his father allowed him a
+nominal £200 a year; but this, to quote another of his son's
+observations, "anybody might pay that would." The fact was that Colonel
+Fielding's marriage with Madame Rasa had resulted in a large and rapidly
+increasing family; and this burden, together with "the necessary demands
+of his station for a genteel and suitable expence," made it impossible
+for him to spare much for the maintenance of his eldest son. Launched
+thus on the Town, with every capacity for spending an income the receipt
+of which was denied to him, the young man flattered himself that he
+should find resources in his wit and invention; and accordingly he
+commenced as writer for the stage. His first play, a comedy entitled
+_Love in Several Masks_, was performed at Drury Lane in February 1728,
+just before the youthful dramatist had attained his twenty-first year. In
+his preface to these 'light scenes' he alludes with some pride to this
+distinction--"I believe I may boast that none ever appeared so early on
+the stage";--and he proceeds to a generous acknowledgment of the aid
+received from those dramatic stars of the eighteenth-century, Colley
+Gibber, Mr Wilks and Mrs Oldfield, all of whom appeared in the cast. Of
+the two former he says, "I cannot sufficiently acknowledge their civil and
+kind behaviour previous to its representation"; from which we may
+conclude, as his biographer Laurence points out, that Harry Fielding was
+already familiar with the society of the green-room. To Mrs
+Oldfield,--that charming actress
+
+  "In publick Life, by all who saw Approv'd
+  In private Life, by all who knew her Lov'd"--
+
+the young man expresses yet warmer acknowledgments. "Lastly," he
+declares, "I can never express my grateful sense of the good nature of
+Mrs Oldfield ... nor do I owe less to her excellent judgment, shown in
+some corrections which I shall for my own sake conceal." The comedy is
+dedicated, with the graceful diction and elaborate courtesies of the
+period, to Fielding's cousin, that notable eighteenth-century wit, the
+Lady Mary Wortley Montagu; and from the dedication we learn that to Lady
+Mary's approval, on her first perusal, the play owed its existence. What
+the approval of a great lady of those times meant for the young writer
+may be measured by the fact that Fielding concludes his dedication by
+solemnly 'informing the world' that the representation of his comedy was
+twice honoured with Her Ladyship's presence.
+
+In view of the frequent accusation of coarseness brought against
+Fielding, we may quote a few lines of the prologue with which he made his
+literary entry into the world. Here his audience are promised
+
+  "Humour, still free from an indecent Flame,
+  Which, should it raise your Mirth, must raise your Shame:
+  Indecency's the Bane to Ridicule,
+  And only charms the Libertine, or Fool:
+  Nought shall offend the Fair One's Ears to-day,
+  Which they might blush to hear, or blush to say.
+  No private Character these Scenes expose,
+  Our Bard, at Vice, not at the Vicious, throws."
+
+Thus it was with an honourable declaration of war against indecency and
+libel that the young wit and man of fashion, began his career as "hackney
+writer." If to modern taste the first promise lacks something of
+fulfilment, it is but just to remember that to other times belong other
+manners.
+
+In the play, rustic and philosophic virtue is prettily rewarded by the
+possession of a beautiful heiress, while certain mercenary fops withdraw
+in signal discomfiture; and that Fielding, at one and twenty, had already
+passed judgment on that glittering 'tinsel' tribe, is clear enough from
+his portrait of the "empty gaudy nameless thing," Lord Formal. Lord
+Formal appears on the stage with a complexion much agitated by a day of
+business spent with "three milleners, two perfumers, my bookseller's and
+a fanshop." In the course of these fatigues he has "rid down two brace of
+chairmen"; and had raised his colour to "that exorbitancy of Vermeille"
+that it will hardly be reduced "under a fortnight's course of acids." It
+is the true spirit of comedy which introduces into this closely perfumed
+atmosphere the bluff country figure of Sir Positive Trap, with his
+exordiums on the rustic ladies, and on "the good old English art of
+clear-starching." Sir Positive hopes "to see the time when a man may
+carry his daughter to market with the same lawful authority as any other
+of his cattle"; and causes Lord Formal some moments' perplexity, his
+lordship being "not perfectly determinate what species of animal to
+assign him to, unless he be one of those barbarous insects the polite
+call country squires." In this production of a youth of twenty we may
+find a foretaste of that keen relish in watching the human comedy, that
+vigorous scorn of avarice, that infectious laughter at pretentious folly,
+which accompanied the novelist throughout his life.
+
+To this same year is attributed a poem called the _Masquerade_, which need
+only be noticed as again emphasising its author's lifelong war against the
+evils of his time. The _Masquerade_ is a satire on the licentious
+gatherings organised by the notorious Count Heidegger, Master of the
+Revels to the Court of George II.
+
+Many years later Fielding reprinted [3] two other poetical effusions
+bearing the date of this his twenty-first year. Of these the first,
+entitled "A Description of U----n G----(alias _New Hog's Norton_) in
+_Com-Hants_" identified by Mr Keightley as Upton Grey in Hampshire, is
+addressed to the fair _Rosalinda,_ by her disconsolate _Alexis_. Alexis
+bewails his exile among
+
+  "Unpolish'd Nymphs and more unpolish'd Swains,"
+
+and describes himself as condemned to live in a dwelling half house, half
+shed, with a garden full of docks and nettles, the fruit-trees bearing
+only snails--
+
+  "Happy for us had Eve's this Garden been
+  She'd found no Fruit, and therefore known no Sin,"--
+
+the dusty meadows innocent of grass, and the company as innocent of wit.
+This sketch of rural enjoyments recalls a later utterance in _Jonathan
+Wild_, concerning the votaries of a country life who, with their trees,
+"enjoy the air and the sun in common and both vegetate with very little
+difference between them." With one or two eloquent exceptions there is
+scarce a page in Fielding's books devoted to any interest other than that
+of human nature.
+
+The second fragment is a graceful little copy of verse addressed to
+_Euthalia_, in which we may note, by the way, that the fair Rosalinda's
+charms are ungallantly made use of as a foil to Euthalia's dazzling
+perfections. As Fielding found these verses not unworthy of a page in his
+later _Miscellanies_ they are here recalled:
+
+  TO EUTHALIA.
+
+  WRITTEN IN THE YEAR 1728.
+
+  "Burning with Love, tormented with Despair,
+  Unable to forget or ease his Care;
+  In vain each practis'd art _Alexis_ tries;
+  In vain to Books, to Wine or Women flies;
+  Each brings _Euthalia's_ Image to his Eyes.
+  In _Lock's_ or _Newton's_ Page her Learning glows;
+  _Dryden_ the Sweetness of her Numbers shews;
+  In all their various Excellence I find
+  The various Beauties of her perfect Mind.
+  How vain in Wine a short Relief I boast!
+  Each sparkling Glass recalls my charming Toast.
+  To Women then successless I repair,
+  Engage the Young, the Witty, and the Fair.
+  When _Sappho's_ Wit each envious Breast alarms,
+  And _Rosalinda_ looks ten thousand Charms;
+  In vain to them my restless Thoughts would run;
+  Like fairest Stars, they show the absent Sun."
+
+_Love in Several Masks_ was produced, as we have seen, in February, 1728;
+and it is a little surprising to find the young dramatist suddenly
+appearing, four weeks later, as a University student. He was entered at
+the University of Leyden, as "Litt. Stud," on the 16th of March 1728. The
+reason of this sudden change from the green-room of Drury Lane to the
+ancient Dutch university must be purely matter of conjecture, as is the
+nature of Fielding's undergraduate studies, Murphy having lately been
+proved to be notably erroneous as to this episode. [4] His name occurs as
+staying, on his entry at Leyden, at the "Casteel von Antwerpen"; and
+again, a year later, in the _recensiones_ of the University for February
+1729, as domiciled with one Jan Oson. As all students were annually
+registered, the omission of any later entry proves that he left Leyden
+before 1730; with which meagre facts and his own incidental remark that
+the comedy of _Don Quixote in England_ was "begun at Leyden in the year
+1728," our knowledge of the two years of Fielding's university career
+concludes. In February 1730 he was presumably back in London, that being
+the date of his next play, the _Temple Beau_, produced by Giffard, the
+actor, at the new theatre in Goodman's Fields.
+
+The prologue to the _Temple Beau_ was written by that man of many parts,
+James Ralph, the hack writer, party journalist and historian, who was in
+after years to collaborate with Fielding, both as a theatrical manager and
+as a journalist. Ralph's opening lines are of interest as bearing on
+Fielding's antagonism to the harlequinades and variety shows, then
+threatening the popularity of legitimate drama:
+
+  "Humour and Wit, in each politer Age,
+  Triumphant, rear'd the Trophies of the Stage:
+  But only Farce, and Shew, will now go down,
+  And HARLEQUIN'S the Darling of the Town."
+
+Ralph bids his audience turn to the 'infant stage' of Goodman's Fields
+for matter more worthy their attention; and his promise that there
+
+  "The Comick Muse, in Smiles severely gay,
+  Shall scoff at Vice, and laugh its Crimes away"
+
+must surely have been inspired by the young genius from whom twenty years
+later came the formal declaration of his endeavour, in _Tom Jones,_
+"to laugh mankind out of their favourite follies and vices."
+
+The special follies of the _Temple Beau_ have, for background, of course,
+those precincts in which Fielding was later to labour so assiduously as a
+student, and as a member of the Middle Temple; but where, as the young
+Templar of the play observes, "dress and the ladies" might also very
+pleasantly employ a man's time. But except for an oblique hit at duelling,
+a custom which Fielding was later to attack with curious warmth, this
+second play seems to yield few passages of biographical interest. Of very
+different value for our purpose is the third play, which within only two
+months appeared from a pen stimulated, presumably, by empty pockets. This
+was the comedy entitled the _Author's Farce_, being the first portion of a
+medley which included the '_Puppet Show call'd the Pleasures of the Town_;
+the whole being acted in the Little Theatre in the Haymarket, long since
+demolished in favour of the present building.
+
+In the person of Harry Luckless, the hero of the _Author's Farce_, it is
+impossible not to surmise the figure of young Fielding himself; a figure
+gay and spirited as those of his first comedy, but, by now, well
+acquainted with the hungers and the straits of a 'hackney writer.' Mr
+Luckless wears a laced-coat and makes a handsome figure (we remember that
+Fielding had always the grand air), whereby his landlady, clamouring for
+her rent, upbraids him for deceiving her: "Cou'd I have guess'd that I had
+a Poet in my House! Cou'd I have look'd for a Poet under lac'd Clothes!"
+The poor author offers her the security of his (as yet unacted) play;
+whereupon Mrs Moneywood (lineal ancestress of Mrs Raddles) pertinently
+cries out: "I would no more depend on a Benefit-Night of an unacted Play,
+than I would on a Benefit-Ticket in an undrawn Lottery." Luckless next
+appeals to what should be his landlady's heart, assuring her that unless
+she be so kind as to invite him "I am afraid I shall scarce prevail on my
+Stomach to dine to-day." To which the enraged lady answers: "O never fear
+that: you will never want a Dinner till you have dined at all the
+Eating-houses round.--No one shuts their Doors against you the first time;
+and I scarce think you are so kind, seldom to trouble them a second." And
+that the good landlady had some grounds for her wrath is but too apparent
+when she announces: "Well, I'm resolv'd when you are gone away (which I
+heartily hope will be very soon) I'll hang over my Door in great red
+Letters, _No Lodging for Poets_ ... My Floor is all spoil'd with Ink, my
+Windows with Verses, and my Door has been almost beat down with Duns.'
+While the landlady is still fuming, enters our author's man, Jack.
+
+    "_Jack_. An't please your Honour, I have been at my Lord's,
+    and his Lordship thanks  you for the Favour you have offer'd of
+    reading your Play to him; but he has such a  prodigious deal of
+    Business he begs to be excus'd. I have been with Mr _Keyber_
+    too: he made no Answer at all...."
+
+    "_Luckless_. Jack.
+
+    "_Jack_. Sir.
+
+    "_Luckless_. Fetch my other Hat hither.  Carry it to the
+    Pawnbroker's.
+
+    "_Jack_. To your Honour's own Pawnbroker.
+
+    "_Luckless_. Ay And in thy way home call at the Cook's Shop.
+    So, one way or other I find, my Head must always provide for my
+    Belly."
+
+At which moment enters the caustic, generous Witmore, belabouring the
+profanity, the scurrility, the immodesty, the stupidity of the age with
+one hand, the while he pays his friend's rent with the other; and who,
+incidentally, is requested by that irascible genius to kick a worthy
+publisher down the stairs, on the latter's refusal to give fifty
+shillings "no, nor fifty farthings" for his play. Once mollified by the
+settlement of her bill, we have the landlady playing advocate for her
+hapless lodger in words that sound very like the apologia of Mr Harry
+Fielding himself: "I have always thought, indeed, Mr _Luckless_ had a
+great deal of Honesty in his Principles; any Man may be unfortunate: but I
+knew when he had Money I should have it...." And the good woman's
+reminiscence that while her lodger had money her doors were thundered at
+every morning between four and five by coachmen and chairmen; and her wish
+that that pleasant humour'd gentleman were "but a little soberer,"
+finishes, we take it, the portrait of the Fielding of 1730. "Jack call a
+coach; and d'ye hear, get up behind it and attend me," cries the
+improvident poet, the moment his generous friend has left him; and so we
+are sure did young Mr Fielding put himself and his laced coat into a
+coach, and mount his man behind it, whenever the exigencies of duns and
+hunger were for a moment abated. And with as gallant a humour as that of
+his own Luckless did he walk afoot, when those "nine ragged jades the
+muses" failed to bring him a competency.
+
+Such failure on the part of the Muses was due to no want of wooing on his
+part. During the six years between Fielding's first appearance as dramatic
+author in 1728, and his marriage in 1734, there stand no fewer than
+thirteen plays to his name. Of these none have won any lasting reputation;
+and to this period of the great novelist's life may doubtless be applied
+Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's description, when lamenting that her kinsman
+should have been "forced by necessity to publish without correction, and
+throw many productions into the world he would have thrown into the fire,
+if meat could have been got without money, and money without scribbling."
+Lady Mary's account moreover is reinforced by Murphy's classical periods:
+"Mr Fielding's case was generally the same with that of the poet described
+by Juvenal; with a great genius, he must have starved if he had not sold
+his performance to a favourite actor. _Esurit, intactam Paridi, nisi
+vendit Agaven_." A complete list of all these ephemera will be found in
+the bibliography at the end of this volume; here we need but notice those
+to which a special interest attaches. Thus, that incomparable comic
+actress, Kitty Clive, was cast for a part in the _Lottery_, a farce
+produced in 1731; and three years later Fielding is adapting for her,
+especially, the _Intriguing Chambermaid_. It was in these two plays, and
+that of the _Virgin Unmasked_, that the town discovered the true comic
+genius of Kitty Clive "the best player I ever saw," in Dr Johnson's
+opinion. For this discovery Fielding takes credit to himself, in the
+dedication addressed to Mrs Clive, which he prefixed to the _Intriguing
+Chambermaid_; and in which he finds opportunity to pay a noble tribute to
+the private life of that inimitable hoyden of the stage. "I cannot help
+reflecting" he writes, "that the Town hath one great obligation to me, who
+made the first discovery of your great capacity, and brought you earlier
+forward on the theatre, than the ignorance of some and the envy of others
+would have otherwise permitted.... But as great a favorite as you at
+present are with the audience you would be much more so were they
+acquainted with your private character ... did they see you, who can charm
+them on the stage with personating the foolish and vicious characters of
+your sex, acting in real life the part of the best Wife, the best
+Daughter, the best Sister, and the best Friend." That this splendid praise
+was as sincere as it was generous need not be doubted. No breath of
+slander, even in that slanderous age, seems ever to have dulled the
+reputation of the queen of comedy, and "better romp than any I ever saw in
+nature"--to quote Dr Johnson again,--Kitty Clive.
+
+So few of Fielding's letters have been, to our knowledge, preserved, that
+the following note addressed to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and concerning
+the _Modern Husband_, a comedy produced in 1731 or 1732, must here be
+given, though containing little beyond the fact that the dramatist of
+three years' standing seems still to have placed as high a value on his
+cousin's judgment, as when recording her approval of his first effort for
+the stage. The play was a piece of admittedly moral purpose, and was
+dedicated to Sir Robert Walpole. The first line of the autograph is,
+apparently, missing.
+
+
+"I hope your Ladyship will honour the Scenes, which I presume to lay
+before you, with your Perusal. As they are written on a Model I never yet
+attempted, I am exceedingly anxious least they should find least Mercy
+from you than my lighter Productions. It will be a slight compensation to
+the modern Husband, that your Ladyship's censure will defend him from the
+Possibility of any other Reproof, since your least Approbation will
+always give me a Pleasure, infinitely superior to the loudest Applauses
+of a Theatre. For whatever has past your judgment, may, I think without
+any Imputation of Immodesty, refer Want of Success to Want of Judgment in
+an Audience. I shall do myself the honour of waiting on your Ladyship at
+Twickenham next Monday to receive my Sentence, and am, Madam, with the
+most devoted Respect
+
+"Your Ladyship's
+"most Obedient most humble Servant
+"Henry Ffielding. [5]
+
+"London 7'br 4."
+
+In 1731-32 the burlesque entitled the _Tragedy of Tragedies; or the Life
+and Death of Tom Thumb the Great_, took the Town. The _Tragedy_ parodies
+the absurdities of tragedians; and so far won immortality that in 1855 it
+was described as still holding the stage. But its chief modern interest
+lies in the tradition that Swift once observed that he "had not laughed
+above twice" in his life,--once at the tricks of a merry-andrew, and again
+when Fielding's Tom Thumb killed the ghost. The design for the
+frontispiece of the edition of 1731, here reproduced, is from the pencil
+of Hogarth; and is the first trace of a connexion between Fielding and the
+painter who was to be honoured so frequently in his pages. An adaptation
+from Molière, produced in 1733, under the title of the _Miser_, won from
+Voltaire the praise of having added to the original "quelques beautes de
+dialogue particulières a sa [Fielding's] nation." The leading character in
+the _Miser_, Lovegold, became a stock part, and survived to our own days,
+having been a favourite with Phelps. In _Don Quixote in England_, produced
+in 1733 or 34, [6] Fielding reappears in the character of patriotic censor
+with the design, as appears from the dedication to Lord Chesterfield, of
+representing "the Calamities brought on a Country by general Corruption."
+No less than fifteen songs are interspersed in the play, and it is matter
+for curious conjecture why none of them was chosen for a reprint among the
+collected verses published ten years later in the _Miscellanies_. Time has
+almost failed to preserve even the hunting-song beginning finely--
+
+  "The dusky Night rides down the Sky,
+    And ushers in the Morn;
+  The Hounds all join in glorious Cry,
+    The Huntsman winds his Horn:"
+
+But a happier fate has befallen the fifth song, now familiar as the first
+verse of the _Roast Beef of Old England_. It is eminently appropriate that
+the most distinctly national of English novelists should have written:
+
+  "_When mighty Rost Beef was the_ Englishman's _food,
+  It ennobled our Hearts, and enriched our Blood;
+  Our Soldiers were brave and our Courtiers were good.
+    Oh, the Rost Beef of old England,
+    And old_ England's _Rost Beef!_
+
+  "_Then_, Britons, _from all nice Dainties refrain,
+  Which effeminate_ Italy, France, _and_ Spain;
+  _And mighty Rost Beef shall command on the Main.
+    Oh, the Rost Beef_, etc."
+
+To this truly prolific period of the young 'hackney writer's' pen belongs
+an _Epilogue_, hitherto overlooked, written for Charles Johnson's five-act
+play _Caelia or the Perjur'd Lover_, and spoken by Kitty Clive. The lines,
+which are hardly worth reprinting, consist of an ironic attack on the
+laxity of town morals, where "Miss may take great liberties upon her," and
+each woman is virtuous till she be found out.
+
+An average of two plays a year is a record scarcely conducive to literary
+excellence; any more than is the empty cupboard, and the frequent recourse
+to 'your honour's own pawnbroker,' so often and so honourably familiar to
+struggling genius. "The farces written by Mr Fielding," says Murphy"...
+were generally the production of two or three mornings, so great was his
+facility in writing"; and we have seen Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's
+assertion that much of his work would have been thrown into the fire had
+not his dinner gone with it. Of the struggles of these early years [7]
+(struggles never wholly remitted, for, to quote Lady Mary again, Fielding
+would have wanted money had his hereditary lands been as extensive as his
+imagination) we get further suggestions in the _Poetical Epistle_
+addressed to Sir Robert Walpole when the young poet was but twenty-three.
+The lines go with a gallant spirit, but it is not difficult to detect a
+savour of grim hardship behind the jests:
+
+  "While at the Helm of State you ride,
+  Our Nation's Envy and its Pride;
+  While foreign Courts with Wonder gaze,
+  And curse those Councils which they praise;
+  Would you not wonder, Sir, to view
+  Your Bard a greater Man than you?
+  Which that he, is you cannot doubt,
+  When you have heard the Sequel out.
+  .    .    .    .    .
+  "The Family that dines the latest,
+  Is in our Street esteem'd the greatest;
+  But latest Hours must surely fall
+  Before him who ne'er dines at all.
+
+  Your Taste in Architect, you know,
+  Hath been admir'd by Friend and Foe;
+  But can your earthly Domes compare
+  With all my Castles--in the Air?
+
+  "We're often taught it doth behove us
+  To think those greater who're above us;
+  Another Instance of my Glory,
+  Who live above you, twice two Story,
+  And from my Garret can look down
+  On the whole Street of Arlington." [8]
+
+Not to depend too greatly on Mr Luckless for our picture of Fielding as a
+playwright, we will conclude it with the well-known passage from Murphy:
+"When he had contracted to bring on a play, or a farce, it is well known,
+by many of his friends now living, that he would go home rather late from
+a tavern, and would the next morning deliver a scene to the players,
+written upon the papers which had wrapped the tobacco in which he so much
+delighted." Would that some of those friends had recorded for our delight
+the wit that, alas! has vanished like the smoke through which it was
+engendered. What would we not give for the table-talk of Henry Fielding.
+
+[1] _Joseph Andrews_, Book iii. Chap. iii.
+
+[2] _Miscellanies_, ed. 1743, vol. ii. p. 62.
+
+[3] In the _Miscellanies_ of 1743.
+
+[4] _Fielding_, Austin Dobson, 1907. App. iv.
+
+[5] What appears to be the original autograph of the above letter is now
+(1909) in the library of the Boston Athenaeum, having been presented by Mr
+C. P. Greenough.
+
+[6] _Notitia Dramatica_ (British Museum. MSS. Dept.) and Genest give 1734
+as the date of Don Quixote; Murphy, edition of 1766, vol. iii p. 249,
+gives 1733.
+
+[7] For the refutation of Genest's confusion of Timothy Fielding, a
+strolling player, with Henry Fielding, see Austin Dobson, _Fielding_, pp.
+28, 29.
+
+[8] The _Miscellanies_. Edition 1743.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+MARRIAGE
+
+
+    "What happiness the world affords equal to the possession of such
+    a woman as Sophia I sincerely own I have never yet discovered."
+    --_Tom Jones_.
+
+Out of the paint and powder of the green-room, the tobacco clouds of the
+tavern, the crowded streets where hungry genius went afoot one day, and
+rode in a coach the next--in a word, out of the Town as Harry Fielding
+knew it--we step, in the year 1734, into the idyll of his life, his
+marriage with Charlotte Cradock. For to Fielding the supreme gift was
+accorded of passionate devotion to a woman of whose charm and virtue he
+himself has raised an enduring memorial in the lovely portrait of Sophia
+Western. It is this portrait, explicitly admitted [1], that affords almost
+our only authentic knowledge of Charlotte Cradock, beyond the meagre facts
+that her home was in Salisbury, and that there she and her sisters reigned
+as country belles. For it was not in the gay world of 'Riddoto's, Opera's,
+and Plays,' nor among the humbler scenes of the great city in which he
+delighted to watch the humours of simple folk (the highest life being in
+his opinion 'much the dullest'), that Fielding found his wife. Doubtless
+his six years about town, as hackney author, with his good birth, his
+brilliant wit, and his scanty means, had made him well acquainted with
+every phase of society, "from the Minister at his Levee, to the Bailiff at
+his spunging-house; from the Duchess at her drum, to the Landlady behind
+her bar"; but it was in the rural seclusion of an old cathedral town that
+he wooed and won the beautiful Miss Cradock. Indeed it is impossible to
+conceive of Sophia as for ever domiciled in streets. The very apostrophe
+which heralds her first appearance in _Tom Jones_ is fragrant with
+flower-enamelled meadows, fresh breezes, and the songs of birds "whose
+sweetest notes not even Handel can excel"; and it is thus, with his
+reader's mind attuned to the appropriate key, that Fielding ushers in his
+heroine: "... lo! adorned with all the Charms in which Nature can array
+her; bedecked with Beauty, Youth, Sprightliness, Innocence, Modesty, and
+Tenderness, breathing Sweetness from her rosy Lips, and darting Brightness
+from her sparkling Eyes, the lovely _Sophia_ comes." Of middle size, but
+rather inclining to tall, with dark hair "curled so gracefully on her neck
+that few could believe it to be her own," a forehead rather low, arched
+eyebrows, and lustrous black eyes, a mouth that "exactly answered Sir John
+Suckling's description in those lines
+
+  'Her lips were red and one was thin,
+  Compar'd to that was next her chin.
+    Some bee had stung it newly,'"
+
+with a dimple in the right cheek, and a complexion rather more of the
+lily than the rose unless increased by exercise or modesty when no
+vermilion could equal it--such was the appearance of Sophia, who, most of
+all "resembled one whose image never can depart from my breast."
+
+Nor was the beautiful frame, Fielding hastens to add, disgraced by an
+unworthy inhabitant. He lingers on the sweetness of temper which
+"diffused a glory over her countenance which no regularity of features
+can give"; on her perfect breeding, "though wanting perhaps a little of
+that ease in her behaviour which is to be acquired only by habit, and
+living within what is called the polite circle"; on the "noble, elevated
+qualities" which outshone even her beauty.
+
+The only facts recorded concerning Miss Cradock are that her home was in
+Salisbury, or New Sarum as the city was then called, and that she
+possessed a small fortune. It is said, but on what authority is not
+stated, that she was one of three beautiful sisters, the belles of the
+country town; and it is in accordance with this tradition that Fielding
+should celebrate in some verses "writ when the Author was very young,"
+the beauty and intellectual charm of the Miss Cradocks. When printing
+these verses many years afterwards, in his _Miscellanies_ he describes the
+poem as originally partly filled in with the 'Names of several young
+Ladies,' which part he now omits, "the rather, as some Freedoms, tho'
+gentle ones, were taken with little Foibles in the amiable Sex, whom to
+affront in Print, is, we conceive, mean in any Man, and scandalous in a
+Gentleman." Certainly the Miss Cradocks suffered no affront in the lines
+retained, wherein the young poet affirms that of all the famed nymphs of
+Sarum, that favoured city,
+
+  "Whose Nymphs excel all Beauty's Flowers,
+  As thy high Steeple doth all Towers"
+
+the 'C----cks' were the best and fairest. Nay, has not great Jove himself
+apportioned a 'celestial Dower' to these most favoured of maidens,
+
+  "To form whose lovely Minds and Faces
+  I stript half Heaven of its Graces."
+
+From this charming sisterhood Harry Fielding won his bride, but not until
+four years of waiting had been accomplished. So much may be assumed from
+the early date of the verses entitled "Advice to the Nymphs of _New
+S---m_. Written in the Year 1730." Here the newly returned student from
+Leyden, the successful dramatist from Drury Lane, bids the Salisbury
+beauties cease their vain endeavours to contend with the matchless charms
+of his Celia. And here, in a pretty compliment introduced to the great Mr
+Pope, then at the height of his fame, we are reminded that Celia's lover
+is already a man of letters, for all his mere three and twenty years. When
+Celia meets her equal, then, he declares, farthing candles shall eclipse
+the moon, and "sweet _Pope_ be dull."
+
+It is these youthful love-verses, verses as he himself was the first to
+admit, that were 'indeed Productions of the Heart rather than the Head,'
+that afford our only record of Fielding's wooing. Thus, he sings his
+passion for _Celia_ in the declaration
+
+  "I hate the Town, and all its Ways;
+  Ridotto's, Opera's, and Plays;
+  The Ball, the Ring, the Mall, the Court;
+  Where ever the Beau-Monde resort....
+  All Coffee-houses, and their Praters;
+  All Courts of Justice, and Debaters;
+  All Taverns, and the Sots within 'em;
+  All Bubbles, and the Rogues that skin 'em,"
+
+in short, the whole world 'cram'd all together,' because all his heart is
+engrossed for Celia. Again, Cupid is called to account, in that the
+careless urchin had left Celia's house unguarded from thieves, save for
+an old fellow "who sat up all Night, with a Gun without any Ammunition."
+Celia, it seems, had apprehended robbery, and her poet's rest is troubled:
+
+  "For how should I Repose enjoy,
+  While any fears your Breast annoy?
+  Forbid it Heav'n, that I should be
+  From any of your Troubles free."
+
+
+Cupid explains his desertion by ingeniously declaring that a sigh from
+Celia had blown him away
+
+  "_to Harry Fielding's breast_,"
+
+in which lodging the 'wicked Child' wrought unconscionable havoc. Again,
+Celia wishes to have a "Lilliputian to play with," so she is promptly
+told that her lover would doff five feet of his tall stature, to meet her
+pleasure, and
+
+  "Then when my Celia walks abroad
+  I'd be her pocket's little Load:
+  Or sit astride, to frighten People,
+  Upon her Hat's new fashion'd Steeple."
+
+Nay, to be prized by Celia, who would not even take the form of her
+faithful dog Quadrille.
+
+Jove, we may remember, had dowered the lovely Miss Cradocks with minds as
+fair as their persons; and the excellence of Celia's understanding is
+again celebrated in a neatly turned verse upon her 'having blamed Mr Gay
+for his Severity on her Sex.' Had other women known a tenderness like
+hers, cries the poet, Gay's darts had returned into his own bosom; and
+last of all should such blame come from her
+
+  "in whose accomplish'd Mind
+  The strongest Satire on thy Sex we find."
+
+
+The love story that first ran to such pleasant rhymes, in the old
+cathedral town, was destined to know many a harsh chapter of poverty and
+sickness; but throughout it all the affection of the lovers remained
+true; and there is no reason to doubt that, had it been in Harry
+Fielding's power to achieve it, the promise of perhaps the most charming
+of his love verses would have been fulfilled:
+
+  "Can there on Earth, my _Celia_, be,
+  A Price I would not pay for thee?
+  Yes, one dear precious Tear of thine
+  Should not be shed to make thee mine."
+
+To read Swift's _Journal to Stella_ is almost a sacrilege; the little
+notes that Dick Steele would write to his 'dearest Prue' at all hours of
+day and night, from tavern and printing office, are scarce less private;
+no such seals have been broken, no such records preserved, of the love
+story of Harry Fielding. But to neither Swift nor Steele was it given to
+raise so perfect and imperishable a memorial of the women loved by them,
+as that reared by the passionate affection and grief of Fielding for
+Charlotte Cradock. To this day the beautiful young figure of Sophia
+Western, all charm and goodness, is alive in his immortal pages. And if,
+as her friend Lady Bute asserts, Amelia also is Mrs Fielding's portrait,
+then we know her no less intimately as wife and mother. We watch her brave
+spirit never failing under the most cruel distresses and conflicts; we
+play with her children in their little nursery; we hear her pleasant wit
+with the good parson; we feel her fresh beauty, undimmed in the poor
+remnants of a wardrobe that has gone, with her trinkets, to the
+pawnbroker; we see a hundred examples of her courage and tenderness and
+generosity. There is nothing in Fielding's life that is more to his honour
+than the brief words in which so competent an observer as Lady Bute summed
+up his marriage with Charlotte Cradock, "he loved her passionately and she
+returned his affection."
+
+It was in the little country church of St Mary Charlcombe, a remote
+village some two miles from Bath, that "Henry Fielding, of ye Parish of St
+James in Bath, Esq., and Charlotte Cradock of ye same Parish, spinster"
+were married, on the 28th of November 1734. [2] Fifty years later the
+village was described as containing only nine houses, the church, well
+fitted for the flock, being but eighteen feet wide. The old Somerset
+historian, Collinson, tells us how the hamlet stood on rising ground, in a
+deep retired valley, surrounded by noble hills, and with a little stream
+winding through the vale.
+
+In the January following Fielding and his wife were presumably back in
+town; for in this month he produced, at Drury Lane, the brisk little
+farce called _An Old Man taught Wisdom_, a title afterwards changed to the
+_Virgin Unmasked_. It is probable that this farce was especially written
+to suit Kitty Clive in her excelling character of hoyden; and to it, as we
+have seen, together with two of its predecessors, is assigned the credit
+of having first given that superb comic actress an opportunity of
+revealing her powers. Mrs Clive here played the part of Miss Lucy, a
+forward young lady who after skittishly interviewing a number of suitors
+proposed by her father, finally runs away with Thomas the footman. The
+little piece is said to have achieved success; but scarce had it been
+staged when "the prolific Mr Fielding," as a newspaper of the day styles
+him, brought out a five-act comedy, named the _Universal Gallant: or The
+different Husbands_, which wholly failed to please the audience, and
+indeed ran but for three nights.
+
+The dedication of this play is dated from "Buckingham Street, Feb. 12,"
+and assuming Buckingham Street, Strand, to be the district meant, it is
+probable that the newly married 'poet' and his wife were then living with
+Mrs Fielding's relatives; for although the rate-books for Buckingham
+Street fail to show the name of Fielding, they do show that a Mr Thomas
+Cradock was then a householder in the street. In an _Advertisement_,
+prefixed to the published copies of this ill-fated comedy, the
+disappointed author deprecates the hasty voice of the pit in words that
+suggest the anxiety of a man now responsible for a happiness dearer than
+his own. "I have heard," he writes, "that there are some young Gentlemen
+about this Town who make a Jest of damning Plays--but did they seriously
+consider the Cruelty they are guilty of by such a Practice, I believe it
+would prevent them"; the more, that if the author be "so unfortunate to
+depend on the success of his Labours for his Bread, he must be an inhuman
+Creature indeed, who would out of sport and wantonness prevent a Man from
+getting a Livelihood in an honest and inoffensive Way, and make a jest of
+starving him and his Family." There is other evidence that young men about
+town were wont to amuse themselves by damning plays 'when George was
+King.' In the _Prologue_ to this same condemned play, spoken by the actor
+Quin, and said to have been written after the disastrous first night's
+performance, a more elaborate indictment is laid against the audiences of
+the day. The _Critick_, it seems, is grown so captious that if a poet
+seeks new characters he is denounced for dealing in monsters; if they are
+known and common, then he is a plagiarist; if his scenes are serious they
+are voted dull; if humorous they are 'low' (a true Fielding touch). And
+not only the critic but also the brainless beau stands, as we have seen,
+ready to make sport of the poor author. For such as these
+
+  _"'Tis not the Poet's wit affords the Jest,
+  But who can Cat-call, Hiss, or Whistle best."_
+
+In previous years the brilliant Leyden student might have merely derided
+his enemies; to the Fielding of February 1735, struggling to support
+himself and his beautiful country bride, this 'cruel usage' of his 'poor
+Play' assumed a graver aspect:
+
+  _"Can then another's Anguish give you Joy?
+  Or is it such a Triumph to destroy?
+  We, like the fabled Frogs, consider thus,
+  This may be Sport to you, but it is Death to us."_
+
+This note of personal protest recalls an indisputably reminiscent
+observation in _Amelia_, to the effect that although the kindness of a
+faithful and beloved wife compensates most of the evils of life, it
+"rather serves to aggravate the misfortune of distressed circumstances,
+from the consideration of the share which she is to bear in them." We all
+know how bravely Amelia bore that share; how cheerfully she would cook the
+supper; how firmly she confronted disaster. To realise how deeply Fielding
+felt the pain of such struggles when falling upon "the best, the worthiest
+and the noblest of women" we need but turn again to his own pages. If,
+cries Amelia's husband, when his distresses overwhelm him, "if I was to
+suffer alone, I think I could bear them with some philosophy"; and again
+"this was the first time I had ever felt that distress which arises from
+the want of money; a distress very dreadful indeed in the married state
+for what can be more miserable than to see anything necessary to the
+preservation of the beloved creature and not be able to supply it?"
+
+To supply for his Celia much less than the necessities of life Harry
+Fielding would undoubtedly have stripped his coat, and his shirt with it,
+off his back; but, at the end of this same month of February, fortune
+made the young couple sudden amends for the anxieties that seem to have
+surrounded them. This turn of the wheel is reflected with curious
+accuracy by an anonymous satirist of 1735:
+
+  "F---g, who _Yesterday_ appear'd so rough,
+  Clad in coarse Frize, and plaister'd down with _Snuff_,
+  See how his _Instant_ gaudy _Trappings_ shine;
+  What _Play-house_ Bard was ever seen so fine!
+  But this, not from his _Humour_ glows, you'll say
+  But mere _Necessity_;--for last Night lay
+  In pawn the Velvet which he wears to Day." [3]
+
+This relief, for a time at least, from the pressing anxieties of a
+'play-house bard,' befell by the death of Charlotte Fielding's mother,
+Mrs Elizabeth Cradock of Salisbury, who died in February, but a week or
+two after the execution of a will wholly in favour of that 'dearly
+beloved' daughter. As the details of Mrs Fielding's inheritance have not
+hitherto been known, some portions of her mother's will may be quoted.
+"... I Elizabeth Cradock of Salisbury in the County of Wilts ... do make
+this my last will and testament ... Item I give to my daughter Catherine
+one shilling and all the rest and residue of my ready money plate jewels
+and estate whatsoever and wheresoever after my debts and funeral charges
+are fully paid and satisfied I give devize and bequeath the same unto my
+dearly beloved daughter Charlott Ffeilding wife of Henry Ffeilding of
+East Stour in the County of Dorset Esqre." Mrs Cradock proceeds to revoke
+all former wills; and appoints her said daughter "Charlott Ffeilding" as
+her sole executrix. The will is dated February 8 1734, old style, viz.
+1735; and was proved in London on the 25th of the same month, 'Charlott
+Ffeilding,' as sole executrix, being duly sworn to administer. The
+provision of one shilling for another, and apparently _not_ dearly
+beloved, daughter, Catherine, recalls the wicked sister in _Amelia_ who
+"had some way or other disobliged her mother, a little before the old lady
+died," and who consequently was deprived of that inheritance which
+relieved Amelia and her husband from the direst straits.
+
+As no plays are credited to Fielding's name for the ensuing months of
+1735, it is a reasonable inference that the young Salisbury heiress, whose
+experience of London had, doubtless, included a pretty close acquaintance
+with the hardships of struggling genius, employed some of her inheritance
+to enable her husband to return to the home of his boyhood, on the
+"pleasant Banks of sweetly-winding Stour." There is no record of how the
+Stour estate, settled on Henry Fielding and his brother and sisters, was
+apportioned; but an engraving published in 1813 shows the old stone
+"farmhouse," which Fielding occupied, the kitchen of which then still
+remained as it was in the novelist's time, when it served as a parlour.
+Behind the house stood a famous locust tree; and close by was the village
+church served at this time, as the parish registers show, by the Rev.
+William Young, the original of the immortal Parson Adams of _Joseph
+Andrews_. [4] From a subsequent deed of sale we know that the estate
+consisted of at least three gardens, three orchards, eighty acres of
+meadow, one hundred and forty acres of pasture, ten acres of wood, two
+dove-houses, and "common of pasture for all manner of cattle." To the
+stone farmhouse, and to these orchards and meadows, commons and pastures,
+Fielding brought his wife, probably in this year of 1735; and memories of
+their sojourn at Stour surely inspired those references in _Amelia_ to the
+country life of 'love, health, and tranquillity,' a life resembling a calm
+sea which "must appear dull in description; for who can describe the
+pleasures which the morning air gives to one in perfect health; the flow
+of spirits which springs up from exercise; the delights which parents feel
+from the prattle and innocent follies of their children; the joy with
+which the tender smile of a wife inspires a husband; or lastly the
+cheerful solid comfort which a fond couple enjoy in each others'
+conversation.--All these pleasures, and every other of which our situation
+was capable we tasted in the highest degree."
+
+That a man endowed with Fielding's intense joy in living--he was "so
+formed for happiness," wrote his cousin Lady Mary, "it is a pity he was
+not immortal"--should eagerly taste all the pleasures of life as a country
+gentleman, and that in 'the highest degree,' is entirely consonant with
+his character. At the very end of his life, when dying of a complication
+of diseases, his happy social spirit was still unbroken; for we find him
+even then writing of his inability to enjoy an agreeable hour "without the
+assistance of a companion which has always appeared to me necessary to
+such enjoyment." [5] Nor would the generous temper, which was ever ready
+to share his most needed guinea with a friend scarce poorer than himself,
+be infected with niggardliness by the happy enjoyment of that position to
+which he was by birth entitled. The well-known account therefore, given by
+Murphy, of the East Stour episode is exactly what we might have expected
+of Harry Fielding in the part of country gentleman: "To that place [_i.e._
+his estate of East Stour]," says Murphy, "he retired with his wife, on
+whom he doated, with a resolution to bid adieu to all the follies and
+intemperances to which he had addicted himself in the career of a town
+life. But unfortunately a kind of family pride here gained an ascendant
+over him, and he began immediately to vie in splendour with the
+neighbouring country 'squires. With an estate not much above two hundred
+pounds a year, and his wife's fortune, which did not exceed fifteen
+hundred pounds, he encumbered himself with a large retinue of servants,
+all clad in costly yellow liveries. For their master's honour, these
+people could not descend so low as to be careful of their apparel, but in
+a month or two were unfit to be seen; the 'squire's dignity required that
+they should be new-equipped; and his chief pleasure consisting in society
+and convivial mirth, hospitality threw open his doors, and, in less than
+three years, entertainments, hounds, and horses, entirely devoured a
+little patrimony...." This account is prefaced by gross inaccuracies of
+fact, inexplicable in a biographer writing but ten years after the death
+of his subject; but, as Mr Austin Dobson says, "there can be little doubt
+that the rafters of the old farm by the Stour, with the great locust tree
+at the back, which is figured in Hutchins's _History of Dorset_, rang
+often to hunting choruses, and that not seldom the 'dusky Night rode down
+the Sky' over the prostrate forms of Harry Fielding's guests."
+Petty-minded moralists like Murphy have gravely admonished the great
+novelist's memory for not having safely bestowed his estate in the consols
+of the period; they forget that a spirit of small economy is generally the
+compensation awarded to the poor average of humanity. The genius of
+Fielding knew how to enjoy splendidly, and to give lavishly.
+
+[1] _Tom Jones_. Book xiii. Introduction.
+
+[2] See the registers of St Mary Charlcombe. As Sarah Fielding, the
+novelist's sister, was buried in the entrance to the chancel of this
+church, it would appear that some connection existed between Charlcombe
+and the Fielding family.
+
+[3] _Seasonable Reproof--a Satire in the manner of Horace_, 1735.
+
+[4] The entry in the East Stour Registers is "W'm. Young, Curate
+1731-1740."
+
+[5] _Voyage to Lisbon_.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+POLITICAL PLAYS
+
+    "Whoever attempteth to introduce corruption into any community,
+    doth much the same thing, and ought to be treated in much the
+    same manner with him who poisoneth a fountain."
+    --Dedication of the _Historical Register_.
+
+A prolonged retirement into Dorsetshire, however pleasant were the banks
+of Stour with a beautiful young wife, and a sufficient estate, could
+scarce be expected of Fielding's restless genius. He was now thirty-five;
+his splendid physique was as yet unimpaired by the gout that was so soon
+to attack him; his powers were still hardly revealed; and, as far as we
+can discover, he was, at the moment, under no pressure for money. Still,
+the hunting choruses of the Squire Westerns of Dorsetshire can hardly
+have long sufficed for one whom Lyttelton declared to have had "more wit
+than any man I ever knew"; and the social and political conditions of the
+country were increasingly calculated to inflame into practical activity
+that "enthusiasm for righteousness," which Mr Gosse has so well detected
+in Fielding. [1] The distracted state of the London stage, divided by the
+factions of players and managers, afforded moreover an excellent
+opportunity for a dramatist of some means to essay an independent venture.
+And accordingly, at the beginning of 1736, we find the Harry Fielding of
+the green-room and the poet's garret, the Henry Fielding Esqre of East
+Stour, suddenly throwing the full force of his energies into political
+life, as the manager of, and writer for, a theatre with indisputable
+political aims. For the next eight years of his short life Fielding was
+largely occupied in the lively turmoil of eighteenth-century politics; and
+here, first by means of the stage, and later as journalist, he played a
+part which has perhaps been somewhat unduly overshadowed by the surpassing
+achievements of his genius as father of the English novel. But if we would
+perceive the full figure of the man this time of boisterous political
+warfare is of no mean account. In the dedication of his first party play,
+the amazingly successful _Pasquin_, Fielding subscribes himself as "the
+most devoted Servant of the public"; and no more appropriate keyword could
+be found for the energies which he threw into those envenomed political
+struggles of 1736-41.
+
+At the date of his first plunge into these struggles England stood sorely
+in need of a pen as biting, as witty and as fearless, as that of Henry
+Fielding. For over ten years the country had been ruled by one of those
+"peace at any price" Ministers who have at times so successfully inflamed
+the baser commercial instincts of Englishmen. Sir Robert Walpole, the
+reputed organiser of an unrivalled system of bribery and corruption, the
+Minister of whom a recent apologist frankly declares that to young members
+of Parliament who spoke of public virtue and patriotism he would reply
+"you will soon come off that and grow wiser," the autocrat enamoured of
+power who could brook no colleague within measurable distance, the man of
+coarse habits and illiterate tastes, above all the man who induced his
+countrymen to place money before honour, and whose administration even an
+admirer describes as one of unparalleled stagnation--such a man must have
+roused intense antagonism in Fielding's generous and ardent nature. For,
+from the days of his first boyish satires to the last energetic acts of
+his life as a London magistrate, for Fielding to see an abuse was to set
+about reforming it. To his just sense of the true worth of money, the
+wholesale corruption of English political life accredited to Walpole, the
+poisoning, to adopt his own simile, of the body politic, must have seemed
+the vilest national crime. There could never have been the least sympathy
+between the mercenary and apathetic methods of Walpole and the
+open-hearted genius of Fielding. And, added to such fundamental opposition
+of character, the influence of Fielding's old school friend, George
+Lyttelton, would, at this juncture especially, draw him into the active
+ranks of the Opposition.
+
+Lyttelton was then rising into celebrity as a ready parliamentary speaker;
+a celebrity as yet not wholly eclipsed by the youthful oratory of William
+Pitt, the young cornet of the horse, who also had lately taken his seat on
+the Opposition benches. It was the burning patriotism, the lofty character
+and the towering genius of Pitt, the fluency and personal integrity of
+Lyttelton, that led the younger members of the Opposition in the House of
+Commons; while in the Lords another friend from whom Fielding was to
+receive "princely benefactions," the young Duke of Bedford, a man of
+"inflexible honesty and goodwill to his country," attacked Walpole's
+alleged corrupt practices in the election of Scottish peers. With leaders
+such as William Pitt and Lyttelton on the one hand, and the corrupt figure
+of Walpole on the other, there is no wonder that Fielding flung all his
+generous force into the effort to free England from so degrading a
+domination. Accordingly, in 1736, when the young Pitt's impassioned
+eloquence was soon to alarm the _Great Man_--"we must muzzle that terrible
+Cornet of the Horse," Sir Robert said--and when fierce and riotous
+hostility to the government had broken out in the country over an
+attempted Excise Bill, Fielding appears as a frankly political manager of
+the "New Theatre" in the Haymarket. This small theatre stood precisely
+adjoining the present Palladian structure, as may be seen from a print of
+1820, showing the demolition of the old building and the adjacent façade
+of the modern "Haymarket." According to Tom Davies, who, as an actor in
+Fielding's company and as an author of some pretensions should be
+reliable, Fielding was a managing partner of this "New Theatre," in
+company with James Ralph, "about the year 1735." [2] And apparently early
+in 1736 [3] his political, theatrical, and social satire of _Pasquin_
+appeared on the little stage, and immediately captured the town.
+
+In _Pasquin_ a perfectly outspoken attack on Walpole's corrupt methods is
+united with a comprehensive onslaught on abuses in the stage, law,
+divinity, physic, society, and on the odes of Colley Cibber, sufficient
+one might suppose to satisfy even Fielding's zeal. In an exuberant
+newspaper advertisement of the 5th of March Mr Pasquin is announced as
+intending to "lay about him with great impartiality," and throughout the
+play Fielding's splendid figure may be felt, swinging his satiric club
+with a boisterous enjoyment. The immediate success achieved by the piece
+was certainly not due to any great dramatic excellence; and that so
+loosely knit a medley as _PASQUIN, a Dramatic Satire on the Times: Being
+the Rehearsal of Two Plays, viz. A Comedy call'd THE ELECTION and a
+Tragedy, call'd The Life and Death of COMMON-SENSE_ should have achieved
+almost as long a run as the _Beggars Opera_, shows that the public
+heartily sympathised with the satirist. _Pasquin_ begins with the
+rehearsal of a comedy, called _The Election_, consisting of a series of
+broadly humorous scenes in which the open and diverse bribery at
+elections, the equally open immorality of fashionable town life, the
+connivance of country dames, and the inanity of the beau monde, are
+satirised. The country Mayor, the Ministerial candidates and the
+Opposition squire drink, bribe and are bribed with complete impartiality.
+A scene devoted to the political young lady of the day affords opportunity
+for a hit at the sickly and effeminate Lord 'Fanny' Hervey, that
+politician whom Pope described as a "mere white curd of Asse's milk," and
+of whom Lady Mary Wortley Montagu observed that "the world consisted of
+men, women, and Herveys." Pope had stigmatised Hervey as _Lord Fanny_, and
+Fielding obviously plays on the nickname by references to the value
+attached by certain young ladies to their fans. "Faith," says his comic
+author, "this incident of the fan struck me so strongly that I was once
+going to call this comedy by the name of the Fan." The comedy ends with
+the successful cooking of the election returns by Mr Mayor in favour of
+the Ministerial candidates, for which "return" he is promised a "very good
+turn very soon"; and by the precipitate marriage of one of the said
+candidates to the Mayor's daughter "to strengthen his interest with the
+returning officer."
+
+Having settled the business of the corrupt and corrupting Ministry in his
+comedy, Mr Pasquin proceeds to exhibit the rehearsal of his tragedy, _The
+Life and Death of Common Sense_. Here the satirist, leaving politics,
+applies his cudgel mainly to the prevailing taste for pantomime, a form of
+entertainment introduced it was said some thirty years previously by one
+Weaver, a country dancing master, and already lashed by Sir Richard Steele
+in his couplet:
+
+  "Weaver, corrupter of the present age,
+  Who first taught silent sins upon the stage."
+
+That the Covent Garden manager, John Rich, [4] could engage four French
+dancers, and a German with two dogs, taught to dance the _Louvre_ and the
+_Minuet_, at ten pounds a night, and clear thereby "above 20 good houses,"
+while the Othello of Booth and the Wildair of Wilkes were neglected, was
+sufficient to rouse the indignation alike of moralists, dramatists and
+playgoers. Fielding in turn took the matter up with all his natural
+warmth; and in _Pasquin_ he represents the kingdom of the Queen of Common
+Sense as invaded by a vast army of "singers, fidlers, tumblers, and
+ropedancers," who moreover fix their standard in Covent Garden, the
+headquarters of Rich.
+
+Not content with assailing this public folly, the 'Tragedy' of _Pasquin_
+strikes a higher note by ranging among the foes of Common Sense three
+unworthy professors of Law, Medicine, and Religion; callings, as Fielding
+is careful to point out,
+
+  "in themselves designed
+  To shower the greatest blessings on Mankind."
+
+Queen Common Sense seemingly receives her deathblow; but her ghost finally
+rises victorious, and so justifies the author's contention that his "is
+almost the only play where she has got the better lately." The vigour with
+which Mr Pasquin here 'laid about him,' in such matters as the legal
+abuses relating to imprisonment for debt, may be inferred from the
+following passage. Queen Common Sense is speaking to the representative of
+_bad_ Law, and tells him she has heard that men
+
+  "unable to discharge their debts
+  At a short warning, being sued for them,
+  Have, with both power and will their debts to pay,
+  Lain all their lives in prison, for their costs.
+
+  _Law_. That may perhaps be some poor person's case
+  Too mean to entertain your royal ear.
+
+  _Q.C.S_. My Lord, while I am Queen I shall not think
+  One man too mean, or poor, to be redress'd."
+
+So too, the great genius of Fielding, when in long after years harnessed
+to the drudgery of a London magistrate, held no porter's brawl or beggar's
+quarrel too mean "to be redress'd."
+
+The immediate success of _Pasquin_ attests, as we have said, the readiness
+of London audiences in 1736 to applaud an honest and humorous presentation
+of wicked Ministers, corrupt clergy, lawyers, and doctors, inane
+Laureates, and degrading public entertainments. Mrs Delany, gathering
+London news for Dean Swift, writes on April 22, "When I went out of Town
+last Autumn, the reigning madness was Farinelli; I find it now turned on
+_Pasquin_, a dramatic satire on the times. It has had almost as long a run
+as the Beggar's Opera; but in my opinion not with equal merit, though it
+has humour." [5] We are told how the piece drew numerous enthusiastic
+audiences "from _Grosvenor_, _Cavendish_, _Hanover_, and all the other
+fashionable Squares, as also from _Pall Mall_ and the _Inns of Court_" And
+on the 26th of May a benefit performance for the author was announced as
+the "60th. Day." The vogue of the satire even demanded a key, as may be
+seen in an advertisement in the _London Daily Post_ for May 17: _This Day
+is published, Price Four-Pence. A Key to Pasquin, address'd to Henry
+Fielding Esqre._
+
+Mr Pasquin's own advertisements for his little theatre are not without the
+zest with which our beef-eating ancestors attacked politics, social abuses
+and one another. The announcement for March 5, ran as follows:--
+
+    "_By the_ Great Mogul's _Company of_ English
+    _Comedians, Newly Imported_. At the New Theatre in the
+    Haymarket, this Day, March 5, will be presented
+
+    PASQUIN,
+
+    A Dramatick SATYR on the times.
+
+    Being a Rehearsal of two PLAYS, viz. a Comedy call'd The
+    ELECTION; and a Tragedy, call'd The Life and Death of COMMON
+    SENSE....
+
+    N.B.--Mr Pasquin intending to lay about him with great
+    Impartiality, hopes the Town will all attend, and very civilly
+    give their Neighbours what the find belongs to 'em.
+
+    N.B.--The Cloaths are old, but the Jokes entirely new...."
+
+In the following month the Opposition was busy over the marriage of their
+chief supporter, the Prince of Wales; and Mr Pasquin duly chronicles the
+event in his advertisements of the 28th of April, observing that his
+company "by reason of the Royal Wedding expecting no Company but
+themselves, are obliged to defer Playing till tomorrow." A few days
+later, on the 12th of May, Sir Robert Walpole celebrated the royal
+marriage by a grand evening entertainment given at his house in St James
+Park; and on the same night 'Pasquin' had the audacity to advertise a
+special performance, in the following terms (the "country party," it
+should be understood, was a usual name for Walpole's opponents):--
+
+"For the Benefit of Miss Burgess, who has so zealously espoused the
+Country Interest.... Miss Burgess hopes all Patriots and Lovers of their
+Country will appear in her favour and give all encouragement to one who
+has so early distinguished herself on the side of Liberty." In Pasquin's
+_Election_ scenes, this lady played the part of Miss Stitch, a political
+damsel, opposed to Walpole's candidate. Next day appeared an ironic
+counter-advertisement of a performance for "the Benefit of Miss Jones (the
+Mayor's daughter who hath so furiously espoused the Court [_i.e._
+Walpole's] Interest....) _N.B._--Miss Jones does not doubt that all true
+loyal People will give her all Encouragement in their Power, as she has
+engaged in so unpopular a Side and even given away her FAN (which very few
+young ladies would) for the service of the Country: she hopes the
+Courtiers will not let her be out of pocket by the Bargain." Here, again,
+is doubtless a hit at Lord 'Fanny' Hervey; as well as a plain hint that
+those who espoused Walpole's cause might expect ample payment for their
+trouble.
+
+Is there any wonder that a wrathful and uneasy Minister, not yet
+overthrown, shortly took stringent measures against the 'liberty' of the
+stage; measures by which a political stage censorship was formally
+established, and the topical gaiety of our theatre, and the pungency of
+our theatrical announcements, henceforth immeasurably dulled.
+
+A few further points of minor interest remain to be noted concerning that
+popular and scathing personage Mr Pasquin. By May the company styled
+themselves "Pasquin's Company of Comedians"; a fresh indication of the
+credit attaching to the performance. In the previous month a contributor
+to _The Grub Street Journal_ tells "Dear Grub" that he has seen Pope
+applauding the piece; and, although the statement was promptly denied, a
+rare print by Hogarth lends some colour to a very likely story; for the
+great Mr Pope, the terror of his enemies, the autocrat of literature, was
+warmly on the side of the Opposition. Hogarth depicts the stage of
+Fielding's theatre, and thereon a scene in the fifth act of _Pasquin_, in
+which the foes of Queen Common Sense are for the moment triumphant. The
+side boxes are well filled; and in one of them Mr Pope's deformed figure,
+apparently, turns away, declaring: "There is no whitewashing this stuff."
+The curious may find another plate by Hogarth in which Pope _is_ busy
+whitewashing Lord Burlington; but the drift of the remark for the
+Opposition drama of _Pasquin_ seems obscure. The gains that accrued to
+Fielding from the success of _Pasquin_ are indicated by another rare
+print, that entitled the _Judgement of the Queen o' Common Sense.
+Addressed to Henry Fielding Esqre._ Here, again, it is _Pasquin's_ satire
+on the prevailing furore for pantomime that is chiefly illustrated; as
+Common Sense gives to Rich, the harlequin, a halter, while to Fielding she
+accords an overflowing purse. Supporting Fielding are a long lean
+Shakespeare, and two figures, possibly the distinguished players Kitty
+Clive and Quin; on the opposite side, behind Harlequin, are figures
+representing the bad clergy, lawyers, and doctors satirised in the
+_Tragedy_; and the whole is balanced by the emergence of the ghost in
+Hamlet, from a trap door in the foreground. Doggerel verses, at the foot
+of the print, celebrate the arrival of a bard, "from ye Great Mogul,"
+bringing with him _Wit, Humour, and Satyr_, and receiving the Queen's
+"honest favour," in "show'rs of gold."
+
+Under those golden showers, and with the applause of 'all the fashionable
+Squares' ringing in his ears, we may leave Mr Pasquin. Fielding's first
+venture as political dramatist and theatrical manager had proved
+brilliantly successful; his little theatre, like his own Tom Thumb, had
+assailed a dozen giant abuses, an all-powerful Minister among them, and
+the town had applauded the courage and wit of the performance. In the
+following season, those same boards were to witness the author of
+_Pasquin_ "laying about him" with an even greater political audacity.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Content, doubtless, with the success of _Pasquin_, Fielding does not seem
+to have launched any further political attacks during the remaining months
+of 1736. A newspaper advertisement of June announces the intention of the
+'Great Mogul's Company of Comedians' to continue "playing twice a week
+during the summer season," and _Pasquin_ remained occasionally in the
+bills as late as the 2nd of July. The public were advised that "This is
+much the coolest House in Town"; and audiences must have been drawn even
+in August, for in that month one small and presumably party play was
+performed, the _New Comi-Tragical Interlude call'd the Deposing and Death
+of Queen Gin_. This little piece consisted of only two scenes, and was
+probably a skit on a Bill "against spirituous liquors" which Walpole had
+supported earlier in the year. The measure met with violent opposition,
+including petitions from the Liverpool and Bristol merchants; and in view
+of Sir Robert's own notorious excesses with the bottle a temperance Bill
+from his hands may well have roused Fielding's ironic laughter. The
+authorship of the satire is unknown; but the moral appears to have been
+unexceptionable, as _Queen Gin_, in the final scene, "drinks a great
+quantity of liquor and at last dies."
+
+Fielding clearly began his second year at the 'little theatre' with some
+social or political exhortation, as the following bill appears for
+January:--"By a Company of Comedians, At the New Theatre in the Haymarket,
+this Day, January 26, will be presented a Dramatick Satire on the Times
+(never performed before) call'd The Mirrour." By February "the Original
+Company who perform'd _Pasquin_" are notified on the bills; and on the 2nd
+of March a performance is announced of a _Dramatick Tale of the King and
+the Miller of Mansfield_, presumably the same _Miller of Mansfield_ openly
+declared by one of Walpole's "hired scribblers" to be aimed at the
+overthrow of the Ministry. [6] All such preliminary skirmishes, however,
+served but to introduce the grand attack of the _Historical Register for
+the Tear 1736_, the first performance of which may be assigned to the end
+of March 1737. [7]
+
+In the _Register_ we have the most complete display of Fielding's vigour
+as a fighting politician. Here, to recur to Mr Pasquin's characteristic
+phrase, he "lays about him" with a gusto and honest frankness quite lost
+among our own tepid conventions. But however hard the hitting, however
+boisterous the broad humour, however biting the irony, it is noteworthy
+that in this his chief political satire, written moreover for a yet
+unregulated stage, Fielding never stoops to the shameless personalities of
+his day. The fashion of the eighteenth-century permitted even the great
+and classical genius of Pope to hurl lines at the persons of his opponents
+that, to modern ears, scarcely bear quotation. Fielding, as we know,
+constantly asserted his intention of throwing not at the vicious but at
+vice; and accordingly, even in this party play, flung openly in the face
+of the Minister, there is but one reference (and that only a fling at his
+"lack of any the least taste in polite literature") to the notorious
+personal failings of Sir Robert. It is against the Minister, and not the
+man, that the hot-blooded Opposition dramatist directs his humour and his
+irony. Fielding's manly and generous nature here permitted no virulent
+personalities to blacken his pages. [8]
+
+The irony of the _Register_ is chiefly reserved for the _Dedication to the
+Public_, designed for the reader at leisure; though here Walpole is
+indicated broadly enough, first in the figure of an ass hung out on a
+signpost, and again as "Old Nick," for "who but the devil could act such a
+part." Here the attacks of the Ministerial papers are parried by ironic
+explanations that "The Register is a ministerial pamphlet calculated to
+infuse into the minds of the people a great opinion of their ministry,"
+explanations full of admirable fencing and excellent hits. And in these
+dedicatory pages Fielding utters a sonorous warning to his countrymen
+concerning the insidious policy that was undermining their very
+constitution: "... Here is the danger, here is the rock on which our
+constitution must, if it ever does split. The liberties of a people have
+been subdued by conquests of valour and force, and have been betrayed by
+the subtle and dexterous arts of refined policy, but these are rare
+instances; for geniuses of this kind are not the growth of every age,
+whereas if a general corruption be once introduced, and those, who should
+be the guardians and bulwarks of our liberty, once find or think they find
+an interest in giving it up, no great capacity will be required to destroy
+it. On the contrary the meanest, lowest, dirtiest fellow, if such an one
+should ever have the assurance in future ages to mimick power, and
+browbeat his betters, will be as able as Machiavel himself could have
+been, to root out the liberties of the bravest people." From the
+solemnities of the _Dedication_ we come to the "humming deal of satire,"
+and the boisterous action, of the play itself. As in the case of _Pasquin_
+the form of the drama is that of a rehearsal, a form which affords
+excellent opportunities for such explanatory asides as that addressed to
+the critic who complains of the attempt to review a year's events in a
+single play: "Sir," says the author, "if I comprise the whole actions of a
+year in half an hour, will you blame me, or those who have done so little
+in that time?" The long years of Walpole's power were admittedly "years
+without parallel in our history, for political stagnation." Scene one
+discovers five 'blundering blockheads' of politicians, in counsel with one
+silent "little gentleman yonder in the chair;" who knows all and says
+nothing, and whose politics lie so deep that "nothing but an inspir'd
+understanding can come at 'em." The blockheads, however, have capacity
+enough to snatch hastily at the money lying on their council table.
+Walpole's jealousy of power, it may be remembered, had driven almost every
+man of ability out of his ministry. Then comes a vivacious parody on the
+fashionable auctions of the day. Lots comprising "a most curious remnant
+of Political Honesty," a "delicate piece of Patriotism," and a "very clear
+Conscience which has been worn by a judge and a bishop" and on which no
+dirt will stick, go for little or nothing, while Lot 8, "a very
+considerable quantity of Interest at Court," excites brisk bidding, and is
+finally knocked down for one thousand pounds. From the excellent fooling
+of the auction, the action suddenly changes to combined satire on the
+Ministry and on the two Cibbers, father and son. The Ministry are
+ingeniously implied to have been damn'd by the public; to give places with
+no attention to the capacity of the recipient; and to laugh at the dupes
+by whose money they live. A like weakness for putting blockheads in office
+and for giving places to rogues, and a like contempt of the public, is
+allegorically conveyed in the third act, in which 'Apollo' casts the parts
+for a performance among sundry unworthy actors, and declares that the
+people may grumble 'as much as they please, as long as we get their
+money.' "There sir," cries the author to the critic of the rehearsal, "is
+the sentiment of a great man." The _Great Man_ was a phrase, to use Pope's
+words, "by common use appropriated to the first minister"--that is, to
+Walpole. In the next scene the effrontery of the piece culminates in a
+ballet where the Prime Minister appears, leading a chorus of false
+patriots, who, to use Fielding's own words, are set in the 'odious and
+contemptible light' of a set of "cunning self-interested fellows who for a
+little paltry bribe would give up the liberties and properties of their
+country." These worthy patriots are of four types, the noisy, the
+cautious, the self-interested (he whose shop is his country) and the
+indolent ("who acts as I have seen a prudent man in company, fall asleep
+at the beginning of a fray and never wake 'till the end o't"). To them
+enters Quidam, unblushingly announced in the play bill as "Quidam, Anglice
+a Certain Person," in other words Walpole himself. Quidam pours gold into
+the pockets of the four patriots, drinks with them, and then, when the
+'bottle is out' (a too frequent occurrence at Sir Robert's table) takes up
+his fiddle, strikes up a tune and dances off, the patriots dancing after
+him. But even this is not all. "Sir," says the author, "every one of these
+patriots have a hole in their pockets as Mr Quidam the fiddler there
+knows; so that he intends to make them dance 'till all the money is fall'n
+through, which he will pick up again and so not lose one halfpenny by his
+generosity...." We may suppose that the final scene lost nothing in
+breadth by the acting of Quidam; and it is not surprising that the
+immediate result was the subjugation not, alas! of the Ministry, but of
+the liberty of the stage. Walpole's fall was delayed for three years; the
+destruction of the political stage was accomplished in three months.
+
+It is difficult to imagine that any party, in those days of comparatively
+arbitrary power, would venture a public satire so unveiled and so menacing
+as that of the _Register_, unless supported by some confidence in the
+immediate fall of their opponents. Without such confidence the political
+tactics of such an onslaught would be simple foolhardiness. Signs of these
+false hopes are not wanting in the slight, but equally bold, satire on the
+sycophants represented as composing Walpole's _levée_, which was shortly
+added to the _Register_. This little sketch, in which a protest concerning
+the damning, early in the year, of Fielding's ballad farce _Eurydice_ is
+combined with the political satire, was advertised as follows:--
+
+    "EURYDICE HISS'D: or, a Word to the Wise, giving an Account of
+    the Rise, Progress, Greatness, and Downfal of Mr Pillage, ... with
+    the dreadful Consequence and Catastrophe of the whole." [9]
+
+We have the authority of Tom Davies, at this time a member of Fielding's
+company, for the statement that "Fielding in his _Eurydice Hiss'd_ had
+brought on the Minister [Walpole] in a _levée_ scene" [10]; and as Pillage
+is the "very great man" who holds the _levée_ in the fragment, the above
+allusion to an expected downfall of Walpole's Ministry seems obvious.
+Passages of similar import to the advertisement occur in the piece itself.
+Thus the play is declared to convey a "beautiful image of the instability
+of human greatness"; and the spectacle is promised of the 'author of a
+mighty farce' at the pinnacle of human greatness and adored by a crowd of
+dependants, become by a sudden turn of fortune, scorned, "deserted and
+abandon'd."
+
+The single scene of the play opens when Pillage is at the zenith of his
+power; a stage direction orders that "The Lèvee enters, and range
+themselves to a ridiculous tune"; a partition of places ensues under the
+allegory of the business arrangements of a theatrical manager; and the
+author explains that by this _levée_ scene he hopes that persons greater
+than author-managers may learn to despise sycophants. Close on the heels
+of the _levée_ comes the catastrophe. Not one honest man, Pillage sadly
+admits, is on his side; as his 'shallow plot' opens out the first applause
+changes to hisses; his farce is damn'd; and he himself is left consoling
+the solitude of his downfall by getting exceedingly drunk on a third
+bottle.
+
+The figure of a fallen Minister boozing away his own intolerable
+reflections, was not calculated to pacify that notoriously hard drinker,
+Sir Robert, already soundly pilloried in the _Register_, and severely
+indited by _Pasquin_. By the end of April the _Register_ had reached its
+thirty-first performance, a good run at that date; and according to an
+advertisement in the _Craftsman_ the satire was still being played on the
+7th of May. In little more than four weeks, and after the alleged
+perpetration of a treasonable and profane farce called _The Golden Rump_,
+a Bill for stifling the liberty of the stage under a censorship was
+introduced, had passed through both Houses, and received the royal assent.
+Well might Lord Chesterfield exclaim in the brilliant speech which, in
+Smollet's words, "will ever endear his character to all the friends of
+genius and literature, to all those who are warmed with zeal for the
+liberties of their country," that the Bill was not only "of a very
+extraordinary nature, but has been brought in at a very extraordinary
+season and pushed with very extraordinary despatch." Concerning the nature
+of the measure Chesterfield had no doubt. He saw its tendency towards
+restraining the "liberty of the Press which will be a long stride towards
+the destruction of Liberty itself"; he pointed out that a Minister who has
+merited the esteem of the people will neither fear the wit nor feel the
+satire of the theatre; he denounced the subjugation of the stage under "an
+arbitrary Court license" which would convert it into a canal for conveying
+the vices and follies of "great men and Courtiers" through the whole
+kingdom; he protested against the Bill as an encroachment not only on
+liberty but also on property, for "Wit, my Lords, is a sort of property;
+it is the property of those that have it, and too often the only property
+that they have to depend on."
+
+As a manager of the intrepid little theatre in the Haymarket, as well as
+the author of the most successful of the offending plays, the Licensing
+Act fell with double weight on Fielding. "When I speak against the Bill,"
+cried Chesterfield, "I must think I plead the cause of Wit, I plead the
+cause of Humour, I plead the cause of the British Stage, and of every
+gentleman of taste in the Kingdom." Looking back over two centuries, we
+honour Chesterfield in that, unknown to himself, he also pleaded the cause
+of the greatest of English humourists. But appeals on behalf of genius and
+freedom were thrown away upon Walpole; the Act received the royal assent
+on June 21 1737; and, in the honourable company of Wit, Humour, and Taste,
+Fielding was forced to retire from the theatre, on the boards of which he
+had for two years so vigorously assailed Ministerial corruption and
+autocracy.
+
+[1] _Works of Henry Fielding_, Edited by Edmund Gosse. Introduction,
+p. xxi.
+
+[2] _Life of Garrick_. T. Davies. 1780, vol. i. p. 223.
+
+[3] _Notitia Dramatica_, MSS. Dept. British Museum, speaks of _Pasquin_ as
+performed for the fortieth time on April 21, 1736: and quotes an
+advertisement of the play for March 5. There seems to be no record of the
+actual first night.
+
+[4] Rich appears to have been the manager at Covent Garden from 1733 to
+1761.
+
+[5] _Autobiography of Mrs Delany._ 1861. Vol I. p. 554.
+
+[6] See Fielding's ironic reference to such "iniquitous surmises" in the
+Dedication to the _Historical Register_.
+
+[7] The earliest newspaper reference, so far available, is that of the
+_Daily Journal_ for April 6 1737, which speaks of April 11 as the ninth
+day of the _Register_.
+
+[8] In the succeeding Epilogue of _Eurydice Hiss'd_ it must be admitted
+that Sir Robert's love of the bottle is broadly satirised.
+
+[9] _Daily Advertiser_, April 29. 1737.
+
+[10] _Life of Garrick_, T. Davies, vol. ii. p. 206.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+HOMESPUN DRAMA
+
+    "Virtue distrest in humble state support."
+    Prologue to _Fatal Curiosity_.
+
+The Licensing Act of June 1737 thus brought Henry Fielding's career as
+political dramatist to a hasty conclusion; a conclusion quite unforeseen
+by the luckless author, as appears from his _Dedication_ to the
+_Historical Register_, published almost at the moment when the Act became
+law: "The very great indulgence you have shown my performances at the
+little theatre these two last years," he says, addressing his public,
+"have encouraged me to the proposal of a subscription for carrying on that
+theatre, for beautifying and enlarging it, and procuring a better company
+of actors."
+
+Before finally losing sight of the stage on which _Pasquin_ and the
+_Register_ had scored such signal success, we may notice some minor
+incidents of these two years of Fielding's administration. His company
+does not seem to have included either Macklin, Quin, or Kitty Clive; but
+that distinguished actress Mrs Pritchard, the central figure of Hogarth's
+charming group called "The Green Room, Drury Lane," is said to have made
+her first appearance on his boards, [1] and his players also included that
+man of many parts Tom Davies. Davies was a student of Edinburgh
+University; an actor at Drury Lane and elsewhere; a bookseller of whom the
+elder D'Israeli said 'all his publications were of the best kind'; the
+writer of various works including a _Life of Garrick_; and a particular
+friend of Dr Johnson. In the first year of Fielding's management in the
+Haymarket, Davies was cast for a principal part in George Lillo's tragedy
+_Fatal Curiosity_; and it is to his pen that we owe the only known
+contemporary reference to the active part taken by Fielding himself in the
+affairs of his theatre.
+
+Lillo, a jeweller of Moorfields, had captured the town, a few years
+previously, by his tragedy of common life, _George Barnwell_; and among
+the dramatists selected by Fielding for representation on his stage the
+most interesting is undoubtedly this pioneer of the coming revolution in
+English literature. For, incredible as it may seem, until that first
+performance of _Barnwell_, no writer, to quote Tom Davies' own words "had
+ventured to descend so low as to introduce the character of a merchant or
+his apprentice into a tragedy." Certain "witty and facetious persons who
+call themselves the town," continues Davies, brought to the first night
+copies of the old ballad on which the jeweller's play was based, meaning
+to mock the new tragedy with the old song; but so forcible and pathetic
+were Lillo's scenes that these merry gentlemen were obliged "to throw away
+their ballads, and take out their handkerchiefs." More tears, we learn,
+were shed over this 'homespun drama' than at all the imitations of ancient
+fables by learned moderns. To Fielding this revolution, from the buskin'd
+heroics of the Alexanders and Clelias to the living and natural pathos of
+the tragedy of a poor London apprentice, must have appealed with
+extraordinary force; for it is the especial glory of his own genius that,
+throwing aside all the traditions of his age, and 'adventuring on one of
+the most original expeditions that ever a writer undertook,' [2] he was to
+discover a new world for English fiction, the world of simple human
+nature. That expedition must have been already forming in his mind when,
+night after night, in the hottest part of the year, _George Barnwell_ was
+playing to crowded houses, and convincing the astonished audiences of 1731
+that even so low a creature as a London apprentice was possessed of
+passions extremely like their own. Some ten years later, when Fielding
+revealed the first true sign of his own surpassing genius in the _History
+of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews_, he chose for his hero a country
+footman. The worthy City jeweller was, in his own limited measure, the
+forerunner, on the stage, of that new era in English literature created by
+honest Andrews and Parson Adams, Partridge and Mrs Slipslop, Fanny and
+Sergeant Atkinson, Tow-wouse and Mrs Miller, to name but a few of
+Fielding's immortal portraits, drawn from the 'vast authentic book of
+Nature.'
+
+It is no wonder then, to return to Tom Davies, that a play by Lillo was
+announced on the bills of Fielding's theatre within a few months of the
+opening of his management. On May 27, 1736, the following advertisement
+appeared:
+
+    "Guilt its Own Punishment. Never Acted before. By Pasquin's
+    Company of Comedians. Being a True Story in Common Life and the
+    Incidents extremely affecting." By the Author of George Barnwell.
+
+Davies' part in the play was a chief one, that of young Wilmot, and the
+story of the performance may be given in his own words. "Mr Fielding, who
+had a just sense of our author's merit, and who had often in his humourous
+pieces laughed at those ridiculous and absurd criticks who could not
+possibly understand the merit of Barnwell, because the subject was low,
+treated Lillo with great politeness and friendship. He took upon himself
+the management of the play and the instruction of the actors. It was
+during the rehearsal of the _Fatal Curiosity_ that I had an opportunity to
+see and to converse with Mr Lillo. Plain and simple as he was in his
+address, his manner of conversing was modest affable and engaging. When
+invited to give his opinion how a particular sentiment should be uttered
+by the actor he expresst himself in the gentlest and most obliging terms,
+and conveyed instruction and conviction with good nature and good
+manners.... Fielding was not content merely to revise the 'Fatal
+Curiosity,' and to instruct the actors how to do justice to their parts.
+He warmly recommended the play to his friends and to the public. Besides
+all this he presented the author with a well written prologue."
+
+This _Prologue_, which has apparently hitherto escaped the collectors of
+Fielding's _Works_, seems worthy of a reprint here, if only for its
+characteristic sympathy with virtue and distress 'in humble state,' and
+for the opening tribute to 'Shakespeare's nature' and to 'Fletcher's
+ease.'
+
+PROLOGUE TO THE FATAL CURIOSITY
+
+  "The Tragic Muse has long forgot to please
+  With Shakespeare's nature or with Fletcher's ease:
+  No passion mov'd, thro' five long acts you sit,
+  Charm'd with the poet's language or his wit.
+  Fine things are said, no matter whence they fall;
+  Each single character must speak them all.
+
+  "But from this modern fashionable way
+  To-night our author begs your leave to stray.
+  No fustian hero rages here to-night,
+  No armies fall to fix a tyrant's right:
+  From lower life we draw our scenes' distress:
+  --Let not your equals move your pity less!
+  Virtue distrest in humble state support;
+  Nor think she never lives without the court.
+
+  "Tho' to our scenes no royal robes belong
+  And tho' our little stage as yet be young
+  Throw both your scorn and prejudice aside;
+  Let us with favour not contempt be try'd,
+  Thro' the first act a kind attention lend
+  The growing scene shall force you to attend:
+  Shall catch the eyes of every tender fair,
+  And make them charm their lovers with a tear.
+  The lover too by pity shall impart
+  His tender passion to his fair one's heart:
+  The breast which others' anguish cannot move
+  Was ne'er the seat of friendship or of love."
+
+
+Notwithstanding all the manager's friendly efforts, the play met at first
+with very little success, a failure in Davies' opinion "owing in all
+probability to its being brought on in the latter part of the season, when
+the public had been satiated with a long run of _Pasquin_," but, he adds,
+"it is with pleasure I observe that Fielding generously persisted to serve
+the man whom he had once espoused; he tacked the 'Fatal Curiosity' to his
+Historical Register which was played with great success in the ensuing
+winter." [3]  We owe no inconsiderable debt to Tom Davies in that he has
+preserved for us this picture of Fielding, actively engaged in the
+stage-management of his little theatre; a picture, moreover, that does
+equal honour to the brilliant wit, the successful political satirist, and
+to that modest, gentle Nonconformist poet, the man of whom it was said
+that he "had the spirit of an old Roman joined to the innocence of a
+Primitive Christian," George Lillo.
+
+A few weeks before the production of Lillo's tragedy, and while _Pasquin_
+was still in the full tide of political success, an event occurred of
+closer import to Fielding's affectionate nature than all the applause of
+the Opposition and the town. This was the birth, in April, 1736, of his
+daughter Charlotte. No English writer has left more charming pictures of
+mother and child than those we owe to the tenderness and simplicity of
+Fielding's pen. When we find Squire Western turning, in his latter days,
+to Sophia's nursery, and hear him declaring that the prattling of his
+granddaughter is "sweeter Music than the finest Cry of Dogs in _England_"
+when we see Captain Booth stretched at full length on the floor of his
+poor lodgings, with his "little innocents" jumping over him, we are almost
+inclined to forgive alike the brutalities of the old foxhunter, and the
+weaknesses of the young soldier. Fielding's affection for his children,
+his apprehensions for their ultimate provision, his anxiety in their
+sickness, his grief at the loss of a little daughter, are manifest in his
+pages. If anything could exceed the satisfaction which the brilliant
+success of _Pasquin_ must have given to his buoyant nature, it would be
+the birth of this, the first child apparently, of his marriage with the
+beautiful Charlotte Cradock. The entry in the registers of St Martin's in
+the Fields runs as follows: Baptized May 19th, 1736 Charlotte Fielding, of
+Henry and Charlotte, Born April 27th.
+
+The dates of _Pasquin_, of Lillo's tragedy, and of the _Historical
+Register_, cover a considerable portion of the years 1736, 1737, and their
+production in a theatre under Fielding's own management practically
+presupposes his presence in London at that time. This by no means fits in
+with Murphy's implication that Fielding retired to Stour on his marriage,
+and that, remaining there, he ran through his "little patrimony," in "less
+than three years." A complete country retirement cannot be assigned to
+those busy years in the Haymarket; and in 1736 the journey from London to
+Dorsetshire was no trifling undertaking. But it seems quite possible that
+Fielding and his wife went down to their small estate in Dorsetshire for
+part or all of the summer, autumn and winter of both 1736 and 1737. This
+would cover the hunting months, and "hounds and horses," according to
+Murphy, filled a large part in Fielding's country life at Stour; the time
+would be that of the comparatively dull season for the theatre in the
+Haymarket; and, with the year immediately preceding _Pasquin_, we should
+thus, perhaps, account sufficiently for Murphy's "three years". Certain
+passages in the _Miscellanies_, published long after the pleasant meadows
+and the modest house at Stour--no less than the turmoil of the green-room
+and the crowded political audiences in the Haymarket--were things of the
+past, have a personal ring, reminiscent perhaps of such months of "sweet
+Retirement" in Dorsetshire. Thus one of the characters in the _Journey
+from this World to the next_ recalls the change, from a life of "restless
+Anxieties," to a "little pleasant Country House, where there was nothing
+grand or superfluous, but everything neat and agreeable"; and how, after a
+little time, "I began to share the Tranquillity that visibly appeared in
+everything round me. I set myself to do Works of Fancy and to raise little
+Flower-Gardens, with many such innocent rural Amusements; which altho'
+they are not capable of affording any great Pleasure, yet they give that
+serene Turn of the Mind, which I think much preferable to anything else
+Human Nature is made susceptible of." To this pleasant picture of "rural
+Amusements," and tranquillity, it is surely not impertinent to add this
+further passage, as a possible echo of Charlotte Fielding's thought, well
+acquainted as she must have been both with the "sweetly winding banks of
+Stour" and with the clamorous successes of political drama: "in all these
+various Changes I never enjoyed any real Satisfaction, unless in the
+little time I lived retired in the Country free from all Noise and Hurry."
+
+In the summer or autumn of 1737 the curtain was finally rung down on all
+the 'noise and hurry,' the achievements and audacities of Fielding's
+"little stage"; a few months later, and the country retirement at Stour
+had also become but a memory of that short life into which he managed to
+compress "more variety of Scenes than many People who live to be very
+old."
+
+[1] _Life of Garrick_. T. Davies, vol. ii.
+
+[2] _Works of Henry Fielding_, edited by Edmund Gosse. Introduction, p.
+xxix.
+
+[3] _The Works of Mr George Lillo, with some Account of his Life_, T.
+Davies.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+BAR STUDENT. JOURNALIST
+
+    "the ... Covetous, the Prodigal, the Ambitious, the Voluptuous,
+    the Bully, the Vain, the Hypocrite, the Flatterer, the Slanderer,
+    call aloud   for the _Champion's_ Vengeance."
+    --The _Champion_, Dec. 22, 1739.
+
+There is no record of when or how Fielding disposed of his share in the
+management of the New Theatre in the Haymarket. But on June 21 1737,
+Walpole's Bill for regulating the stage received, as we have seen, the
+royal assent; and there can be no doubt that Sir Robert would at once
+apply his newly acquired powers to removing the dances of the fiddler, Mr
+Quiddam, and the drunken consolations of Mr Pillage, from the Haymarket
+boards, if indeed these gentlemen had not anticipated events by already
+removing themselves. We may safely assume that Henry Fielding's career as
+political dramatist came to an abrupt conclusion some time in the summer
+of 1737. [1]
+
+It remains a matter for speculation why, after seven years spent in
+producing a stream of not unsuccessful social comedies and farces, leading
+up to a final and brilliant success in the field of political satiric
+drama, Fielding should have thrown up the stage as a whole, when suddenly
+debarred from those party onslaughts which had occupied but a fraction of
+his dramatic energies. The cause was not any lack of popularity. "The
+farces written by Mr Fielding," wrote Murphy in 1762, "were almost all of
+them very successful, and many of them are still acted every winter, with
+a continuance of approbation." And it is obvious that the fashionable
+vices and follies of the time afforded ample inducement to a satiric
+dramatist to continue 'laying about him,' even when Ministerial offences
+had been rendered inviolate by Act of Parliament. Neither was Fielding's
+sanguine temperament likely to be daunted by the single failure of his
+farce _Eurydice_, which had been damned at Drury Lane on February 19 of
+this same year: "disagreeable impressions," Murphy tells us, "never
+continued long upon his mind." The most satisfactory solution of the
+matter seems to be that now, in the approaching maturity of his powers,
+the 'Father of the English Novel' was becoming conscious that the true
+field for his genius lay in a hitherto unattempted form of imaginative
+narration, and not within the five acts of comedy or farce. The entirely
+original conceptions of a _Joseph Andrews_ and a _Jonathan Wild_ may
+already have begun to captivate the vigorous energies of his mind. We have
+his own word for assigning "some years" to the writing of _Tom Jones_; it
+is therefore not unreasonable to suppose that the conception of the first
+English "Comic Epic Poem in Prose" may date as far back as the summer of
+1737.
+
+Leaving surmise for fact, it is certain that this year marks the dividing
+line in Fielding's life.
+
+Henceforth he ceases to be the witty, facile, popular dramatist; and he
+enters slowly on his birthright as the first in time, if not in genius, of
+English novelists. To this complete severance from the theatre belongs his
+own remark that "he left off writing for the stage when he ought to have
+begun." Arrived at a late maturity, and with accumulated stores of
+observation and insight,--"he saw the latent sources of human action,"
+says Murphy--his genius happily turned into a channel carved, with
+splendid originality, for itself alone. After nine years of servitude to
+the limitations of dramatic construction, limitations he was wont to
+relieve, as his friend James Harris tells us, by "pleasantly though
+perhaps rather freely" _damning the man who invented fifth acts_, Fielding
+was now soon to discover his freedom in the spacious, hitherto
+unadventured, regions of prose fiction. But genius, especially genius with
+wife and child to support, cannot maintain life on inspiration alone; and,
+accordingly, the ex-dramatist now flung himself, with characteristic
+impetuosity and courage, into a struggle for independence at the Bar,
+perhaps the most arduous profession, under all the circumstances, that he
+could have chosen. For a reputation as the writer of eighteen comedies,
+and as the reckless political dramatist whose boisterous energies had set
+the town ringing with _Pasquin_ and the _Register_, the fame in short of
+being the successful manager of _The Great Mogul's Company of Comedians_,
+was surely the last reputation in the world to bring a man briefs from
+cautious attorneys. And, with whatever hopes of political patronage, any
+temperament less buoyant might well have hesitated to embark on reading
+for the Bar at the age of thirty. But "by dificulties," says his earliest
+biographer, "his resolution was never subdued; on the contrary they only
+roused him to struggle through them with a peculiar spirit and
+magnanimity." So, within six months of the closing down of his little
+theatre under Walpole's irate hand, Fielding had formally entered himself
+as a student at the Middle Temple.
+
+The entry in the books of that society runs as follows:--
+
+    [574 G] 1 Nov'ris. 1737.
+
+    _Henricus Fielding, de East Stour in Com Dorset Ar, filius et
+    haeres apparens Brig: Gen'lis: Edmundi Fielding admissus est in
+    Societatem Medii Templi Lond specialiter at obligatur una cum &c.
+
+    Et dat pro fine_ 4. 0. 0.
+
+Of the ensuing two and a half years of student life in the Temple we know
+practically nothing, beyond one vivacious picture of Harry Fielding's
+attack upon the law. "His application while a student in the Temple,"
+writes Murphy, "was remarkably intense; and though it happened that the
+early taste he had taken of pleasure would occasionally return upon him,
+and conspire with his spirits and vivacity to carry him into the wild
+enjoyments of the town, yet it was particular in him that amidst all his
+dispositions nothing could suppress the thirst he had for knowledge, and
+the delight he felt in reading; and this prevailed in him to such a
+degree, that he has been frequently known by his intimates, to retire late
+at night from a tavern to his chambers, and there read and make extracts
+from the most abstruse authors, for several hours before he went to bed;
+so powerful were the vigour of his constitution and the activity of his
+mind."
+
+One of the few pages of Fielding's autograph that have come down to us is
+presumably a relic of these student days. In the catalogue of the
+_Morrison Manuscripts_ occurs this description of two undated pages in his
+hand: "List of offences against the King and his state immediately, which
+the Law terms High Treason. Offences against him in a general light as
+touching the Commonwealth at large, as Trade etc. Offences against him as
+supreme Magistrate etc." Were ever genius and wit more straitly or more
+honourably shackled than that of Henry Fielding, gallantly accepting such
+toil as this, toil moreover that must have weighed with double weight on a
+man who had spent nine years in the company of those charming if 'fickle
+jades' the Muses.
+
+All efforts have failed to trace where Fielding and his wife and child (or
+children--the date of the birth of his daughter Harriet is not known)
+lived during these laborious months; but that money was needed in the
+summer following his entry at the Middle Temple may be inferred from the
+sale of the property at Stour. According to the legal note of this
+transaction, [2] "Henry ffeilding and Charlotte his wife" conveyed, in the
+Trinity Term of 1738, to one Thomas Hayter, for the sum of £260, "two
+messuages, two dove-houses, three gardens, three orchards, fifty acres of
+Land, eighty acres of meadow, one hundred and forty acres of pasture, ten
+acres of wood and common and pasture for all manner of cattle with the
+appurtenances in East Stour." It does not need a very active imagination
+to realise the keen regret with which Fielding must have parted with his
+gardens and orchards, his pastures, woods and commons. Sixty years ago the
+barn and one of the "dove-houses" had been but recently pulled down; and
+to this day the estate is still known as "Fielding's Farm." [3]
+
+It has been stated, on what authority does not appear, that, after leaving
+Stour, Fielding went to Salisbury, and there bought a house, his solicitor
+being a Mr John Perm Tinney. Whatever be the fact as to the Salisbury
+residence, it is certain that a full year after the sale of the
+Dorsetshire property the Temple student was by no means at the end of his
+resources. For in the following letter [4] to Mr Nourse, the bookseller,
+dated July 1739, we find him requiring a London house at a rent of forty
+pounds and with a large "eating Parlour."
+
+
+"Mr Nourse,
+
+Disappointments have hitherto prevented my paying y'r Bill, which, I
+shall certainly do on my coming to Town which will be next Month. I
+desire the favour of y'u to look for a House for me near the Temple. I
+must have one large eating Parlour in it for the rest shall not be very
+nice.
+
+Rent not upwards of £40 p. an: and as much cheaper as may be. I will take
+a Lease for Seven years. Yr Answer to this within a fortnight will much
+oblige.
+
+Y'r Humble Serv't
+
+Henry Ffielding.
+
+I have got Cro: Eliz. [5]
+
+"July 9th 1739."
+
+This note, written a year before Fielding's call to the Bar, suggests
+that his early married life was by no means spent in the "wretched
+garrett" of Lady Louisa Stuart's celebrated reminiscence.
+
+In the September following the sale of his Dorsetshire estate Fielding had
+to regret the death of George Lillo, to whose success he had devoted so
+much personal care and energy, when staging Lillo's tragedy _Fatal
+Curiosity_ on the boards of the little theatre in the Haymarket. The close
+relationship in intellectual sympathy between Lillo's talent and the
+genius of Fielding has already been noticed. But apart from this
+intellectual sympathy, the personal worth and charm of the good tradesman
+is noteworthy, as affording striking proof of the quality of man chosen by
+the 'wild Harry Fielding' for regard and friendship. And it should be
+remembered that in those days to bridge the social gulf between the
+kinsman of the Earl of Denbigh and a working jeweller, required courage as
+well as insight. Some time after Lillo's death a generous memorial notice
+of him appeared in Fielding's paper the _Champion_. The writer detects in
+his work "an Heart capable of exquisitely Feeling and Painting human
+Distresses, but of causing none"; and declares that his title to be called
+the best tragic poet of his age, "was the least of his Praise, he had the
+gentlest and honestest Manners, and, at the same Time, the most friendly
+and obliging. He had a perfect Knowledge of Human Nature, though his
+Contempt of all base Means of Application, which are the necessary Steps
+to great Acquaintance, restrained his Conversation within very narrow
+Bounds: He had the Spirit of an old _Roman_, joined to the Innocence of a
+primitive Christian; he was content with his little State of Life, in
+which his excellent Temper of Mind gave him an Happiness, beyond the Power
+of Riches, and it was necessary for his Friends to have a sharp Insight
+into his Want of their Services, as well as good Inclinations or Abilities
+to serve him. In short he was one of the best of Men, and those who knew
+him best will most regret his Loss." [6] In the excellent company of Henry
+Fielding's friends George Lillo may surely take his stand beside the 'good
+Lord Lyttelton,' the munificent and pious Allen, and not far from 'Parson
+Adams' himself.
+
+No record has survived of Fielding's share in the political struggles of
+his party, during his first two years of "intense application" to the law.
+Walpole's power had been sensibly lessened by the death of the Queen, and
+he was losing the support of the country and even of the trading classes.
+The Prince of Wales, now openly hostile to the "great man," was the
+titular head of an Opposition numbering almost all the men of wit and
+genius in the kingdom. Lyttelton, Fielding's warmest friend, had become
+secretary to the Prince, and was recognised as a fluent leader of the
+Opposition in the House of Commons. Another friend, John Duke of Argyll,
+had joined the ranks of the Opposition in the Lords. On the whole the
+author of _Pasquin_, may well have hoped for a speedy fall of the
+"Colossos," with "its Brains of Lead, its Face of Brass, its Hands of
+Iron, its Heart of Adamant," and the accession to power of a party not
+without obligations to the fearless manager of the little theatre in the
+Haymarket. During these years the Opposition, even though supported by
+Pope and Chesterfield, Thomson and Bolingbroke, could scarcely fail to
+utilise the trenchant scorn, the whole-hearted vigour, the boisterous
+humour, of Fielding's genius; and Murphy, speaking vaguely of Fielding's
+legal years, says that a "large number of fugitive political tracts, which
+had their value when the incidents were actually passing on the great
+scene of business, came from his pen." It is not however till November
+1739, two years and a half after the pillorying of Walpole on the
+Haymarket boards, that Fielding is again clearly seen, 'laying about' him,
+in those clamourous eighteenth-century politics.
+
+His choice of a new weapon of attack is foreshadowed in the noble
+concluding words of the _Introduction_ to the _Historical Register_; words
+written on the very eve of the Ministerial Bill gagging that and all other
+political plays: "If nature hath given me any talents at ridiculing vice
+and imposture, I shall not be indolent, nor afraid of exerting them, while
+the liberty of the press and stage subsists, that is to say while we have
+any liberty left among us." A few weeks after these words were published
+the liberty of the stage was triumphantly stifled by Walpole's Licensing
+Bill. But even "old Bob" himself dared not lay his hand on the liberty of
+the British Press; and so we find Mr Pasquin reappearing under the guise,
+or in the company, of the _Champion and Censor of Great Britain_,
+otherwise one _Captain Hercules Vinegar_, a truculent avenger of wrong and
+exponent of virtue, in whose fictitious name a political, literary, and
+didactic newspaper entered the field of party politics on November 15,
+1739. The paper, under the title of the _Champion_, was issued three times
+a week, and consisted of one leading article, an anti-Ministerial summary
+of news, and literary notices of new books. The first number announced
+that the author and owner was the said Captain Hercules Vinegar, and that
+the Captain would be aided in various departments by members of his
+family. Thus the Captain's wife, Mrs Joan Vinegar, a matron of a very
+loquacious temper, was to undertake the ladies' column, and his son Jack
+was to have "an Eye over the gay Part of the Town." The criticism was to
+be conducted by Mr Nol Vinegar who was reported to have spent one whole
+year in examining the use of a single word in Horace. And the politics
+were to be dealt forth by the Captain's father, a gentleman intimately
+versed in kingdoms, potentates and Ministers, and of so close a
+disposition that he "seldom opens his Mouth, unless it be to take in his
+Food, or puff out the Smoke of his Tobacco."
+
+The paper bore no signed articles; but judging from an attack levelled
+against it in a pamphlet of the following year, [7] Fielding and his
+former not very worshipful partner in the Haymarket management, James
+Ralph, were the reputed "authors," Ralph being in a subordinate position.
+Thus, it is stated that Ralph, "is now say'd to be the 'Squire of the
+_British_ CHAMPION"; the writer identifies _Captain Vinegar_ and the
+author of _Pasquin_ as one and the same person; he describes Pasquin and
+Ralph as the "Authors of the Champion"; he asserts that the old Roman
+statues of Pasquin and Marfario, "are now dignified and distinguished (by
+The CHAMPION and his doughty Squire RALPH), under the Names [_sic_] of
+Captain Hercules Vinegar."; he prints an address to the "_Self-dubb'd
+Captain_ Hercules Vinegar," and his "Man _Ralph_"; and appends some
+doggerel verse entitled "Vinegar and his gang." But from all this nothing
+definite emerges as to the precise part taken by Fielding in the
+authorship of the _Champion_. The pamphleteer accredits a fragment of a
+paper signed C. to the _Captain_, and attributes two papers, [8] signed C.
+and L., to "Mr Pasquin"--_i.e._ Fielding; and as the reprint of the
+_Champion_, which appeared in 1741, announces that all papers so signed
+are the "Work of one Hand," there is so much external proof that all such
+pages in these volumes (numbering some sixty essays) are by Fielding. Dr
+Nathan Drake, writing in 1809, more than sixty years after the appearance
+of the paper, asserts, without stating his reasons, that the numbers
+marked "C." and "L." "were the work of Fielding." This view is further
+supported by the opinion of Mr Austin Dobson, that many of the papers
+signed _C._ "are unmistakably Fielding's."
+
+On the other hand Murphy, writing only twenty-two years after the
+appearance of the paper, but often with gross inaccuracy, states that the
+_Champion_ "owed its chief support to his [Fielding's] abilities," but
+that "his essays in that collection cannot now be so ascertained as to
+perpetuate them in this edition of his works." Boswell refers to Fielding
+as possessing a "share" in the paper. A manuscript copy of some of the
+Minutes of meetings of the _Champion_ partners, written out in an
+eighteenth-century handwriting, and now in the possession of the present
+writer, confirms Boswell's note, in as far as an entry therein records
+that "Henry Fielding Esq. did originally possess Two Sixteenth Shares of
+the Champion as a Writer in the said paper." One of the lists of the
+partners of the _Champion_ which occur in the same manuscript, is headed
+by the name of "Mr Fielding." Finally, a contemporary satirical print
+shows Fielding with his "length of nose and chin" and his tall figure,
+acting as standard-bearer of the _Champion_; the paper being represented
+in its political capacity of a leading Opposition organ. There is,
+moreover, the internal evidence of style and sentiment. Thus the matter
+rests; and although it is exceedingly tempting to use the _Champion_ for
+inferences as to the manner in which Fielding approached his new craft of
+journalism, and as to his attitude on the many subjects, theological,
+social, political and personal, handled in these essays, the evidence
+seems hardly sufficient to warrant such deductions. It does, however, seem
+clear, taking as evidence the shilling pamphlet already
+mentioned,[9] that Harry Fielding, the intrepid and audacious Mr Pasquin
+of 1736-7 reappeared, laying about him with his ever ready cudgel now
+raised to the dignity of a miraculous Hercules club, as the _Champion_ of
+1739-41. To all lovers of good cudgelling, whether laid on the shoulders
+of the incorrigible old cynic Sir Robert, or on those of the egregious
+Colley Cibber, or falling on the follies and abuses of the day, the
+"Pasquinades and Vinegarades" of _Captain Hercules Vinegar_, and his
+"doughty Squire Ralph," may be commended. And no fault can be found with
+the _Captain's_ declaration, when establishing a Court of Judicature for
+the trial and punishment of sundry offenders in his pages, that "whatever
+is wicked, hateful, absurd, or ridiculous, must be exposed and punished,
+before this Nation is brought to that Height of Purity and good Manners to
+which I wish to see it exalted." [10]
+
+One personal sketch of Fielding himself deserves quotation, whether drawn
+by his own hand or that of another. The _Champion_ for May 24, 1740,
+contains a vision of the Infernal Regions, where Charon, the ghostly
+boatman, is busy ferrying souls across the River Styx. The ferryman bids
+his attendant Mercury see that all his passengers embark carrying nothing
+with them; and the narrator describes how, after various Shades had
+qualified for their passage, "A tall Man came next, who stripp'd off an
+old Grey Coat with great Readiness, but as he was stepping into the Boat,
+_Mercury_ demanded half his Chin, which he utterly refused to comply with,
+insisting on it that it was all his own." Fielding's length of chin and
+nose was well known; and not less familiar, doubtless, was the 'old Grey
+Coat,' among the purlieus of the Temple.
+
+The beginning of the year 1740, when the lusty _Champion_ and his cudgel
+were well established, and _Captain Hercules'_ private legal studies were
+drawing to a close, was marked by a fresh outburst of the old feud with
+Colley Cibber. Cibber, already notorious as actor, dramatist, manager, the
+Poet Laureat of "preposterous Odes," and the 'poetical Tailor' who would
+even cut down Shakespeare himself, now appeared in the character of
+historian and biographer, publishing early in 1740 the famous _Apology for
+the Life of Mr Colley Cibber, Comedian, and late Patentee of the Theatre
+Royal. With an Historical View of the Stage during his Own Time._
+
+Cibber, soon to be scornfully chosen by Pope as dunce-hero of the
+_Dunciad_, had, for the past six years, been pilloried by Fielding; and,
+not unmindful of these onslaughts, he inserted in his new work a virulent
+attack on the late manager of the New Theatre in the Haymarket. The tenor
+of _Pasquin_ was here grossly misrepresented. Fielding was described as
+being, at the time of entering on his management, "a Broken Wit"; he was
+accused of using the basest dramatic means of profit, since "he was in
+haste to get money"; and the final insult was added by Cibber's stroke of
+referring to his enemy anonymously, as one whom "I do not chuse to name."
+
+Looking back across two centuries on to the supreme figures of Pope and
+Fielding, it is matter for some wonder that these giants of the intellect
+should have greatly troubled to annihilate a Colley Cibber. A finer
+villain, it seems to us, might have been chosen by Pope for the six
+hundred lines of his _Dunciad_ a worthier target might have drawn the
+arrows of Fielding's _Champion_. But Cibber possessed at least the art of
+arousing notable enmities; and the four slashing papers in which the
+_Champion_ [11] promptly parried the scurrilities of the _Apology_ still
+make pretty reading for those who are curious in the annals of literary
+warfare. It is noteworthy that these _Champion_ retorts are honourably
+free from the personalities of an age incredibly gross in the use of
+personal invective. Fielding's journal, even under the stinging
+provocation of the insults of the _Apology_, was still true to the
+standard set in the _Prologue_ of his first boyish play
+
+  'No private character these scenes expose.'
+
+It is Cibber's ignorance of grammar, his murder of the English tongue,
+his inflated literary conceit, rather than his 'private character' that
+are here exposed.
+
+Some time during the latter half of 1740 the whole feud between Cibber,
+Pope, Fielding and Ralph was reprinted in the shilling pamphlet, already
+referred to, entitled _The Tryal of Colley Cibber_. The collection
+concludes as follows:
+
+    "ADVERTISEMENT
+
+    "If the Ingenious _Henry Fielding_ Esq.; (Son of the Hon.
+    Lieut. General  _Fielding_, who upon his Return from his
+    Travels entered Himself of the  _Temple_ in order to study
+    the Law, and married one of the pretty Miss  _Cradocks_ of
+    _Salisbury_) will _own_ himself the AUTHOR of 18
+    strange Things  called Tragical _Comedies_ and Comical
+    _Tragedies_, lately advertised by _J. Watts_, of
+    _Wild-Court_, Printer, he shall be _mentioned_ in
+    Capitals in the _Third_ edition of Mr CIBBER'S _Life_,
+    and likewise be placed _among_ the _Poetae minores
+    Dramatici_ of the Present Age; then will both his _Name and
+    Writings be remembered on Record_ in the immortal _Poetical
+    Register_ written by Mr Giles Jacob."
+
+
+The whole production affords a lively example of the full-blooded
+pamphleteering of 1740; and throws valuable light on Fielding's repute as
+the _Champion_.
+
+As regards Ralph's collaboration with Fielding at this period (a
+collaboration further affirmed by Dr Nathan Drake's assertion, written in
+1809, that James Ralph was Fielding's chief coadjutor in that paper) it
+may be recalled that ten years previously this not very reputable American
+had provided a prologue for Fielding's early play, the _Temple Beau_; and
+that he appears again as Fielding's partner in the management of the
+Little Theatre in the Haymarket. Gradually relinquishing his theatrical
+ambitions, Ralph appears to have turned his talents to political
+journalism, and according to Tom Davies was becoming formidable as a party
+writer for the Opposition in these last years of Walpole's administration.
+Boswell tells us that Ralph ultimately succeeded Fielding in his share of
+the _Champion_; [12] but we have no definite knowledge of what precise
+part was taken by him in the earlier numbers. No continued trace occurs of
+his collaboration with Fielding; and indeed it is difficult to conceive
+any permanent alliance between Fielding's manly, independent, and generous
+nature, and the sordid and selfish character, and mediocre talents of
+James Ralph.
+
+[1] The fullest newspaper for theatrical notices at this date, preserved
+in the British Museum, the _London Daily Post_, is unfortunately missing
+for this year.
+
+[2] Now first printed, from documents at the Record Office.
+
+[3] A table inscribed by a former owner as having belonged to Henry
+Fielding, Esq., novelist, is now in the possession of the Somersetshire
+Archaeological Society. The inscription adds that Fielding "hunted from
+East Stour Farm in 1718." He would then be eleven years old!
+
+[4] From the hitherto unpublished original, in the library of Alfred Huth,
+Esq.
+
+[5] "Cro: Eliz." is the legal abbreviation for Justice Croke's law reports
+for the reign of Elizabeth.
+
+[6] _Champion_, February 26, 1740.
+
+[7] _The Tryal of Colley Cibber, Comedian etc._ 1740.
+
+[8] Those of April 22, and April 29, 1740.
+
+[9] And see _Daily Gazeteer_, Oct. 9, 1740.
+
+[10] _Champion_, December 22, 1739.
+
+[11] For April 22, April 29, May 6, and May 17.
+
+[12] Boswell's _Johnson_, edited by Birkbeck Hill. Vol. i. p. 169. n. 2:
+"Ralph ... as appears from the minutes of the partners of the _Champion_
+in the possession of Mr Reed of Staple Inn, succeeded Fielding in his
+share of the paper before the date of that eulogium [1744]."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+"COUNSELLOR FIELDING"
+
+    "Wit is generally observed to love to reside in empty pockets."
+    _Joseph Andrews_.
+
+The last retort on Colley Cibber had scarcely been launched from the
+columns of the _Champion_, when that intrepid 'Censor of Great Britain'
+and indefatigable law student, _Captain Hercules Vinegar_, attained the
+full dignities of a barrister of the Middle Temple. On June 20, 1740,
+Fielding was called to the Bar; and on the same day the Benchers of his
+Inn assigned to him chambers at No. 4 Pump Court, "up three pair of
+stairs." This assignment, according to the wording of the Temple records,
+was "for the term of his natural life." These chambers may still be seen,
+with their low ceilings and panelled walls, very much to all appearance as
+when tenanted by Harry Fielding. The windows of the sitting-room and
+bedroom look out on to the beautiful old buildings of Brick Court, and
+from the head of the staircase one looks across to the stately gilded
+sundial of Pump Court, old even in Fielding's day, with its warning motto:
+
+  "Shadows we are and like shadows depart."
+
+Here, in these lofty chambers, up their "three pair" of worn and narrow
+stairs, Fielding donned his barrister's gown, and waited for briefs; and,
+possessing as he did an imagination "fond of seizing every gay prospect,"
+and natural spirits that gave him, as his cousin Lady Mary tells us,
+cheerfulness in a garret, this summer of 1740 must have been full of
+sanguine hopes. He was now thirty-three, and his splendid physique had not
+yet become shattered by gout. He had gained, Murphy observes, no
+inconsiderable reputation by the _Champion_; his position as a brilliant
+political playwright had been long ago assured by _Pasquin_; the party to
+whose patriotic interests he had devoted so much energy and wit was now
+rapidly approaching power; and two years of eager application had equipped
+him with 'no incompetent share of learning' for a profession in which, we
+are told, he aspired to eminence. The swift disappointment of these brave
+hopes, the fast coming years of sickness, distress, and grief endow the
+old chambers with something of tragedy; but in June, 1740, the shadows
+were still but a sententious word on the dial.
+
+There is practically no surviving record of Fielding's activity as a
+barrister. From Murphy we learn that his pursuit of the law was hampered
+by want of means; and that, moreover, even his indomitable energies were
+soon often forced to yield to disabling attacks of illness. So long as his
+health permitted him he "attended with punctual assiduity" on the Western
+circuit, and in term time at Westminster Hall. But gout rapidly "began to
+make such assaults upon him as rendered it impossible for him to be as
+constant at the bar as the laboriousness of his profession required," and
+he could only follow the law in intervals of health. Under such
+"severities of pain and want" he yet made efforts for success; and the
+tribute rendered by his first biographer to the courage of those efforts
+deserves quotation in full: "It will serve to give us an idea of the great
+force of his mind, if we consider him pursuing so arduous a study under
+the exigencies of family distress, with a wife and children, whom he
+tenderly loved, looking up to him for subsistence, with a body lacerated
+by the acutest pains, and with a mind distracted by a thousand avocations
+and obliged for immediate supply to produce almost extempore a farce, a
+pamphlet, or a newspaper." Murphy's careless pen seems here to confuse the
+student years with those of assiduous effort at the Bar; and the extempore
+farces are, judging by the dates of Fielding's collected plays, no more
+than a rhetorical flourish: but there seems no reason to doubt the
+essential truth of this picture of the vigorous struggles of the sanguine,
+witty, and not unlearned barrister, ambitious of distinction, and always
+sensitively anxious as to the maintenance of his wife and children. We may
+see him attending the Western circuit in March and again in August, riding
+from Winchester to Salisbury, thence to Dorchester and Exeter, and on to
+Launceston, Taunton, Bodmin, Wells or Bristol as the case might be;
+constant in his appearance at Westminster; and supplementing his briefs by
+political pamphlets written in the service of an Opposition supported by
+the intellect and integrity of the day.
+
+It is inexplicable that no records, in the letters or diaries of his
+brother lawyers, should have come down to us of circuits, enlivened by the
+wit of Harry Fielding; that practically all traces of his professional
+work should be lost; and that concerning the many friendships which he is
+recorded to have made at the Bar we should know practically nothing beyond
+his own cordial acknowledgment of the lawyers' response, three years after
+his call, to the subscription for the _Miscellanies_. In the preface to
+those volumes he writes: "I cannot however forbear mentioning my sense of
+the Friendship shown me by a Profession of which I am a late and unworthy
+Member, and from whose Assistance I derive more than half the Names which
+appear to this subscription." All that we have to add to this, is the
+unconscious humour of Murphy's observation that the friendships Fielding
+met with "in the course of his studies, and indeed through the remainder
+of his life from the gentlemen of the legal profession in general, and
+particularly from some who have since risen to be the first ornaments of
+the law, will ever do honour to his memory." Had the names of these worthy
+'ornaments' been preserved, posterity could now give them due recognition
+as having been honoured by the friendship of Henry Fielding. [1]
+
+Fielding in his habit, as he lived, is for ever eluding us. His tall
+figure vanishes behind the prolific playwright, the exuberant politician,
+the truculent journalist, the indefatigable magistrate, the great creative
+genius. But at no point does the wittiest man of his day, and a lawyer of
+some repute--'Mr Fielding is allowed to have acquired a respectable share
+of jurisprudence'--escape us so completely as during these years of
+'punctual assiduity' at the Bar. His very domicile is unknown, after the
+surrender of those pleasant chambers in Pump Court, on November 28 1740.
+
+The political activities of "Counsellor Fielding" stand out far more
+clearly than do the legal labours of these years of struggle at the Bar.
+The year of his call, 1740, was one of constant embarrassment for Sir
+Robert Walpole, whose long enjoyment of single power was now at last
+drawing to a miserable close. The conduct of the Spanish War was
+arraigned, and suggestions were made that the Government were in secret
+alliance with the enemy. When the news came, in March, that Walpole's
+parliamentary opponent, the bluff Admiral Vernon, had captured Porto Bello
+from Spain, with six ships only, the public rejoicing and votes of
+congratulation were so many attacks on the peace-at-any-price Minister. A
+powerful fleet, designed against Spain, lay inactive in Torbay the greater
+part of the summer, through (alleged) contrary winds. And when Parliament
+met in November 1740, an onslaught by the Duke of Argyll in the Lords
+paved the way for the celebrated attack on Sir Robert in the Commons,
+known as "The Motion" of February 13, 1741. A fine political cartoon
+published in the following month, and here reproduced, in which Walpole
+appears as mocking at the death and burial of this same "Motion" of
+censure (which the House had rejected), places Fielding in the forefront
+of the Opposition procession. The dead "Motion" is being carried to the
+"Opposition" family vault, already occupied by Jack Cade and other
+"reformers"; and the bier is preceded by five standard-bearers, sadly
+carrying the insignia of the party's papers. Among these, and second only
+to the famous _Craftsman_, comes Fielding's tall figure, bearing aloft a
+standard inscribed _The Champion_, and emblazoned with that terrible club
+of _Captain Hercules Vinegar_, which, we may recall, was always ready to
+"fall on any knave in company." Behind the bier hobbles, clearly, the old
+Duchess of Marlborough; and Walpole's fat figure stands in the foreground,
+laughing uproariously at this "Funeral of Faction." In the doggerel verses
+beneath this cartoon, it is very plainly hinted that "old Sarah," and the
+Opposition, were in league with the Stewarts. In this historic debate, for
+which members secured seats at six o'clock in the morning, the vote of
+censure on "the _one person_" arraigned was defeated, Sir Robert once
+again securing a majority, and so "the Motion" as the cartoonist depicts,
+died "of a Disappointment." Another cartoon commemorating this ill-fated
+effort is instructive as showing, again in the foreground of the fight, a
+figure wearing a barrister's wig, gown, and bands, and inscribed with the
+words _Pasquin_ and _The Champion_. The Opposition Leader, Pulteney, leads
+both the _Pasquin_ figure, and another representing the paper _Common
+Sense_, literally by the nose with the one hand, while with the other he
+neatly catches, on his drawn sword, Walpole's organ the _Gazetteer_. In
+doggerel verses attached to the print Fielding is complimented with the
+following entire verse to himself:--
+
+  "Then the Champion of the Age,
+  Being Witty, wise, and Sage,
+  Comes with Libells on the Stage."
+
+This _Pasquin_ figure has none of the personal characteristics of
+Fielding, neither his "length of nose" nor his stately stature, so well
+suggested in the former print; but, lay figure though it be, it symbolises
+no less clearly the prominent part he played in these final political
+struggles of 1741. Also the lawyer's dress with which Fielding is here
+signified is noteworthy; and similar acknowledgment of his new dignities
+may be seen in the reference (in a copy of Walpole's _Gazetteer_ for 1740)
+to the attacks levelled on Sir Robert by "Captain Vinegar--_i.e._
+Counsellor F---d--g."
+
+These popular indications of Fielding's activity in the fighting ranks of
+the Opposition, during this last year of Walpole's domination, are
+supplemented by the evidence of his own pen. As early as January 1741, and
+while the grand Parliamentary attack of the 13th of February was but
+brewing, he published an eighteenpenny pamphlet, in verse, satirising Sir
+Robert's lukewarm conduct of the war with Spain. To the title of _The
+Vernoniad_, there was added a lengthy mock-title in Greek, the whole being
+presented as a lost fragment by Homer, describing, in epic style, the
+mission of one "Mammon" sent by Satan to baffle the fleets of a nation
+engaged in war with _Iberia_. "Mammon" is a perfectly obvious satirical
+sketch of Walpole himself, in the execution of which the hand that had
+drawn the corrupt fiddler "Mr Quidam" and the tipsy "Mr Pillage" for the
+Haymarket stage, has in no wise lost its cunning. "Mammon" (Walpole was
+reputed to have amassed much wealth) hides his palace walls by heaps of
+"ill-got Pictures." The pictures collected at Houghton, the Minister's
+pretentious Norfolk seat, were famous; and the notes to the "Text" are
+careful to depict, in illustration, "some rich Man without the least Taste
+having purchased a Picture at an immense Price, lifting up his eyes to it
+with Wonder and Astonishment, without being able to discover wherein its
+true Merit lies." "Mammon" declares virtue to be but a name, and his
+wonted eloquence is bribery. Sir Robert asserted that every man has his
+price. "Mammon" preserves dulness and ignorance, "while Wit and Learning
+starve." Walpole's illiterate tastes were notorious. At the close of the
+poem, "Mammon" accomplishes the behest of his master, Satan, by bribing
+contrary winds to drive back the English ships (a satire on Walpole's
+conduct of the war); and he finally returns to hell, and "in his Palace
+keeps a _three Weeks'_ Feast." Sir Robert it may be noted usually
+entertained for three weeks, in the spring, at Houghton. The whole is a
+slashing example of the robust eighteenth-century political warfare,
+polished by constant classical allusions and quotations; and doubtless it
+was read with delight in the coffee houses of the Town in that critical
+winter of 1740-1741. Two characteristic allusions must not be omitted.
+Even in the heat of party hard hitting Fielding finds time for a thrust at
+Colley Cibber, whose prose it seems was in several places by no means to
+be comprehended till "explained by the _Herculean_ Labours of Captain
+_Vinegar_" And there is a pleasant reference to "my friend Hogarth the
+exactest Copier of Nature."
+
+In this first month of 1741, Fielding published yet another poetical
+pamphlet for his party, but of a less truculent energy. _True Greatness_
+is a poem inscribed to a recruit in the Opposition ranks, the celebrated
+George Bubb Dodington; and when the eulogiums offered by the poet to his
+political leaders, Argyll, Carteret, Chesterfield, and Lyttelton, to all
+of whom are ascribed that "True Greatness" which "lives but in the Noble
+Mind," are completed by a description of Dodington as irradiating a blaze
+of virtues, this particular pamphlet becomes somewhat rueful reading. For
+Dodington was, if report speaks true, a pliant politician as well as an
+ineffable coxcomb, although it must be admitted that he won eulogies and
+compliments alike from the perfect integrity of Lyttelton, and the
+honourable pen of James Thomson. Even Fielding's glowing lines do not
+outstrip Thomson's panegyric in _The Seasons_.
+
+A more enduring interest however than the merits or demerits of a
+Dodington, lies in this shilling pamphlet. In it is clearly foreshadowed
+Fielding's great ironic outburst on false greatness, given to the world a
+few years later in the form of the history of that Napoleon in villany,
+the "great" Mr Jonathan Wild. In the medium of stiff couplets (verse being
+"a branch of Writing" which Fielding admits "I very little pretend to")
+the subject-matter of the magnificent irony of _Jonathan Wild_ is already
+sketched. Here the spurious "greatness" of inhuman conquerors, of droning
+pedants, of paltry beaus, of hermits proud of their humility, is
+mercilessly laid bare; and something is disclosed of the "piercing
+discernment" of that genius which, Murphy tell us, "saw the latent sources
+of human actions."
+
+We have seen indications in Murphy's careless pages that these few years
+of Fielding's assiduous efforts at the Bar were years burdened by
+"severities of want and pain." It is difficult not to admit a reference to
+some such personal experiences in a passage in this same poem. The lines
+in question describe the Poet going hungry and thirsty
+
+  "As down Cheapside he meditates the Song"....
+
+a "great tatter'd Bard," treading cautiously through the streets lest he
+meet a bailiff, oppressed with "want and with contempt," his very liberty
+to "wholesome Air" taken from him, yet possessing the greatness of mind
+that no circumstances can touch, and the power to bestow a fame that shall
+outlive the gifts of kings. This latter claim foreshadows the magnificent
+apostrophe in _Tom Jones_ on that unconquerable force of genius, able to
+confer immortality both on the poet, and the poet's theme. Was the 'great
+tatter'd Bard,' cautiously treading the streets, little esteemed, and yet
+the conscious possessor of true greatness (did not the author of _Tom
+Jones_ rely with confidence on receiving honour from generations yet
+unborn), none other than the tall figure of Fielding himself? At least we
+know that soon after this year he writes of having lately suffered
+accidents and waded through distresses, sufficient to move the pity of his
+readers, were he "fond enough of Tragedy" to make himself "the Hero of
+one."
+
+One of the rare fragments of Fielding's autograph, [2] refers both to this
+pamphlet, and to the _Vernoniad_:
+
+
+"Mr Nourse,
+
+"Please to deliver Mr Chappell 50 of [crossed out: my] [_sic_] True
+Greatness and 50 of the Vernoniad.
+
+Y'rs
+
+"Hen. Ffielding.
+
+"_April_ 20 1741."
+
+In June of this year occurred the death of General Edmund Fielding,
+briefly noticed in the _London Magazine_ as that of an officer who "had
+served in the late Wars against _France_ with much Bravery and
+Reputation." The General's own struggles to support his large family
+probably prevented his death affecting the circumstances of his eldest
+son. In the same month Fielding appears as attending a "Meeting of the
+Partners in the Champion," held at the Feathers Tavern, on June 29. The
+list of the partners present at the Feathers is given as follows:--[3]
+
+    Present
+
+    Mr Fielding
+    Mr Nourse
+    Mr Hodges
+    Mr Chappelle
+
+    Mr Cogan
+    Mr Gilliver
+    Mr Chandler
+
+The business recorded was the sale of the "Impressions of the Champion in
+two Vollumes, 12'o, No. 1000." The impression was put up to the Company by
+auction, and was knocked down to Mr Henry Chappelle for £110, to be paid
+to the partners. The majority of the partners are declared by the Minutes
+to have confirmed the bargain; the minority, as appears from the list of
+signatures, being strictly that of one, Henry Fielding. After this
+dissension Fielding's name ceases to appear at the _Champion_ meetings;
+and as he himself states that he left off writing for the paper from this
+very month the evidence certainly points to a withdrawal on his part in
+June 1741 from both the literary and the business management of the paper.
+The edition referred to in the Minutes is doubtless that advertised in the
+_London Daily Post_ a few days before the meeting of the partners, as a
+publication of the _Champion_ "in two neat Pocket Volumes." [4]
+
+Meanwhile the whole force of the Opposition was thrown into the battle of
+a General Election; and it is interesting to note that Pitt stood for the
+seat for Fielding's boyish home, and the home of his wife, that of Old
+Sarum. The elections went largely against Walpole, and by the end of June
+defeat was prophesied for a Minister who would only be supported by a
+majority of sixteen.
+
+It is somewhat inexplicable that at this, the very moment of the
+approaching victory of his party Fielding appears to have withdrawn from
+all journalistic work. "I take this Opportunity to declare in the most
+solemn Manner," he writes, in after years, "I have long since (as long as
+from _June_ 1741) desisted from writing one Syllable in the _Champion_, or
+any other public Paper." And yet more unexpected is the fact that six
+months later, during the last weeks of Walpole's failing power, a rumour
+should be abroad that Fielding was assisting his old enemy. In one of his
+rare references to his private life, that in the Preface to the
+_Miscellanies_, he seeks to clear himself from unjust censures "as well on
+account of what I have not writ, as for what I have"; and, as an instance
+of such baseless aspersions, he relates that, in this winter of 1741, "I
+received a letter from a Friend, desiring me to vindicate myself from two
+very opposite Reflections, which two opposite Parties thought fit to cast
+on me, _viz_. the one of writing in the _Champion_ (tho' I had not then
+writ in it for upwards of half a year) the other, of writing in the
+Gazetteer, in which I never had the honour of inserting a single Word."
+What can have occurred, in the bewildering turmoil of that
+eighteenth-century party strife, that the author of _Pasquin_, the
+possessor of "Captain Vinegar's" Herculean Club, should have to vindicate
+himself from a charge of writing in the columns of Walpole's _Gazetteer_.
+During these last months of Sir Robert's power his Cabinet was much
+divided, and two of his Ministers were in active revolt; possibly rumour
+assigned the services of the witty pen of Counsellor Fielding to these
+Opposition Ministerialists. But that some change did indeed take place in
+Fielding's political activities, in these last six months of 1741 is
+obvious from his withdrawal from writing in any "Public" paper; and from
+passages in the last political pamphlet known to have come from his pen.
+This pamphlet, entitled _The Opposition. A Vision_, was published in the
+winter of 1741, a winter of severe illness, and of "other circumstances"
+which, as he tells us, "served as very proper Decorations" to the sickbeds
+of himself, his wife, and child. It is a lively attack on the divided
+councils and leaders of the Opposition, thrown into the form of a dream,
+caused by the author's falling asleep over "a large quarto Book intituled
+'An apology for the Life of Mr Colley Gibber, Comedian.'" In his dream
+Fielding meets the Opposition, in the form of a waggon, drawn by very
+ill-matched asses, the several drivers of which have lost their way. The
+luggage includes the Motion for 1741, and a trunk containing the
+_Champion_ newspaper. One passenger protests that he has been hugely
+spattered by the "Dirt" of the "last Motion," and that he will get out,
+rather than drive through more dirt. A gentleman of "a meagre aspect" (is
+he the lean Lyttelton?) leaves the waggon; and another observes that the
+asses "appear to me to be the worst fed Asses I ever beheld ... that long
+sided Ass they call _Vinegar_, which the Drivers call upon so often to
+_gee up_, and _pull lustily_, I never saw an Ass with a worse Mane, or a
+more shagged Coat; and that grave Ass yoked to him, which they name
+_Ralph_, and who pulls and brays like the Devil, Sir, he does not seem to
+have eat since the hard Frost. [5] Surely, considering the wretched Work
+they are employed in, they deserve better Meat."
+
+The longsided ass, Vinegar, with the worst of manes and the most shagged
+coat, short even of provender, recalls the picture, drawn twelve months
+previously, of the great hungry tatter'd Bard; and the inference seems
+fair enough that for Fielding politics were no lucrative trade. A more
+creditable inference, in those days of universal corruption, it may be
+added, would be hard to find. The honour of a successful party writer who
+yet remained poor in the year 1741, must have been kept scrupulously
+clean. The _Vision_ proceeds to show the waggon, with two new sets of
+asses from Cornwall and Scotland (the elections had gone heavily against
+Walpole in both these districts), suddenly turning aside from the "Great
+Country Road" (the Opposition was known as the Country Party); and the
+protesting passengers are told that the end of their journey is "St
+James." Some of the asses, flinching, are "well whipt"; but the waggon
+leaves the dreamer and many of its followers far behind. Suddenly a Fat
+Gentleman's coach stops the way. The drivers threaten to drive over the
+coach, when one of the asses protests that the waggon is leaving the
+service of the country, and going aside on its own ends, and that "the
+Honesty of even an Ass would start" at being used for some purposes. The
+waggon is all in revolt and confusion, when the Fat Gentleman, who
+appeared to have "one of the pleasantest and best natured Countenances I
+ever beheld," at last had the asses unharness'd, and turned into a
+delicious meadow, where they fell to feeding, as after "long Abstinence."
+Finally, the pleasant-faced fat gentleman's coach proceeds on the way from
+which the waggon had deviated, carrying with it some of the former drivers
+of the same; the mob burn the derelict obstructing vehicle; and their
+noise, and the stink and smoke of the conflagration wake the dreamer.
+
+In this last word of Fielding's active political career (for his later
+anti-Jacobite papers are concerned rather with Constitutional and
+Protestant, than with party strife), a retirement from political
+collar-work is certainly signified. His reasons for such a step escape us
+in the mist of those confused and heated conflicts. His detestation of
+Walpole's characteristic methods may very well have roused his ever ready
+fighting instincts, whereas, once Walpole's fall was practically assured
+the weak forces of the Opposition (William Pitt being yet many years from
+power) could have availed but little to enlist his penetrating intellect.
+And he may by now have found that politics afforded, in those days, but
+scanty support to an honourable pen.
+
+But supposition, in lack of further evidence, is fruitless; all that we
+can clearly perceive is that this winter of sickness and distress marks a
+final severance from party politics. The hungry 'hackney writer' of the
+lean sides and shagged coat, if not, indeed, turned to graze in the fat
+meadow of his dream, was at last freed from an occupation that could but
+shackle the genius now ready to break forth in the publication of _Joseph
+Andrews_.
+
+[1] A tantalising reference to one such acquaintance occurs in Lord
+Campbell's _Lives of the Chancellors_. Vol. v. p. 357. In notes made by
+Lord Camden's nephew, George Hardinge, for a proposed Life of the Lord
+Chancellor there is this entry: "formed an acquaintance ... with Henry
+Fielding ... called to the Bar."
+
+[2] Now in the possession of W. K. Bixby, Esq., of St Louis, U.S.A.
+
+[3] In a manuscript copy of the Minutes, in the possession of the present
+writer.
+
+[4] _London Daily Post_, June 18-26, 1741.
+
+[5] The hard frost would be the terrible preceding winter of 1739-40, a
+winter long remembered for the severity of the cold, the cost of
+provisions, and the suffering of the poor.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+JOSEPH ANDREWS
+
+    "This kind of writing I do not remember to have seen hitherto
+    attempted in our language."
+    Preface to _Joseph Andrews_.
+
+On the 2nd of February 1742 Sir Robert Walpole, the 'Colossos' of popular
+broadsides, under whose feet England had lain for exactly thirty years,
+received his final defeat; and the intrepid wit, who for the past eight
+years had heartily lashed the tyrannies and corruptions of that 'Great
+Man,' enjoyed at last the satisfaction of witnessing the downfall of the
+_Mr Quiddam_ and _Mr Pillage_ of his plays, of the _Plunderer_ and
+_Mammon_ of his pamphlets, of the _Brass_ on whom many a stinging blow had
+fallen in the columns of his _Champion_.
+
+With the retirement of Walpole, Fielding's vigorous figure vanishes from
+active political service. No more caustic Greek epics, translated from the
+original "by Homer," no more boisterous interludes with three-bottle Prime
+Ministers appearing in the part of principal boy, come from his pen. But
+scarcely is the ink dry on the page of his last known political pamphlet,
+when Fielding reappears, in this Spring of 1742, not as the ephemeral
+politician, but as the triumphant discoverer of a new continent for
+English literature; as the leader of a revolution in imaginative writing
+which has outlived the Ministries and parties, the reforms, the broils,
+and warfares of two centuries. For, to-day, the fierce old contests of
+Whig and Tory, the far-off horrors of eighteenth-century gibbets, jails,
+and streets, the succession of this and that Minister, the French Wars and
+Pragmatic Sanctions of 1740 are all dead as Queen Anne. But the novel
+based on character, on human life, in a word on 'the vast authentic Book
+of Nature' is a living power; and it was by the publication, in February
+1742, of _The Adventures of Mr Joseph Andrews and his Friend Mr Abraham
+Adams_, that Fielding reveals himself as the father of the English novel.
+Henceforth we can almost forget the hard-hitting political _Champion_; we
+may quite forget the facile 'hackney writer' of popular farces, and the
+impetuous studies of the would-be barrister. With the appearance of these
+two small volumes Henry Fielding reaches the full stature of his genius as
+the first, and perhaps the greatest, of English novelists.
+
+It is difficult, at the present day, to realise the greatness of his
+achievement. Fielding found, posturing as heroines of romance, the
+_Clelias, Cleopatras, Astraeas_; he left the living women, Fanny Andrews,
+Sophia Western, Amelia Booth. "Amelia," writes his great follower
+Thackeray, "... the most charming character in English fiction,--Fiction!
+Why fiction? Why not history? I know Amelia just as well as Lady Mary
+Wortley Montagu." Again, Fielding found a world of polite letters, turning
+a stiff back on all "low" naturalness of life. He taught that world (as
+his friend Lillo had already essayed to do in his tragedy of a _London
+Merchant_) that the life of a humble footman, of a poor parson in a torn
+cassock, of the poverty-hunted wife of an impoverished army-captain, of a
+country lad without known parentage, interest or fortune, may make finer
+reading than all the Court romances ever written; and, moreover, that "the
+highest life is much the dullest, and affords very little humour or
+entertainment." And, having rediscovered this world of natural and simple
+human nature, his genius proceeded to the creation of nothing less than an
+entirely new form of English literary expression, the medium of the novel.
+
+The preface to _Joseph Andrews_ shows that Fielding was perfectly
+conscious of the greatness of his adventure. Such a species of writing, he
+says, "I do not remember to have seen hitherto attempted in our language."
+We can but wonder at, and admire, the superb energy and confidence which
+could thus embark on the conscious production of this new thing, amid
+want, pain, and distress. And wonder and admiration increase tenfold on
+the further discovery that this fresh creation in literature, fashioned in
+circumstances so depressing, is overflowing with an exuberance of healthy
+life and enjoyment. Having entered on his fair inheritance of this new
+world of human nature, Fielding pourtrays it from the standpoint of his
+own maxim, that life "everywhere furnishes an accurate observer with the
+ridiculous." So, into this, his newly-cut channel for imaginative
+expression (to use Mr Gosse's happy phrase) he poured the strength of a
+genius naturally inclined to that "exquisite mirth and laughter," which as
+he declared in his preface to these volumes, "are probably more wholesome
+physic for the mind and conduce better to purge away spleen, melancholy,
+and ill affections than is generally imagined." No book ever more
+thoroughly carried out this wholesome doctrine. The laughter in _Joseph
+Andrews_ is as whole-hearted, if not as noisy, the practical jokes are as
+broad, as those of a healthy school-boy; and the pages ring with a spirit
+and gusto recalling Lady Mary's phrase concerning her cousin "that no man
+enjoyed life more than he did." To quote again from Mr Gosse: "A good deal
+in this book may offend the fine, and not merely the superfine. But the
+vitality and elastic vigour of the whole carry us over every difficulty...
+and we pause at the close of the novel to reflect on the amazing freshness
+of the talent which could thus make a set of West country scenes, in that
+despised thing, a novel, blaze with light like a comedy of Shakespeare."
+
+So original in creation, so humane, so full of a brave delight in life,
+was the power that, mastering every gloomy obstacle of circumstance, broke
+into the stilted literary world of 1742; and Murphy's Irish rhetoric is
+not too warm when he talks of this sunrise of Fielding's greatness "when
+his genius broke forth at once, with an effulgence superior to all the
+rays of light it had before emitted, like the sun in his morning glory."
+
+Any detailed comment on the literary qualities of the genius which thus
+disclosed itself would exceed the limits of this memoir; and indeed such
+comment is, now, a thrice-told tale. To Sir Walter Scott, Fielding is the
+"father of the English novel"; to Byron, "the prose Homer of human
+nature." The magnificent tribute of Gibbon still remains a towering
+monument, whatever experts may tell us concerning the Hapsburg genealogy.
+"Our immortal Fielding," he wrote, "was of the younger branch of the Earls
+of Denbigh, who drew their origin from the Counts of Hapsburg. The
+successors of Charles V. may disdain their brethren of England; but the
+romance of _Tom Jones_, that exquisite picture of human manners, will
+outlive the palace of the Escurial and the Imperial Eagle of Austria."
+Smollett affirmed that his predecessor painted the characters, and
+ridiculed the follies, of life with equal strength, humour and propriety.
+The supreme autocrat of the eighteenth century, Dr Johnson himself, though
+always somewhat hostile to Fielding, read _Amelia_ through without
+stopping, and pronounced her to be 'the most pleasing heroine of all the
+romances.' "What a poet is here," cries Thackeray, "watching, meditating,
+brooding, creating! What multitudes of truths has that man left behind
+him: what generations he has taught to laugh wisely and fairly." Finally
+we may turn neither to novelist nor historian, but to the metaphysical
+philosopher, "How charming! How wholesome is Fielding!" says Coleridge,
+"to take him up after Richardson is like emerging from a sick-room, heated
+by stoves, into an open lawn on a breezy day in May." Such are some
+estimates of the quality of Fielding's genius, given by men not
+incompetent to appraise him. To analyse that genius is, as has been said,
+beyond the scope of these pages. But Fielding's first novel is not only a
+revelation of genius. It frankly reveals much of the man behind the pen;
+and in its pages, and in those of the still greater novels yet to come, we
+may learn more of the true Fielding than from all the fatuities and
+surmises of his early biographers.
+
+Thus in _Joseph Andrews_ for the first time we come really close to the
+splendid and healthy energy, the detachment, the relentless scorn, the
+warmth of feeling, that characterised Henry Fielding under all
+circumstances and at all times of his life. This book, as we have seen,
+was written under every outward disadvantage, and yet its pages ring with
+vigour and laughter. Here is the same militant energy that had nerved
+Fielding to fight the domination of a corrupt (and generally corrupting)
+Minister for eight lean years; and which in later life flung itself into a
+chivalrous conflict with current social crime and misery. Here is a
+detachment hardly less than that which fills the pages of the last
+_Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon_ with a courage, a gaiety, a serenity that
+no suffering and hardship, and not even the near approach of death itself,
+could disturb. Here, again, Fielding consciously avows a moral purpose in
+his art; the merciless scorn of his insight in depicting a vicious man or
+woman is actuated, he expressly declares, by a motive other than that of
+'art for art's sake.' And as this motive is scarce perceptible in the
+lifelike reality of the figures whom we see breathing in actual flesh and
+blood in his pages, and yet is of the first importance for understanding
+the character of their creator, the great novelist's confession of this
+portion of his literary faith may be quoted in full. The passage occurs in
+the preface to Book iii. of _Joseph Andrews_. Fielding is afraid, he
+explains, that his figures may be taken for particular portraits, whereas
+it is the type and not the individual that concerns him. "I declare here,"
+he solemnly affirms, "once for all, I describe not Men, but Manners; not
+an Individual, but a Species." And he proceeds to make example of the
+lawyer in the stage coach as not indeed confined "to one Profession, one
+Religion, or one Country; but when the first mean selfish Creature
+appeared on the human Stage, who made Self the Centre of the whole
+Creation; would give himself no Pain, incur no Damage, advance no Money to
+assist, or preserve his Fellow-Creatures; then was our Lawyer born; and
+while such a Person as I have described, exists on Earth, so long shall he
+remain upon it." Not therefore "to mimick some little obscure Fellow" does
+this lawyer appear on Fielding's pages, but "for much more general and
+noble Purposes; not to expose one pitiful Wretch, to the small and
+contemptible Circle of his Acquaintance; but to hold the Glass to
+thousands in their Closets that they may contemplate their Deformity, and
+endeavour to reduce it."
+
+Yet another characteristic of Fielding's personality appears in the
+conscious control exercised over all the humorous and satiric zest of
+_Joseph Andrews_. Here is no unseemly riot of ridicule. The ridiculous he
+declares in his philosophic preface is the subject-matter of his pages;
+but he will suffer no imputation of ridiculing vice or calamity. "Surely,"
+he cries, "he hath a very ill-framed Mind, who can look on Ugliness,
+Infirmity, or Poverty, as ridiculous in themselves"; and he formally
+declares that such vices as appear in this work "are never set forth as
+the objects of Ridicule but Detestation." What then were the limits which
+Fielding imposed on himself in treating this, his declared subject matter
+of the ridiculous? Hypocrisy and vanity, he says, appearing in the form of
+affectation; "Great Vices are the proper Object of our Detestation,
+smaller Faults of our Pity: but Affectation appears to me the only true
+Source of the Ridiculous." Such is Fielding's sensitive claim for the
+decent limits of ridicule; and such the consciously avowed subject of his
+work. But the force of his genius, the depth of his insight, the warmth of
+his detestations and affections, soon carried him far beyond any mere
+study in the ridicule of vain and hypocritical affectation. The immortal
+figure of Parson Adams, striding through these pages, tells us infinitely
+much of the character of his creator, but nothing at all of the nature of
+affectation. The "rural innocence of a Joseph Andrews," to quote Miss
+Fielding's happy phrase [1] and of his charming Fanny, are as natural and
+fresh as Fielding's own Dorsetshire meadows, but instruct us not at all in
+vanity or hypocrisy.
+
+To turn to the individual figures of _Joseph Andrews_; what do they tell
+us of the man who called them into being. First and foremost, it is Parson
+Adams who unquestionably dominates the book. However much the licentious
+grossness of Lady Booby, the shameless self-seeking of her waiting-woman,
+Mrs Slipslop, the swinish avarice of Parson Trulliber, the calculating
+cruelty of Mrs Tow-wouse, to name but some of the vices here exposed,
+blazon forth that 'enthusiasm for righteousness' which constantly moved
+Fielding to exhibit the devilish in human nature in all its 'native
+Deformity,' it is still Adams who remains the central figure of the great
+comic epic. Concerning the good parson, appreciation has stumbled for
+adequate words, from the tribute of Sir Walter Scott to that of Mr Austin
+Dobson. "The worthy parson's learning," wrote Sir Walter, "his simplicity,
+his evangelical purity of heart, and benevolence of disposition, are so
+admirably mingled with pedantry, absence of mind, and with the habit of
+athletic and gymnastic exercise, ... that he may be safely termed one of
+the richest productions of the Muse of Fiction." And to Mr Austin Dobson,
+this poor curate, compact as he is of the oddest contradictions, the most
+diverting eccentricities, is "assuredly a noble example of primitive
+goodness, and practical Christianity." We love Adams, as Fielding intended
+that we should, for his single-hearted goodness, his impulsiveness, his
+boundless generosity, his muscular courage; we are never allowed to forget
+the dignity of his office however ragged be the cassock that displays it;
+we admire his learning; we delight in his oddities. But above all he
+reflects honour on his creator by the inflexible integrity of his
+goodness. A hundred tricks are played on him by shallow knaves, and the
+result is but to convince us of the folly of knavery. His ill-clad and
+uncouth figure moves among the vicious and prosperous, and we perceive the
+ugliness of vice, and the poverty of wealth. With his nightcap drawn over
+his wig, a short grey coat half covering a torn cassock, the crabstick so
+formidable to ruffians in his hand, and his beloved AEschylus in his
+pocket, Adams smoking his pipe by the inn fire, or surrounded by his
+"children" as he called his parishioners vying "with each other in
+demonstrations of duty and love," fully justifies John Forster's comment
+on Fielding's manly habit of "discerning what was good and beautiful in
+the homeliest aspects of humanity." Before the true dignity of Abraham
+Adams, whether he be publicly rebuking the Squire and Pamela for laughing
+in church, or emerging unstained from adventures with hogs-wash and worse,
+the accident of his social position as a poor curate, contentedly drinking
+ale in the squire's kitchen, falls into its true insignificance.
+
+Rumour assigned to Fielding's friend and neighbour at East Stour, the Rev.
+William Young, the honour of being the original of Parson Adams; and it is
+a pleasant coincidence that the legal assignment for _Joseph Andrews_,
+here reproduced in facsimile, should bear the signature, as witness, of
+the very man whose "innate goodness" is there immortalised. If there be
+any detractors of Fielding's personal character still to be found, they
+may be advised to remember the truism that a man is known by his friends,
+and to apply themselves to a study of William Young in the figure of
+Parson Adams.
+
+Of the charming picture of rustic beauty and innocence presented in the
+blushing and warmhearted Fanny less need be said; for Fielding's ideal in
+womanhood was soon to be more fully revealed in the lovely creations of
+Sophia and Amelia. And honest Joseph himself, his courage and fidelity,
+his constancy, his tenderness and chivalrous passion for Fanny, his
+affection for Mr Adams, his voice "too musical to halloo to the dogs," his
+fine figure and handsome face, concerns us here chiefly as demonstrating
+that Fielding, when he chose, could display both virtue and manliness as
+united in the person of a perfectly robust English country lad.
+
+These then, are some of the figures that Fielding loved to create,
+breathing into their simple virtues a vigorous human life, fresh as
+Coleridge said, as the life of a Spring morning. In these joyous creations
+of his heart and of his genius, the great novelist assuredly gives us a
+perfectly unconscious revelation of his own character. And among the
+changing scenes of this human comedy one incident must not be forgotten.
+In the famous episode of the stage coach, all Fielding's characteristic
+and relentless hatred of respectable hypocrisy, all his love of innate if
+ragged virtue is betrayed in the compass of a few pages: in those pages in
+which we see the robbed, half-murdered, and wholly naked Joseph lifted in
+from the wayside ditch amid the protests and merriment of the respectable
+passengers; and his shivering body at last wrapped in the coat of the
+postilion,--"a Lad who hath since been transported for robbing a
+Hen-roost,"--who voluntarily stripped off a greatcoat, his only garment,
+"at the same time swearing a great Oath (for which he was rebuked by the
+Passengers) 'that he would rather ride in his Shirt all his Life, than
+suffer a Fellow-Creature to lie in so miserable a Condition.'"
+
+Much has been written concerning the notorious feud between Fielding and
+Richardson, a feud ostensibly based upon the fact that _Joseph Andrews_
+was, to some extent, frankly a parody of Richardson's famous production
+_Pamela_. In 1740, two years before the appearance of _Joseph Andrews_
+that middle-aged London printer had published _Pamela, or Virtue
+Rewarded_, achieving thereby an enormous vogue. That amazing mixture of
+sententious moralities, of prurience, and of mawkish sentiment, became the
+rage of the Town. Admirers ranked it next to the Bible; the great Mr Pope
+declared that it would "do more good than many volumes of Sermons"; and it
+was even translated into French and Italian, becoming, according to Lady
+Mary Wortley Montagu, who did not love Richardson, "the joy of the
+chambermaids of all nations." That all this should have been highly
+agreeable to the good Richardson, a 'vegetarian and water-drinker, a
+worthy, domesticated, fussy, and highly nervous little man,' ensconced in
+a ring of feminine flatterers whom he called 'my ladies,' is obvious; and
+proportionate was his wrath with Fielding's _Joseph Andrews_, of which the
+early chapters, at least, are a perfectly frank, and to Richardson
+audacious, satire on _Pamela_. The caricature was indeed frank. Joseph is
+introduced as Pamela's brother; he writes letters to that virtuous
+maid-servant; and the Mr B. of Richardson becomes the Squire Booby of
+Fielding. But there can be hardly two opinions as to such ridicule being
+an entirely justified and wholesome antidote to the pompous and nauseous
+original. To Fielding's robust and masculine genius, says Mr Austin
+Dobson, "the strange conjunction of purity and precaution in Richardson's
+heroine was a thing unnatural and a theme for inextinguishable Homeric
+laughter." To Thackeray's sympathetic imagination the feud was the
+inevitable outcome of the difference between the two men. Fielding, he
+says "couldn't do otherwise than laugh at the puny cockney bookseller,
+pouring out endless volumes of sentimental twaddle, and hold him up to
+scorn as a moll-coddle and a milksop. His genius had been nursed on sack
+posset, and not on dishes of tea. His muse had sung the loudest in tavern
+choruses, and had seen the daylight streaming in over thousands of empty
+bowls, and reeled home to chambers on the shoulders of the watchman.
+Richardson's goddess was attended by old maids and dowagers, and fed on
+muffins and bohea. 'Milksop!' roars Harry Fielding, clattering at the
+timid shop-shutters. 'Wretch! Monster! Mohock!' shrieks the sentimental
+author of _Pamela_; and all the ladies of his court cackle out an
+affrighted chorus."
+
+Looking back on the incident it seems matter for yet more Homeric laughter
+that Richardson should have called the resplendent genius of Fielding
+"low." But the feud, it may be surmised, led to much of the odium that
+seems to have attached to Fielding's name amongst some of his
+contemporaries. Feeling ran high and was vividly expressed in those days;
+and when cousinly admiration for Fielding was coupled by an excellent
+comment on Richardson's book as the delight of the maidservants of all
+nations, personal retorts in favour of the popular sentimentalist were but
+too likely to ensue. Apart from this aspect of the matter the ancient
+quarrel does not seem a very essential incident in Fielding's life.
+
+The lack of means indicated by Fielding himself, in his reminiscence of
+this winter of 1741-2 as darkened by the illness of himself, his wife and
+of a favourite child, attended "with other Circumstances, which served as
+very proper Decorations to such a Scene," received but little alleviation
+from the publication of _Joseph Andrews_. The price paid for the book by
+Andrew Millar was but £183, 11s.; and there is no record that Millar
+supplemented the original sum, as he did in the case of _Tom Jones_, when
+the sale was assured. The first edition appears to have consisted of 1,500
+copies. A second edition, of 2,000 copies was issued in the same
+summer,[2] and a third edition followed in 1743.
+
+Fielding's formal declaration that he described "not men but manners"; his
+solemn protest, in the preface to this very book, that "I have no
+Intention to vilify or asperse anyone: for tho' everything is copied from
+the Book of Nature, and scarce a Character or Action produced which I have
+not taken from my own Observations and Experience, yet I have used the
+utmost Care to obscure the Persons by such different Circumstances,
+Degrees, and Colours, that it will be impossible to guess at them with any
+degree of Certainty"--represent rather his intention than the result. The
+portraits of "manners" by the "prose Homer of human nature" were too
+lifelike to escape frequent identification. Thus not only was the
+prototype of Parson Adams discovered, but that of his antithesis, the
+pig-breeding Mr Trulliber, was thought to exist in the person of the Rev.
+Mr Oliver, the Dorsetshire curate under whose tutelage Fielding had been
+placed when a boy. Tradition also connects Mr Peter Pounce with the
+Dorsetshire usurer Peter Walter. [3]
+
+Two echoes have come down to us of the early appreciation of this novel. A
+translation of _Joseph Andrews_, "par une Dame Angloise," and bound for
+Marie Antoinette by Derome le Jeune, was placed on the shelves of her
+library in the Petit Trianon. [4] And, seven years after the appearance of
+_Joseph Andrews_, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, when sixty years old, writes
+from her Italian exile: "I have at length received the box with the books
+enclosed, for which I give you many thanks as they amuse me very much. I
+gave a very ridiculous proof of it, fitter indeed for my granddaughter
+than myself. I returned from a party on horseback; and after having rode
+20 miles, part of it by moonshine, it was ten at night when I found the
+box arrived. I could not deny myself the pleasure of opening it; and
+falling upon Fielding's works was fool enough to sit up all night reading.
+I think Joseph Andrews better than his Foundling." [5]
+
+[1] _Cleopatra and Octavia_. Sarah Fielding. Introduction.
+
+[2] See the ledgers of Woodfall, the printer, quoted in _Notes and
+Queries_, Series vi. p. 186.
+
+[3] It is interesting to note that Samuel Rogers was heard to speak with
+great admiration of chapter xiii. of Book iii., entitled "A curious
+Dialogue which passed between Mr Abraham Adams and Mr Peter Pounce." (MS.
+note by Dyce, in a copy of _Joseph Andrews_, now in the South Kensington
+Museum.)
+
+[4] This copy, published in Amsterdam in 1775, is now in the possession of
+Mr Pierpont Morgan.
+
+[5] Letters and Works of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Vol. ii. p. 194.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+THE _Miscellanies_ AND _Jonathan Wild_
+
+    "Is there on earth a greater object of contempt than the poor
+    scholar to a splendid beau; unless perhaps the splendid beau to
+    the poor scholar."
+    _Covent Garden Journal_, No. 61.
+
+If the 'sunrise' of Fielding's genius did indeed shine forth on the
+publication of _Joseph Andrews_, it was a sunrise attended by dark clouds.
+For, with the appearance of these two little volumes, we enter on the most
+obscure period of the great novelist's life, and on that in which he
+appears to have suffered the severest 'invasions of Fortune.'
+
+As regards the winter immediately preceding the appearance of that joyous
+epic of the highway, he himself has told us that he was 'laid up in the
+gout, with a favourite Child dying in one Bed, and my Wife in a Condition
+very little better, on another, attended with other Circumstances, which
+served as very proper Decorations to such a Scene.' In the following
+February, an entry in the registers of St Martin's in the Fields records
+the burial of a child "Charlott Fielding." So it is probable that the very
+month of the appearance of his first novel brought a private grief to
+Fielding the poignancy of which may be measured by his frequent betrayals
+of an anxious affection for his children.
+
+To such distresses of sickness and anxiety, there was now, doubtless,
+added the further misery of scanty means. For a few months later an
+advertisement (hitherto overlooked) appears in the _Daily Post_, showing
+that Fielding was already eagerly pushing forward the publication of the
+_Miscellanies_, that incoherent collection which is itself proof enough
+that necessity alone had called it into being. "The publication of these
+Volumes," he says, "hath been hitherto retarded by the Author's
+indisposition last Winter, and a train of melancholy Accidents, scarce to
+be parallel'd; but he takes this opportunity to assure his Subscribers
+that he will most certainly deliver them within the time mentioned in his
+last receipts, viz. by the 25th December next." [1]
+
+We may take it, then, that the first six months of 1742 were attended by
+no easy circumstances; and, accordingly, during these months Fielding's
+hard-worked pen produced no less than three very different attempts to win
+subsistence from those humoursome jades the nine Muses. To take these
+efforts in order of date, first comes, in March, his sole invocation of
+the historic Muse, the _Full Vindication of the Dutchess Dowager of
+Marlborough_, published almost before Joseph Andrews was clear of the
+printers, and sold at the modest price of one shilling. We learn from the
+title page that the _Vindication_ was called forth by a "late _scurrilous_
+Pamphlet," containing "_base_ and _malicious_ Invectives" against Her
+Grace. Together with Fielding's natural love for fighting, a family tie
+may have given him a further incitement to draw his pen on behalf of the
+aged Duchess. For his first cousin, Mary Gould, the only child of his
+uncle James Gould, M.P. for Dorchester, had married General Charles
+Churchill, brother to the great Duke. Whether this cousinship by marriage
+led to any personal acquaintance between 'old Sarah' and Harry Fielding we
+do not know; and the muniment room at Blenheim affords no trace of any
+correspondence between the Duchess and her champion. But certainly the
+_Vindication_ lacks nothing of personal warmth. Fielding tells us that he
+has never contemplated the character of that 'Glorious Woman' but with
+admiration; and he defends her against the attacks of her opponents
+through forty strenuous pages, in which the curious may still hear the
+echoes of the controversies that raged round the Duke and his Duchess,
+their mistress Queen Anne, and other actors of the Revolution. The
+_Vindication_ appeared in March; and a second edition was called for
+during the year. As far as Millar's payment goes Fielding, as appears from
+the assignment in _Joseph Andrews_, received only £5; and it is to be
+feared that the Duchess (who is said to have paid the historian Hooke
+£5000 for his assistance in the production of her own celebrated pamphlet)
+placed but little substantial acknowledgment in Fielding's lean purse. Her
+champion at any rate had, within three years, modified the views expressed
+in this _Vindication_, concerning the munificence of Her Grace's private
+generosity; for in his journal the _True Patriot_, there occurs the
+following obituary notice, "A Man supposed to be a Pensioner of the late
+Duchess of Marlborough.... He is supposed to have been Poor."
+
+This same month of March marked Fielding's final severance with the
+_Champion_. The partners of that paper, meeting on March the 1st, ordered
+"that Whereas Henry Fielding Esq., did Originally possess Two Sixteenth
+Shares of the Champion as a Writer in the said paper and having withdrawn
+himself from that Service for above Twelve Months past and refused his
+Assistance in that Capacity since which time Mr Ralph has solely
+Transacted the said Business. It is hereby Declared that the said Writing
+Shares shall devolve on and be vested in Mr James Ralph." [2] It is
+curious that Fielding did not add to his impoverished exchequer by selling
+his _Champion_ shares.
+
+Having sought assistance from the Muse of history in March, Fielding
+returns to his old charmer the dramatic Muse in May; assisting in that
+month to produce a farce, at Drury Lane, entitled _Miss Lucy in Town_. In
+this piece, he tells us, he had a very small share. He also received for
+it a very small remuneration; £10, 10s. being recorded as the price paid
+by Andrew Millar.
+
+In the following month Fielding's inexhaustible energies were off on a new
+tack, producing, in startling contrast to _Miss Lucy_, a classical work,
+executed in collaboration with his friend the Rev. William Young,
+otherwise Parson Adams. The two friends contemplated a series of
+translations of all the eleven comedies of Aristophanes; adorned by notes
+containing "besides a full Explanation of the Author, a compleat History
+of the Manners and Customs of the Ancient Greeks particularly of the
+Athenians"; and in June they inaugurated their scheme with the work in
+question, a translation of the Plutus.[3] William Young, says Hutchins,
+"had much learning which was the cement of Mr Fielding's connexion with
+him"; and Fielding's own scholarship, irradiated by his wit, would
+assuredly have made him an ideal translator of Greek comedy. But the
+public of 1742 appears to have afforded very little encouragement to this
+scheme, preferring that "pretty, dapper, brisk, smart, pert, Dialogue" of
+their own comedies, to which allusion is made in the authors' preface.
+
+The rest of the year shows nothing from a pen somewhat exhausted perhaps
+with the production of _Joseph Andrews_ of the historical _Vindication_,
+and of parts of a Drury Lane farce and of the _Plutus_, all within five
+months. And the winter following, in which the promised _Miscellanies_
+should have appeared, brought, in the renewed illness of his wife, an
+anxiety that paralysed even Fielding's buoyant vigour. This we learn from
+his own touching apology for the further delay of those volumes; a delay
+due, their author tells us, to "the dangerous Illness of one from whom I
+draw all the solid Comfort of my Life, during the greatest Part of this
+Winter. This, as it is most sacredly true, so will it, I doubt not,
+sufficiently excuse the Delay to all who know me." [4] Early in the
+following year, after this second winter of crushing anxiety, and under an
+urgent pressure for means, Fielding tried again his familiar _rôle_ of
+popular dramatist, giving his public the husks they preferred, in the
+comedy of the _Wedding Day_. This comedy was produced at Drury Lane on the
+17th of February 1743.
+
+If Fielding had failed to descend to the taste of the Town in offering
+them Aristophanes, he flung them in the _Wedding Day_ something too
+imperfect for acceptance, even by the 'critic jury of the pit,' And the
+bitter humour in which he was now shackling his genius to the honourable
+task of immediate bread-winning, or in his own words to the part of
+"hackney writer," comes out clearly enough in the well-known anecdote of
+the first night of this comedy. In Murphy's words, Garrick, then a new
+player, just taking the Town by storm, "told Mr Fielding he was
+apprehensive that the audience would make free in a particular passage;
+adding that a repulse might so flurry his spirits as to disconcert him for
+the rest of the night, and therefore begged that it might be omitted. 'No,
+d--mn 'em,' replied the bard, 'if the scene is not a good one, let them
+find _that_ out.' Accordingly the play was brought on without alteration,
+and, just as had been foreseen, the disapprobation of the house was
+provoked at the passage before objected to; and the performer alarmed and
+uneasy at the hisses he had met with, retired into the green-room, where
+the author was indulging his genius, and solacing himself with a bottle of
+champaign." Fielding, continues Murphy, had by this time drank pretty
+plentifully, and "'_What's the matter, Garrick?_' says he, '_what are they
+hissing now?_' Why the scene that I begged you to retrench; I knew it
+would not do; and they have so frightened me that I shall not be able to
+collect myself again the whole night. _Oh! d--mn 'em_, replies the author,
+_they HAVE found it out, have they!_" That Fielding should be scornfully
+indifferent to the judgment of the pit on work forced from him by
+overwhelming necessities, and which his own judgment condemned, is a
+foregone conclusion; but that he suffered keenly in having to produce
+imperfect work, and was jealously anxious to clear his reputation, as a
+writer, in the matter of this particular comedy, is no less apparent from
+the very unusual personal explanation he offered for it, soon after the
+brief run of the play was over. For no man was more shy of
+autobiographical revelations. His biographers are continually reduced to
+gleaning stray hints, here and there, concerning his private life.
+[5] And therefore we can measure by this emergence from a habitual
+personal reticence the soreness with which he now published work unworthy
+of his genius. "Mr Garrick," Fielding tells us, speaking of this
+distressed winter of 1742-3 "... asked me one Evening, if I had any play
+by me; telling me he was desirous of appearing in a new Part [and] ... as
+I was full as desirous of putting Words into his Mouth, as he could appear
+to be of speaking them, I mentioned [a] Play the very next morning to Mr
+_Fleetwood_ who embraced my Proposal so heartily, that an Appointment was
+immediately made to read it to the Actors who were principally to be
+concerned in it." On consideration, however, this play appeared to
+Fielding to need more time for perfecting, and also to afford very little
+opportunity to Garrick. So, recollecting that he still had by him a play
+which, although 'the third Dramatic Performance' he ever attempted,
+contained a character that would keep the audience's "so justly favourite
+Actor almost eternally before their Eyes," he decided, with characteristic
+impetuosity, to a change at the last moment. "I accordingly," he writes,
+"sat down with a Resolution to work Night and Day, owing to the short Time
+allowed me, which was about a Week, in altering and correcting this
+Production of my more Juvenile Years; when unfortunately the extreme
+Danger of Life into which a Person, very dear to me, was reduced, rendered
+me incapable of executing my Task. To this Accident alone I have the
+vanity to apprehend, the Play owes most of the glaring Faults with which
+it appeared.... Perhaps, it may be asked me why then did I suffer a Piece
+which I myself knew was imperfect, to appear? I answer honestly and
+freely, that Reputation was not my Inducement; and that I hoped, faulty as
+it was, it might answer a much more solid, and in my unhappy situation, a
+much more urgent Motive." This hope was, alas, frustrated; not even the
+brilliancy of a cast which included Garrick, Mrs Pritchard, Macklin, and
+Peg Woffington, could carry the _Wedding Day_ over its sixth night; and
+the harassed author received 'not £50 from the House for it.' The comedy
+is a coarsely moral attack on libertinism, a fact which probably, in no
+wise added to the popularity of the play in the pit and boxes of 1743.
+
+A doggerel prologue, both written and spoken by Macklin, gives an
+excellent picture of the playhouse humours, and of the wild pit, of those
+exuberant days; and contains moreover the following sound advice,
+addressed to Fielding
+
+  "Ah! thou foolish follower of the ragged Nine
+  You'd better stuck to honest Abram Adams, by half;
+  He, in spite of critics can make your Readers laugh."
+
+The next publication of these lean years was the _Miscellanies_, a
+collection of mingled prose, verse, and drama, of which the only
+connecting link seems to be the urgent need of money which forced so
+heterogenous a medley from so great an artist. These long delayed volumes
+appeared, probably, in April, and were, says Fielding, composed with a
+frequent "Degree of Heartache." They include the lover's verses of his
+early youth; philosophical, satiric, and didactic essays; a reprint of the
+political effusion dedicated to Dodington; a few plays; the fragment
+entitled _A Journey from this World to the Next_; and the splendid ironic
+outburst on villany, _Jonathan Wild_.
+
+The _Preface_, largely occupied as it is with those private circumstances
+which forced the hasty production of the _Wedding Day_, has other matter
+of even greater interest for the biographer. Thus Fielding's sensitive
+care of his reputation in essential matters appears in the fiery denial
+here given to allegations of publishing anonymous scandals: "I never was,
+nor will be the Author of anonymous Scandal on the private History or
+Family of any Person whatever. Indeed there is no Man who speaks or thinks
+with more detestation of the modern custom of Libelling. I look on the
+practice of stabbing a Man's Character in the Dark, to be as base and as
+barbarous as that of stabbing him with a Poignard in the same manner; nor
+have I ever been once in my Life guilty of it." Here too, he marks his
+abhorrence of that 'detestable Vice' hypocrisy, which vice he was, before
+long, to expose utterly in the person of Blifil in _Tom Jones_. His happy
+social temperament is betrayed in the characteristic definition of good
+breeding as consisting in "contributing with our utmost Power to the
+Satisfaction and Happiness of all about us." And in these pages we have
+Fielding's philosophy of _goodness_ and _greatness_, delivered in words
+that already display an unrivalled perfection of style. Speaking of his
+third volume, that poignant indictment of devilry the _Life of Mr Jonathan
+Wild the Great_, it is thus that Fielding exposes the iniquity of villains
+in "great" places:--"But without considering _Newgate_ as no other than
+Human Nature with its mask off, which some very shameless Writers have
+done, a Thought which no Price should purchase me to entertain, I think we
+may be excused for suspecting, that the splendid Palaces of the Great, are
+often no other than _Newgate_ with the Mask on. Nor do I know anything
+which can raise an honest Man's Indignation higher than that the same
+Morals should be in one Place attended with all imaginable Misery and
+Infamy and in the other with the highest Luxory and Honour. Let any
+impartial Man in his Senses be asked, for which of these two Places a
+Composition of Cruelty, Lust, Avarice, Rapine, Insolence, Hypocrisy, Fraud
+and Treachery, was best fitted, surely his Answer must be certain and
+immediate; and yet I am afraid all these Ingredients glossed over with
+Wealth and a Title, have been treated with the highest Respect and
+Veneration in the one, while one or two of them have been condemned to the
+Gallows in the other."
+
+Here is the converse of that insight which could discern goodness under a
+ragged cassock, or in a swearing postilion. And, having discerned the true
+nature of such Great Men, Fielding proceeds to point out that "However the
+Glare of Riches and Awe of Title may terrify the Vulgar; nay however
+Hypocrisy may deceive the more Discerning, there is still a Judge in every
+Man's Breast, which none can cheat or corrupt, tho' perhaps it is the only
+uncorrupt thing about him"; that nothing is so preposterous as that men
+should laboriously seek to be villains; and that this Judge, inflexible
+and honest "however polluted the Bench on which he sits," always bestows
+on the spurious Great the penalty of fear, an evil which "never can in any
+manner molest the Happiness" of the "Enjoyments of Innocence and Virtue."
+
+The subsequent philosophic dissertation on the qualities of goodness and
+greatness is interesting for such passages as the definition of a good man
+as one possessing "Benevolence, Honour, Honesty, and Charity"; and the
+fine declaration that of the passion of Love "goodness hath always
+appeared to me the only true and proper Object." And the very springs of
+action underlying half at least of each of the three great novels, and
+almost every page of _Jonathan Wild_, are revealed in the final
+declaration of the writer's intention to expose in these pages vice
+stripped of its false colours; to show it "in its native Deformity." As
+the native and stripped deformity of vice is perhaps not often fully
+apprehended and certainly is very seldom exposed in our own age, Fielding,
+by the very sincerity and fire of his morality, doubtless loses many a
+modern reader.
+
+It is in the third volume of the _Miscellanies_, a volume completely
+occupied by _Jonathan Wild_, that Fielding first fully reveals himself as
+public moralist. And in this Rogue's progress to the gallows he displays
+so concentrated a zeal, that nothing short of his genius and his humour
+could have saved these pages from the dullness of the professional
+reformer. For the little volume consists of a relentless exposure of the
+deformity and folly of vice. Here the foul souls of Wild and his
+associates, stripped of all the glamour of picturesque crime, stand
+displayed in their essential qualities, with the result that even the
+pestilential air of thieves' slums, of 'night cellars,' and of Newgate
+purlieus, an air which hangs so heavy over every page, falls back into
+insignificance before the loathsomeness of the central figure. A few years
+later, in the preface to _Tom Jones_, Fielding formally asserted his
+belief that the beauty of goodness needed but to be seen 'to attract the
+admiration of mankind'; in _Jonathan Wild_ he appears to be already at
+work on the converse doctrine, that if the deformity of vice be but
+stripped naked, abhorrence must ensue. Such a naked criminal is Wild; and
+in the contemplation of his vices, as in the case of the arch hypocrite
+Blifil, in _Tom Jones_, and of the shameless sensualist "My Lord," in
+_Amelia_, Fielding's characteristic compassion for the faults of hard
+pressed humanity is, for the time, scorched up in the fierceness of his
+anger and scorn at deliberate cruelty, avarice and lust. Under the spell
+of Fielding's power of painting the devil in his native blackness, we feel
+that for such as Wild hanging is too handsome a fate. It is easy for his
+Newgate chaplain to assert that "nothing is so sinful as sin"; it takes a
+great genius and a great moralist to convince us, as in this picture, that
+nothing is so deformed or so contemptible. The dark places of _Jonathan
+Wild_ receive some light in the character of the good jeweller, in the
+tender scenes between that honest ruined tradesman and his wife and
+children, and in the devoted affection of his apprentice. But the true
+illumination of the book, and its personal value for the biographer, lie
+in the white heat of anger, the "sustained and sleepless irony" to adopt
+Mr Austin Dobson's happy phrase, with which Fielding, with a force
+unwavering from the first page to the last, here assails his subject. An
+underlying attack on the Ministerial iniquity of "Great Men" in high
+places seems to be often suggested; if this be a true inference, it does
+but give us further proof of Fielding's energies as a political, no less
+than as a moral, reformer. Certainly, through all the squalid scenes of
+the book, the contention is insisted on that criminals of Wild's
+tyrannical stamp may as easily be found in courts, and at the head of
+armies, as among the poor leaders of Newgate gangs. To the wise moralist
+it is the same rogue, whether picking a pocket or swindling his country.
+
+And not to forget the wit in the moral reformer, we may leave Mr Jonathan
+Wild listening to one of the reasons given by the Newgate chaplain for his
+Reverence's preference for punch over wine: "Let me tell you, Mr Wild
+there is nothing so deceitful as the spirits given us by wine. If you must
+drink let us have a bowl of punch; a liquor I the rather prefer as it is
+nowhere spoken against in Scripture."
+
+After _Jonathan Wild_ the most interesting fragment of the _Miscellanies_
+is the _Journey from this World to the Next_. In this essay Fielding
+reveals his philosophy, his sternness, his affections, and his humour, as
+a man might do in intimate conversation. His warm humanity breathes in the
+conception that "the only Business" of those who had won admission to
+Elysium 'that happy Place,' was to "contribute to the Happiness of each
+other"; and again in the stern declaration of Heaven's doorkeeper, the
+Judge Minos, that "no Man enters that Gate without Charity." And indeed
+the whole chapter devoted to the judgments administered by Minos on the
+spirits that come, confident or trembling, before him, and are either
+admitted to Heaven, sent back to earth, or despatched to the "little Back
+Gate" opening immediately into the bottomless pit, is full of personal
+revelation. We feel the glee with which Fielding consigns the "little
+sneaking soul" of a miser to diabolically ingenious torments; the
+satisfaction with which he watches Minos apply a kick to the retreating
+figure of a duke, possessed of nothing but "a very solemn Air and great
+Dignity"; and the pleasure it gave him to observe the rejection accorded
+to "a grave Lady," the Judge declaring that "there was not a single Prude
+in Elysium." Again, nothing could be more true to Fielding's nature than
+the account of the poet who is admitted, not for the moral value he
+himself places on his Dramatic Works (which he endeavours to read aloud to
+Minos), but because "he had once lent the whole profits of a Benefit Night
+to a Friend, and by that Means had saved him and his Family from
+Destruction"; unless it were the account of the poverty driven wretch,
+hanged for a robbery of eighteen-pence, who yet could plead that he had
+supported an aged Parent with his labour, that he had been a very tender
+Husband, and a Kind Father, and that he had ruined himself for being Bail
+for a Friend. "At these words," adds the historian, "the gate opened, and
+_Minos_ bid him enter, giving him a slap on the Back as he passed by him."
+
+When the author's own turn came, he very little expects, he tells us, "to
+pass this fiery Trial. I confess'd I had indulged myself very freely with
+Wine and Women in my Youth, but had never done an Injury to any Man
+living, nor avoided an opportunity of doing good; but I pretended to very
+little Virtue more than general Philanthropy and Private Friendship." Here
+Minos cut the speaker short, bidding him enter the gate, and not indulge
+himself trumpeting forth his virtues. Whether or no we may here read the
+reflections of Fielding's maturity, looking honestly back over his own
+forty years and forward with humble fear into the future, we may certainly
+see reflected in both confession and judgment much of the doctrine and the
+practice of his life.
+
+After the failure, early in 1743, of the _Wedding Day_, and the subsequent
+publication of the _Miscellanies_, Fielding seems to have thrown his
+energies for twelve months into an exclusive pursuit of the law. This
+appears from his statement, made a year later, in May 1744, that he could
+not possibly be the author of his sister's novel _David Simple_, which had
+been attributed to him, because he had applied himself to his profession
+"with so arduous and intent a diligence that I have had no leisure, if I
+had inclination, to compose anything of this kind." Clearly, in the period
+that covers the publication of _Joseph Andrews_ an historical pamphlet,
+parts of a farce and of _Plutus_, and of the _Miscellanies_, Fielding
+found both leisure and inclination for writing; so this sudden immersion
+in law must relate to the twelve months or so intervening between these
+works and the publication of his statement. Murphy corroborates this bout
+of hard legal effort. After the _Wedding Day_ says that biographer "the
+law from this time had its hot and cold fits with him." The cold fits were
+fits of gout; and inconveniences felt by Fielding from these interruptions
+were, adds Murphy "the more severe upon him, as voluntary and wilful
+neglect could not be charged upon him. The repeated shocks of illness
+disabled him from being as assiduous an attendant at the bar, as his own
+inclination and patience of the most laborious application, would
+otherwise have made him."
+
+Mr Counsellor Fielding follows his retrospect of this strenuous attack on
+the law with a declaration that, henceforth, he intends to forsake the
+pursuit of that 'foolscap' literary fame, and the company of the
+'infamous' nine Muses; a decision based partly on the insubstantial nature
+of the rewards achieved, and partly it would seem due to the fact that at
+Fielding's innocent door had been laid, he declares, half the anonymous
+scurrility, indecency, treason, and blasphemy that the few last years had
+produced. [6] In especial he protests against the ascription to his pen of
+that 'infamous paltry libel' on lawyers, the _Causidicade_, an ascription
+which, as he truly says, accused him "not only of being a bad writer and a
+bad man, but with downright idiotism in flying in the face of the greatest
+men of my profession." He also declares that no anonymous work had issued
+from his pen since his promise to that effect; and that these false
+accusations had injured him cruelly in ease, reputation and interest. This
+solemn declaration that the now detested Muses shall no longer beguile
+Fielding's pen affords excellent reading in view of the fact that this
+absorbed barrister must, within a year or two, have been at work on _Tom
+Jones_. The whole emphatic outburst was probably partly an effort to
+assert himself as now wholly devoted to the law, and partly an example of
+one of those "occasional fits of peevishness" into which, Murphy tells us,
+distress and disappointment would betray him.
+
+The preface to his sister's novel _David Simple_, in which Fielding took
+occasion to announce these protests and assertions, is his only extant
+publication for this year of 1744; and apart from its biographical value
+is not of any great moment. Ample proof may be found in it of brotherly
+pride and admiration for the work of a sister "so nearly and dearly allied
+to me in the highest friendship as well as relation." There is the
+noteworthy declaration that the "greatest, noblest, and rarest of all the
+talents which constitute a genius" is the gift of "a deep and profound
+discernment of all the mazes, windings, and labyrinths which perplex the
+heart of man." The utterance concerning style, by so great a master of
+English, is memorable--"a good style as well as a good hand in writing is
+chiefly learned by practice." And a delightful reference should not be
+forgotten to the carping ignorant critic, who has indeed, "had a little
+Latin inoculated into his tail," but who would have been much the gainer
+had "the same great quantity of birch been employed in scourging away his
+ill-nature."
+
+Disabled by gout and harassed by want of money, a yet greater distress was
+now fast closing on Fielding in the prolonged illness of his wife. "To see
+her daily languishing and wearing away before his eyes," says Murphy, "was
+too much for a man of his strong sensations; the fortitude with which he
+met all other calamities of life [now] deserted him." In the autumn of
+1744 Mrs Fielding was at Bath, doubtless in the hope of benefit from the
+Bath waters. And here, in November, she died. Her body was brought to
+London for burial in the church of St. Martin's in the Fields; receiving
+on the 14th of November, 1744, honourable interment in the chancel vault,
+to the tolling of the great tenor bell, and with the fullest ceremonial of
+the time. Indeed it is evident, from the charges still preserved in the
+sexton's book, that Fielding rendered to his wife such stately honours as
+were occasionally accorded to the members of the few great families
+interred in the old church.
+
+The death of this beloved wife, Murphy tells us, brought on Fielding "such
+a vehemence of grief that his friends began to think him in danger of
+losing his reason." When we remember that he himself has explicitly stated
+that lovely picture of the 'fair soul in the fair body,' the Sophia of
+_Tom Jones_, to have been but a portrait of Charlotte Fielding, we can in
+some measure realise his overwhelming grief at her death. And that the
+exquisite memorial raised to his wife by Fielding's affection and genius
+was not more beautiful in mind or face than the original, is acknowledged
+by Lady Bute, a kinswoman of the great novelist. Lady Bute was no
+stranger, "to that beloved first wife whose picture he drew in his Amelia,
+where, as she said, even the glowing language he knew how to employ did
+not do more than justice to the amiable qualities of the original, or to
+her beauty. He loved her passionately, and she returned his affection; yet
+had no happy life for they were almost always miserably poor, and seldom
+in a state of quiet and safety. His elastic gaiety of spirit carried him
+through it all; but meanwhile, care and anxiety were preying upon her more
+delicate mind, and undermining her constitution. She gradually declined,
+caught a fever and died in his arms." That Fielding's married life was
+unhappy, whatever were its outward conditions, is obviously a very shallow
+misstatement; but, for the rest, the picture accords well enough with our
+knowledge of his nature. The passionate tenderness of which that nature
+was capable appears in a passage from those very _Miscellanies_, which, he
+tells us, were written with so frequent a "Degree of Heartache." In the
+_Journey from this World to the Next_, Fielding describes how, on his
+entrance into Elysium, that "happy region whose beauty no Painting of the
+Imagination can describe" and where "Spirits know one another by
+Intuition" he presently met "a little Daughter whom I had lost several
+years before. Good Gods! What Words can describe the Raptures, the melting
+passionate Tenderness, with which we kiss'd each other, continuing in our
+Embrace, with the most extatic Joy, a Space, which if Time had been
+measured here as on Earth, could not have been less than half a Year."
+
+The fittest final comment on Henry Fielding's marriage with Charlotte
+Cradock is, perhaps, that saying of a member of his own craft of the
+drama, "Now to love anything sincerely is an act of grace, but to love the
+best sincerely is a state of grace."
+
+[1] _Daily Post_, June 5, 1742.
+
+[2] MS. copy of the Minutes of the Meetings of the Partners in the
+_Champion_, in the possession of the present writer.
+
+[3] See _Daily Post_. May 29, 1742.
+
+[4] Preface to the _Miscellanies_.
+
+[5] Such as the inscription on some verses, published in the
+_Miscellanies_, as "Written _Extempore_ in the Pump-room" at Bath, in
+1742.
+
+[6] Preface to _David Simple_.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+PATRIOTIC JOURNALISM
+
+    "he only is the _true Patriot_ who always does what is in
+    his Power for his Country's Service without any selfish Views or
+    Regard to private Interests."--The _True Patriot_.
+
+Fielding's active pen seems to have been laid aside for twelve months
+after the death of his wife; and it is perfectly in accord with all that
+we know of his passionate devotion to Charlotte Cradock that her loss
+should have shattered his energies for the whole of the ensuing year.
+Murphy, as we have seen, speaks of the first vehemence of his grief as
+being so acute that fears were entertained for his reason. According to
+Fielding's kinswomen, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Lady Bute, the first
+agonies of his grief approached to frenzy; but "when the first emotions of
+his sorrow were abated" his fine balance reasserted itself, and to quote
+again from Murphy, "philosophy administered her aid; his resolution
+returned, and he began again to struggle with his fortune."
+
+As we hear no more of exclusive devotion to the law, it may be assumed
+that the attempt of the previous year to live by that arduous calling
+alone was now abandoned; and to a man of Fielding's strong Protestant and
+Hanoverian convictions the year of the '45, when a Stewart Prince and an
+invading Highland army had captured Edinburgh and were actually across the
+border, could not fail to bring occupation. Fielding believed ardently
+that Protestant beliefs, civil liberty, and national independence of
+foreign powers were best safeguarded by a German succession to the English
+throne; so by the time Prince Charles and 6,000 men had set foot on
+English soil, the former 'Champion of Great Britain' was again up in arms,
+discharging his sturdy blows in a new weekly newspaper entitled the _True
+Patriot_.
+
+The _True Patriot_ is chiefly notable as affording the first sign that
+Fielding was now leaving party politics for the wider, and much duller,
+field of Constitutional liberty. A man might die for the British
+Constitution; but to be witty about it would tax the resources of a
+Lucian. And, accordingly, in place of that gay young spark Mr Pasquin, who
+laid his cudgel with so hearty a good will on the shoulders of the
+offending 'Great Man,' there now steps out a very philosophic, mature, and
+soberly constitutional _Patriot_; a patriot who explicitly asserts in his
+first number, "I am of no party; a word I hope by these my labours to
+eradicate out of our constitution: this being indeed the true source of
+all those evils which we have reason to complain of." And again, in No.
+14, "I am engaged to no Party, nor in the Support of any, unless of such
+as are truly and sincerely attached to the true interest of their Country,
+and are resolved to hazard all Things in its Preservation." Here is a
+considerable change from the personal zest that placed Mr Quiddam and Mr
+Pillage before delighted audiences in the Little Theatre in the Haymarket.
+
+The available copies of the _True Patriot_, now in the British Museum,
+[1] include only thirty-two numbers, starting from No. 1, which appeared
+on the 5th of November, 1745, and ending on June 3, 1746. The first number
+contains a characteristic tribute to Dean Swift, whose death had occurred
+'a few days since.' Doctor Jonathan Swift, says the _Patriot_, was "A
+genius who deserves to be rank'd among the first whom the World ever saw.
+He possessed the Talents of a Lucian a Rabelais and a Cervantes and in his
+Works exceeded them all. He employed his Wit to the noblest Purposes in
+ridiculing as well Superstition in Religion as Infidelity and the several
+Errors and Immoralities which sprung up from time to time in his Age; and
+lastly in defence of his Country.... Nor was he only a Genius and a
+Patriot; he was in Private Life a good and charitable Man and frequently
+lent Sums of Money, without interest, to the Poor and Industrious; by
+which means many Families were preserved from Destruction." In No. 2, the
+_Patriot_ reiterates his "sincere Intention to calm and heal, not to blow
+up and inflame, any Party-Divisions"; but even the task of defending the
+British Constitution could not stifle Fielding's wit, and he escapes, for
+breathing space as it were, into a column devoted to the news items of the
+week, gathered from various papers, and adorned by comments of his own,
+printed in italics. And in this running commentary on the daily occurences
+of the time we get nearer, perhaps, to the table-talk of Henry Fielding
+than by any other means. Thus he faithfully repeats the inflated obituary
+lists that were then in fashion, but with such a variation as the
+following, "Thomas Tonkin, ... universally lamented by his Acquaintance.
+Upwards of 40 Cows belonging to one at Tottenham Court, _universally
+lamented by all their Acquaintance_." On a notice of an anniversary
+meeting of the Society for propagating the Gospel in Foreign Parts there
+is the pertinent comment "_It is a Pity some Method--was not invented for
+the Propagation of the Gospel in Great Britain_." After the deaths of a
+wealthy banker and factor, comes the obituary of "One Nowns a Labourer,
+_most probably immensely poor, and yet as rich now as either of the two
+Preceeding_"; beside which may be placed the very characteristic assertion
+in No. 6 that "Spleen and Vapours inhabit Palaces and are attired with
+Pomp and Splendor, while they shun Rags and Prisons."
+
+There is scarcely a personal allusion in all the thirty-two numbers of the
+_Patriot_, save the charming picture of that gentleman sitting in his
+study "meditating for the good and entertainment of the public, with my
+two little children (as is my usual course to suffer them) playing near
+me." And the ending of his horrid nightmare, in which a Jacobite
+executioner was placing a rope round his neck, "when my little girl
+entered my bedchamber and put an end to my dream by pulling open my eyes,
+and telling me that the taylor had brought home my cloaths for his
+Majesty's Birthday." The number for January 28 must not be overlooked,
+containing as it does, a scathing and humourous exposure of the profligate
+young sparks of the Town, from no less a pen than that of the Rev. Mr.
+Abraham Adams; and Parson Adams' letter concludes with a paragraph in
+which may be heard the voice of the future zealous magistrate: "No man can
+doubt but that the education of youth ought to be the principal care of
+every legislation; by the neglect of which great mischief accrues to the
+civil polity in every city." When himself but a lad of twenty, and in the
+prologue of his first comedy, Fielding had entered his protest against
+certain popular vices of the time, and had made merry over its follies.
+The desire to make the world he knew too well a better place than he found
+it is just as keen in the wit and humourist of thirty-nine; a desire,
+moreover, undulled by twenty years of vivacious living. Surely not the
+least amazing feature of Fielding's genius is this dual capacity for
+exuberant enjoyment, and incisive judgement. "His wit," said Thackeray,
+"is wonderfully wise and detective; it flashes upon a rogue and brightens
+up a rascal like a policeman's lantern."
+
+To this time of national ferment belongs a publication of which we know
+nothing but the title, a _Serious Address_; and also one of our rare
+glimpses of the novelist's home life. Joseph Warton writes to his brother
+Tom, on October 29, 1746:--"I wish you had been with me last week when I
+spent two evenings with Fielding and his sister, who wrote David Simple,
+and you may guess I was very well entertained. The lady indeed retir'd
+pretty soon, but Russell and I sat up with the Poet till one or two in the
+morning, and were inexpressibly diverted. I find he values, as he justly
+may, Joseph Andrews above all his writings: he was extremely civil to me,
+I fancy, on my Father's account." Joseph Warton's father was Vicar of
+Basingstoke, Professor of Poetry at Oxford, and moreover, something of a
+Jacobite; whereby, we may surmise, that the _True Patriot_ did not allow
+his staunch Hanoverian sentiments too great an invasion into his private
+society. Alas, that it did not occur to Warton to preserve, for the
+entertainment of later ages, some fuller record of those two _noctes
+ambrosianae_.
+
+This sister, Sally Fielding as her cousin Lady Mary Wortley Montagu called
+her, made some figure in the literary world of the day. Richardson
+extolled her "knowledge of the human heart"; Murphy writes of her "lively
+and penetrating genius"; and her classical scholarship is attested by a
+translation of Xenophon's _Memorabilia_. That she also shared some of the
+engaging qualities of her brother may be assumed from the lines written to
+the memory of the "esteemed and loved ... Mrs. Sarah Fielding," by her
+friend Dr. John Hoadley.
+
+  "Her unaffected Manners, candid Mind,
+  Her Heart benevolent, and Soul resign'd;
+  Were more her Praise than all she knew or thought
+  Though Athens Wisdom to her Sex she taught."
+
+Sarah Fielding's name occurs again as living with her brother in that
+house in Beaufort Buildings with which is associated perhaps the happiest
+instance of Fielding's warm-hearted generosity. The story may be given as
+nearly as possible in the words of the narrator, one G. S., writing from
+Harley Street in 1786. After speaking of the conspicuous good nature of
+"the late Harry Fielding," G. S. says: "His receipts were never large, and
+his pocket was an open bank for distress and friendship at all times to
+draw on. Marked by such a liberality of mind it is not to be wondered at
+if he was frequently under pecuniary embarrassments.... Some parochial
+taxes for his house in Beaufort Buildings being unpaid, and for which he
+had been demanded again and again [we may remember how Mr. Luckless' door
+was "almost beat down with duns"]...he was at last given to understand by
+the collector who had an esteem for him, that he could procrastinate the
+payment no longer." To a bookseller, therefore he addressed himself, and
+mortgaged the coming sheets of some work then in hand. He received the
+cash, some ten or twelve guineas, and was returning home, full freighted
+with this sum, when, in the Strand, within a few yards of his own house,
+he met an old college chum whom he had not seen for many years. "Harry
+felt the enthusiasm of friendship; an hundred interrogatives were put to
+him in a moment as where had he been? where was he going? how did he do?
+&c. &c. His friend told him in reply he had long been buffeting the waves
+of adverse fortunes, but never could surmount them." Fielding took him off
+to dine at a neighbouring tavern, and as they talked, becoming acquainted
+with the state of his friend's pocket, emptied his own into it; and a
+little before dawn, he turned homewards "greater and happier than a
+monarch." Arrived at Beaufort Buildings his sister, who had anxiously
+awaited him, reported that the collector had called for the taxes twice
+that day. "Friendship," answered Harry Fielding "has called for the money
+and had it;--let the collector call again." Well might his cousin Lady
+Mary say of the man of whom such a story could be told, "I am persuaded he
+has known more happy moments than any prince upon earth."
+
+During the summer following Warton's visit to the brother and sister,
+Fielding published a _Dialogue between an Alderman and a Courtier_. And in
+the following November his second marriage took place, at the little City
+church of St Bene't's, Paul's Wharf. The story of this marriage cannot be
+better told than in the words of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's
+granddaughter, Lady Louisa Stuart, quoting from the personal knowledge of
+her mother and grandmother:
+
+"His biographers seem to have been shy of disclosing that after the death
+of this charming woman [his first wife] he married her maid. And yet the
+act was not so discreditable to his character as it may sound. The maid
+had few personal charms, but was an excellent creature, devotedly attached
+to her mistress, and almost broken-hearted for her loss. In the first
+agonies of his own grief, which approached to frenzy, he found no relief
+but from weeping with her; nor solace, when a degree calmer, but in
+talking to her of the angel they mutually regretted. This made her his
+habitual confidential associate, and in process of time he began to think
+he could not give his children a tenderer mother, or secure for himself a
+more faithful housekeeper and nurse. At least this was what he told his
+friends; and it is certain that her conduct as his wife confirmed it, and
+fully justified his good opinion." From a supposed allusion by Smollett,
+in the first edition of _Peregrine Pickle_, (an allusion afterwards
+suppressed) it would appear that Fielding's old schoolfellow and lifelong
+friend 'the good Lord Lyttelton' so far approved the marriage as himself
+to give Mary Daniel away; and, as the dates in the Twickenham Register of
+births show that the marriage was one of justice as well as expediency,
+this well accords with Lyttelton's upright and honourable character. Of
+Fielding's affectionate and grateful loyalty to his second wife ample
+evidence appears in the pages of his last book, the _Journal of a Voyage
+to Lisbon_. Throughout this touching record of the journey of a dying man,
+there are references to her tenderness, ability and devotion. At the sad
+parting from children and friends, on the morning of their departure for
+Lisbon, he writes of her behaviour as "more like a heroine and
+philosopher, though at the same time the tenderest mother in the world."
+When, during the voyage down the Thames, an unmannerly custom house
+officer burst into the cabin where Fielding and his wife were sitting, the
+man was soundly rated for breaking "into the presence of a lady without an
+apology or even moving his hat"; by which we may see his sensitive care
+that due respect was accorded her. He tells us how he persuaded her with
+difficulty to take a walk on shore when their vessel was wind bound in
+Torbay, it being "no easy matter for me to force [her] from my side." With
+anxious forboding he thinks of his "dear wife and child" facing the world
+alone after his death, for "in truth I have often thought they are both
+too good and too gentle to be trusted to the power of any man I know, to
+whom they could possibly be so trusted." And in a more formal tribute he
+acknowledges the abilities that accompanied her worth, when he says that
+"besides discharging excellently well her own and all tender offices
+becoming the female character; ... besides being a faithful friend, an
+amiable companion, and a tender nurse, [she] could likewise supply the
+wants of a decrepit husband and occasionally perform his part." That
+Fielding suffered socially by the fact of his second marriage is probable.
+But the fact is proof, if proof were needed, of his courage in reparation,
+and of the unworldly spirit in which he ultimately followed the dictates
+of that incorruptible judge which he himself asserted to be in every man's
+breast.
+
+It was in December 1747, just a month after his second marriage, that
+Fielding again flung himself into the arena of contentious journalism,
+'brandishing' his pen as truculently as ever on behalf of the Protestant
+and Hanoverian succession, and in despite of the Jacobite cause. He called
+his new paper "_The Jacobite's Journal_, by John Trott Plaid Esq're.," and
+the ironic title was accompanied by a woodcut traditionally associated
+with Hogarth. The ironic mask, Fielding explains, was assumed "in order if
+possible to laugh Men out of their follies and to make men ashamed of
+owning or acting by" Jacobite principles.
+
+The _Jacobite's Journal_ appeared at a moment when public opinion, and
+public gossip also, seem to have been immersed in the question whether a
+notorious pamphlet purporting to have been found among the papers of a
+late Minister, Mr. Thomas Winnington, were genuine or a libel. Into this
+fray Fielding promptly plunged, publishing, in December 1747, [2] a
+shilling pamphlet entitled _A Proper Answer to a Late Scurrilous
+Libel,... By the Author of the Jacobites Journal._ This little pamphlet,
+copies of which may be seen in the British Museum, is merely a further
+vigorous declamation for civil liberty and the Protestant religion, as
+under King George, and contains hardly any reference either to Winnington
+or to the author. It was retorted on in two further pamphlets. In one of
+these a Lady Fanny and her friend, enjoying a 'Chit chat,' discuss the
+news that Lady Fanny is she "whom F---g represents in a _Plaid Jocket_ in
+the front of his _Jacobite_ Journal." "The Whirling Coxcomb," cries Lady
+Fanny enraged, "what had he to do with ridiculing any Party, who had
+travell'd round the whole Circle of Parties and Ministers, ever since he
+could brandish a Pen." [3] Her Ladyship adds some further sneers on
+writers pensioned to amuse people with their nonsense. The other counter
+pamphlet consists of conversations overheard, all over the town, on the
+subject of Winnington and his _Apology_. Here a mercer and a bookseller
+abuse Fielding for boxing the political compass, and for selling his pen.
+Another bookseller insinuates that Fielding's own attack on the _Apology_
+is but a half-hearted affair--"Ah Sir, you know not what F---g could do if
+he were willing ... you would have seen him mince and hash it so as to
+make half the Town weep and the other laugh. Don't you think the Pen that
+writ _Pasquin, Joseph Andrews_, and the _Champion_ could have answered the
+Apology if he had had the Will?" "But I can't see why the Author of the
+Jacobite Journal should want that will," protests a Bencher. "Alas Sir!"
+cries the bookseller, "You forget the Power of _Necessity_. If a Man that
+wants Bread can establish a Paper by the P--t Off--e [Post Office?] taking
+off two thousand every week is he not more excusable...." To which the
+Bencher replies that possibly it is Fielding's 'Wavering Principles' that
+have "brought him to the Necessity of writing for Bread." [4] From all
+which we may assume that Fielding's superiority to what he calls the
+"absurd and irrational Distinction of Parties [which] hath principally
+contributed to poison our Constitution" [5] was very little understood by
+the heated party factions of 1747.
+
+To call one's political opponent a 'Whirling Coxcomb,' or a 'pensioned
+scribbler,' was a very mild amenity in eighteenth century party warfare;
+and the abuse of such small fry as these anonymous pamphleteers might be
+wholly disregarded did it not show Fielding's prominence, during these
+anxious times, as a strenuous Hanoverian, and also the fact that he had
+now not only largely abjured party politics, but that what party tenets he
+still held were changed. Indeed as much may surely be deduced from the
+following philosophic passage in his _True Patriot_. "I have formerly
+shown in this Paper, that the bare objecting to a Man a _Change_ in his
+_Political Notions_, ought by no means to affect any Person's _Character_;
+because in a Country like this it is simply impossible that a Man of sound
+Sense, and strict Honour, should always adhere to the same _Political
+Creed_." [6] It is very little material to our knowledge of Fielding as an
+honest man and a great genius to discover, were it possible, precisely
+what changes his political views underwent. When Sir Robert Walpole
+essayed to corrupt the nation Fielding fought strenuously in the cause of
+political honour; when a Stewart invasion threatened (as he thought) both
+civil liberty and Protestant beliefs he flung himself as zealously into
+the defence of the Church of England and of the Hanoverian Government. It
+is clear that the latter exertions stirred up much cheap obliquy; and it
+must be admitted that such references to his antagonists as "last weeks
+Dunghill of Papers" were likely to entail unsavory retort.
+
+This abuse seems to have broken out with an excess of virulence not long
+after the appearance of the _Jacobite's Journal_; a fate, as Fielding
+observes, little to be expected by the editor of a loyal paper. His
+dignified protest in the matter is worth recalling. In a leading article
+he declares that "before my paper hath reached the 20th. number a heavier
+load of Scandal hath been cast upon me than I believe ever fell to the
+Share of a Single Man. The Author of the Journal was soon guessed at;
+Either from some Singularity in Style, or from little care which being
+free from any wicked Purpose, I have ever taken to conceal my Name. Of
+this several Writers were no sooner possessed than they attempted to
+blacken it with every kind of Reproach; pursued me into private Life,
+_even to my boyish Years_; where they have given me almost every Vice in
+Human Nature. Again they have followed me with uncommon Inveteracy into a
+Profession in which they have very roundly asserted that I have neither
+Business nor Knowledge: And lastly, as an Author they have affected to
+treat me with more Contempt than Mr. Pope, who hath great Merit and no
+less Pride in the Character of a Writer hath thought proper to bestow on
+the lowest Scribbler of his Time. All this moreover they have poured forth
+in a vein of Scurrility which hath disgraced the Press with every abusive
+Term in our Language." Although, as Fielding adds, those who knew him
+would not take their opinion from those who knew him not, it is to be
+feared that the scurrilous libellers of the day succeeded in creating a
+prejudice that is hardly yet dispersed. For such petty clamours would be
+trifling enough round the figure of the creator of the English novel, were
+it not that in the abuse of the gutter press of his day we may probably
+find the reason for much of the vague cloud which has so strangely
+overhung Fielding's name. In his own spirited protest he tells us of the
+'ordure' that was thrown at him; and it is an old saying that if enough
+mud be thrown some will stick.
+
+In the February following the appearance of his new paper Fielding must
+have been at Twickenham; for the baptism of his son William appears in the
+Parish Register for that month. A writer of thirty years ago says that the
+house celebrated as that in which Fielding lived was then still standing,
+a quaint old fashioned wooden dwelling, in Back Lane; and adds the
+information that Fielding had two rooms, the house being then let in
+lodgings. [7] Lysons, however, in his _Environs of London_, published in
+1795, says that Fielding "rented a house at this time in the Back-Lane at
+Twickenham," adding that he received his information from the Earl of
+Orford. The site is now occupied by a row of cottages. In his _Parish
+Register for Twickenham_ Horace Walpole commemorates the great novelist's
+residence in that quiet village, so full of eighteenth century memories.
+Here, he says,
+
+  "... Fielding met his bunter Muse,
+  And, as they quaff'd the fiery juice,
+  Droll Nature stamp'd each lucky hit
+  With unimaginable wit."
+
+Bunter was a cant word for a woman who picks up rags about the street; and
+it may seem to later generations that the epithet fitted far more nicely
+the _bunter muse_ of that "facile retailer of _ana_ and incorrigible
+society-gossip," that rag-picker of anecdotes, Mr. Horace Walpole himself.
+
+When the _Journal_ had been running some six months, Fielding formally
+relinquished his ironic character of a Jacobite, partly because, as he
+says, the evils of Jacobitism were too serious for jesting and required
+more open denunciation; partly because the age required more highly
+seasoned writing, the general taste in reading very much resembling "that
+of some particular Man in eating who would never willingly devour what
+doth not stink"; and partly from the ineptitude of the public to
+appreciate the ironic method. This latter passage is of interest as coming
+from the author of that great masterpiece in irony, _Jonathan Wild_.
+Fielding has observed, he tells us that "though Irony is capable of
+furnishing the most exquisite Ridicule; yet as there is no kind of humour
+so liable to be mistaken it is of all others the most dangerous to the
+Writer. An infinite Number of Readers have not the least taste or relish
+for it, I believe I may say do not understand it; and all are apt to be
+tired when it is carried to any degree of Length."
+
+The _Jacobite's Journal_ is of course mainly occupied with maintaining the
+Protestant British Constitution; but here, as in the _True Patriot_,
+Fielding allows himself a pleasant running commentary on the daily news.
+He also erects a _Court of Criticism_ in which, by virtue of his "high
+Censorial Office," he administers justice in "all matters in the Republic
+of Literature." By thus adopting the title of "Censor of Great Britain"
+the editor of the _Jacobites Journal_ preserves his identity with that
+censorial _Champion_ who nine years before had essayed to keep rogues in
+fear of his Hercules' club. Two judgments delivered by the _Court_ are of
+interest. In one, due castigation is given to that incorrigible mimic and
+wit Foote, who was once threatened by no less a cudgel than that of Dr.
+Johnson himself. Foote was evading all law and order by his inimitable
+mimicries at the Little Theatre in the Haymarket; and for these
+performances at his "scandal-shop" is very properly brought up before Mr.
+Censor's _Court_. Whereupon Foote begins to mimic the _Court_ "pulling a
+Chew of Tobacco from his Mouth, in Imitation of his Honour who is greatly
+fond of that weed." The culprit suffers conviction for crime against law
+and good manners. Having thus seen to the public welfare, Fielding also
+happily settles a little score of his own on one of his anonymous
+libellers. "One Porcupine Pillage," he records, "came into the court and
+threw a great shovelful of dirt at his honour, _but luckily none of it hit
+him_." His comments on weekly news items are no less characteristic than
+those hidden in the columns of the _Patriot_. Thus, on a trotting match,
+he observes, "Trotting is a Sport truly adapted to the English Genius."
+And on a man found dead in Jewin Street "formerly an eminent Dealer in
+Buckrams, but [who] being greatly reduced is supposed to have died for
+Want," he notes, "_either of Common Sense in himself or Common Humanity in
+his Aquaintance_." His own humanity is shown in the wise appeals, repeated
+on more than one page of the _Journal_, for some effective provision for
+the distressed widows and children of the poor clergy. And his unbiassed
+judgment appears in the _amende honorable_ to Richardson, in the form of
+generous and unstinted praise of _Clarissa_.
+
+The first number of the _Jacobite's Journal_ was dated Dec. 5, 1747, and
+'Mr. Trott Plaid' formally takes leave of his subject exactly eleven
+months later, on November 5, 1748, declaring that Jacobites were, by then,
+little to be feared. [8] Ten days before this last 'brandish' of
+Fielding's Constitutional pen, on October 26, 1748, his oaths had been
+received as a Justice of the Peace for Westminster.
+
+[1] These are in the Burney Collection, and are inscribed "These papers
+are by the celebrated Henry Fielding Esqre."
+
+[2] See the _Gentleman's Magazine_. Dec. 1747.
+
+[3] _A Free Comment on the Late Mr. W-G-N's Apology ... By a
+Lady ..._ 1748.
+
+[4] _The Patriot Analized_. 1748.
+
+[5] _True Patriot No. 14_.
+
+[6] _True Patriot_. No. 29. May 20, 1746.
+
+[7] R. Cobbett. _Memorials of Twickenham_, 1872.
+
+[8] The _Journal's_ epitaph was promptly written by a scurrilous opponent
+in lines showing that the prominences of Fielding's profile were
+well-known:
+
+  Beneath this stone
+  Lies _Trott Plaid John_
+  His length of chin and nose.
+
+See the _Gentleman's Magazine_, November 1748.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+TOM JONES
+
+    "In God's Name let us speak out honestly and set the good against
+    the bad."
+    No. 48 of the _Jacobite's Journal_.
+
+The two years of Fielding's life preceding his appointment as a Bow Street
+magistrate (an appointment comparable only to the choice of Robert Burns
+as an exciseman) were marked, as we have seen, by lively passages in the
+political arena, and a steady output of political journalism. Indeed, by
+this time, the public must have associated swingeing denunciations of
+Jacobites, and glowing eulogies of the British Constitution, with Harry
+Fielding's name; just as seven years previously he had been in their eyes
+the 'Champion' journalist of a brilliant Opposition; and, for ten years
+before that, the witty writer of a stream of popular farces and comedies.
+For there is no evidence that his audacious innovation, his splendid
+adventure in literature, _Joseph Andrews_, really revealed the existence
+of a new genius in their midst to the Whigs and Tories of those factious
+days, to the gay frequenters of the play-house, to the barristers at
+Westminster Hall and on the Western Circuit. In 1748 Fielding must have
+been, to his many audiences, a witty and well-born man of letters who, at
+forty-one, had as yet achieved no towering success; a facile dramatist;
+and a master of slashing political invective, growing perplexingly
+impartial, alike in his praise and his condemnation. While, as regards
+outward circumstances, the struggling barrister, baffled in his
+professional hopes by persistent attacks of gout, was now so far enlisted,
+to use his own fine image, under the black banner of poverty, that even
+the small post and hard duties of a Bow Street magistrate were worth his
+acceptance. [1]
+
+Such was Harry Fielding as the world of 1748 knew him, in the Coffee
+houses, the Mall, the Green-room and the Law-courts. What that world did
+not know was that all this dramatic, journalistic, and political action,
+was little more than the surface movement of a vitality far too exuberant
+to be contained in any one groove of hackney writing,--of an impetuous
+'enthusiasm for righteousness' far too ardent to pass by any flagrant
+social, moral, or political abuse without inflicting some form of
+chastisement; and that beneath this ever active surface movement
+Fielding's genius was slowly maturing in that new continent of literature
+the borders of which he had already crossed seven years before. In the
+pages of _Joseph Andrews_, he had, as we know, tentatively explored that
+continent feeling his way along the unknown paths of this long neglected
+world of human nature; bringing back with him one immortal figure, that
+living embodiment of simple piety and scholarship, of charity and honest
+strength, Parson Adams; disclosing hints of discoveries, not yet
+perfected, among the humours and villanies, the virtues and charms, of a
+dozen other inhabitants of his _terra incognita_. But there is no sign
+that the greatness of his discovery, the splendour of his addition to the
+empire of English literature, was in the least apprehended during the
+seven years following the appearance of _Joseph Andrews_. Only Fielding
+himself was conscious that he had created a kind of writing "hitherto
+unattempted in our language."
+
+And, having crossed the borders of this new continent, he seems, after his
+first survey, to have deliberately immersed himself in one portion, and
+that the blackest, of his re-discovered world. For _Jonathan Wild_, with
+its disclosure of the active spirit of 'diabolism,' of naked vice, is
+little else than the exploration of those darkest recesses of human nature
+which can be safely entered only by the sanest and healthiest of
+intellects. Fielding's strength was equal to his exploit; and from this,
+his second adventure, he brought back a picture of the deformity and folly
+of vice, drawn with a just and penetrating scorn unequalled, perhaps, by
+any English moralist. But neither of these two essays in the new field of
+writing had covered more than isolated or outlying portions, the first in
+sunlight, the second in shadow, of that vast territory. And it was not
+till the perfect maturity of his powers and of his experience, not till he
+had seen both the 'manners of many men,' and the workings of many hearts,
+not in a word till he had made himself master of great tracts of that
+human nature which had so long lain neglected, that Fielding in _Tom
+Jones_ disclosed himself as the creator of the English novel.
+
+Little is known as to when the conception of _Tom Jones_ first shaped
+itself in his mind, of where he lived during the writing of the great
+Comic Epic, or of the time occupied in its completion. Appropriately for a
+book expressly designed "to recommend goodness and innocence" the plan of
+the novel was suggested, many years before its appearance, by the 'good
+Lord Lyttelton'; and we know, further, that the writing occupied 'some
+thousands of hours'; but _Tom Jones_ does not emerge into definite
+existence till the summer of 1748.
+
+Legend it is true, attesting to the greatness of the achievement contained
+in the six little volumes, endows many localities with the fame of their
+origin. A well-credited contemporary writer, the Rev. Richard Graves,
+declared that the novelist "while he was writing his novel of Tom Jones"
+lived at Tiverton (Twerton), one and a half miles from Bath, and dined
+daily at Prior Park the seat of his munificent and pious friend Ralph
+Allen. Mr Graves says that Fielding then lived in "the first house on the
+right hand with a spread eagle over the door." [2] Salisbury is insistent
+that part at least of the great novel was written at Milford House, near
+to that city. An anonymous old engraver asserts the same honour for
+Fielding's Farm at East Stour, an assertion certainly not confirmed by the
+newly found documents concerning Fielding's sale of property at Stour in
+1738. Twickenham claims that the book was wholly composed in the house in
+Back Lane. And to an ancient building at Tintern Parva in the Wye Valley,
+said to have once been the lodging of the Abbot of Tintern, was also
+assigned the reputation of being the birthplace of the English novel. If
+the latter tradition were true, the fact that it was in the Harlequin
+chamber of the Abbots of Glastonbury that Henry Fielding was born, becomes
+strangely matched by the birth, some forty years later, of his
+masterpiece, in the lodging of the Abbot of Tintern. The one point of real
+interest in all these traditions is the fact that the fame of _Tom Jones_
+has been sufficient to create a widespread popular legend. The truth
+probably is that the book was written in the many shifting scenes of
+Fielding's life during these years; now at Bath whither his gout and the
+generous hospitality of Ralph Allen would take him; now in Salisbury, the
+home of his boyhood, and the scene of his courtship with the lovely
+original of Sophia Western; possibly in his own county of Somerset; and
+most probably both at Twickenham, and in London.
+
+From these various legends it is pleasant to be able to disentangle one
+clear picture of the making of _Tom Jones_. Before the manuscript was
+placed in the printers' hands Fielding submitted it to the opinion both of
+the elder Pitt, and of the estimable and pious Lyttelton; and the account
+of this memorable meeting cannot be better given than in the words of a
+descendant of the hostess on that occasion, the Rev. George Miller,
+great-grandson of that Sanderson Miller of Radway, Warwickshire, who
+numbered many men of note among his acquaintance, and with whom Fielding
+was on terms of intimate friendship. [3] Writing to the present writer, in
+1907, Mr. Miller says: "Lord Chatham and Lord Lyttleton came to Radway to
+visit my ancestor, when Lord Chatham planted three trees to commemorate
+the visit, and a stone urn was placed between them. Fielding was also of
+the party and read 'Tom Jones' in manuscript after dinner for the opinion
+of his hearers before publishing it. My father told me this often and he
+had the account from his Grandmother who survived her husband several
+years and who was the hostess on the occasion." Unhappily no record exists
+of the comments of one of the greatest of English statesmen when listening
+to this reading, in manuscript, of indubitably one of the greatest of
+English novels.
+
+The vagueness which hangs over the places in which _Tom Jones_ was
+written, the certainty that in all of them poverty was constantly present,
+is in perfect accord with the power of detachment manifested in this book
+from circumstances that would surely have tinged, if not over-whelmed, a
+weaker genius. Sickness and poverty are stern sponsors; but neither were
+suffered to leave more than two traces on the pages destined to outlive so
+greatly the harsh circumstances in which they had birth. There is the
+frank acknowledgement of the writer's dependence on Lyttelton's noble
+generosity, without which the book had never, Fielding says, been
+completed, since "I partly owe to you my Existence during great Part of
+the Time which I have employed in composing it." And a touching betrayal
+occurs of his anxiety for the future provision of the "prattling babes,
+whose innocent play hath often been interrupted by my labours." Fielding
+was sensitively anxious for his wife and children; but, for himself,
+living as he did with visions such as that of the _Invocation_ introducing
+Book xiii of _Tom Jones_, the precise situation of his "little Parlour,"
+or the poorness of its furniture, cannot have appeared very material.
+"Come bright Love of Fame," he cries "... fill my ravished Fancy with the
+Hopes of charming Ages yet to come... Do thou teach me not only to
+foresee, but to enjoy, nay, even to feed on future Praise. Comfort me by a
+solemn Assurance, that when the little Parlour in which I sit at this
+Instant, shall be reduced to a worse furnished Box, I shall be read, with
+Honour, by those who never knew nor saw me, and whom I shall neither know
+nor see."
+
+This capacity of Fielding for relegating circumstance to its true level,
+the detached idealism that moulded his genius, are, indeed, shown once for
+all in the fact that the exquisite picture of virtue, the whole-hearted
+attack on vice, the genial humour, the sunny portraits of humanity, the
+splendid cheerfulness of _Tom Jones_, that 'Epic of Youth,' came from a
+man in middle age, immersed in disheartening struggles, and fighting
+recurrent ill health. Superficial critics have called Fielding a realist
+because his figures are so full-blooded and alive that we feel we have met
+them but yesterday in the street; to eyes so shortsighted life itself must
+seem merely realistic. As none but an idealist could have conceived Parson
+Adams, so the creator of Sophia again announced himself an idealist in the
+Dedication of _Tom Jones_. Here, in language of pure symbolism, he
+contends that the ideal virtues such as goodness and innocence, may most
+effectively be presented to men in a figure, for "an Example is a Kind of
+Picture, in which Virtue becomes as it were an Object of Sight, and
+strikes us with an Idea of that Loveliness, which _Plato_ asserts there is
+in her naked Charms." [4] To the man who could write thus, and, who, in
+later pages of his great 'Epic,' could humbly desire of Genius "do thou
+kindly take me by the Hand, and lead me through all the Mazes, the winding
+Labyrinth of Nature. Initiate me into all those Mysteries which profane
+Eyes never beheld,"--to this man the material surroundings of life must
+have seemed of little greater import than the fittings of that narrow box
+to the occupation of which he looked forward with so calm a foresight.
+Indeed he himself acknowledges a carelessness of outward comfort on his
+own behalf. "Come," he cries, to the spirit of mercenary success, "Thou
+jolly Substance, with thy shining Face, ... hold forth thy tempting
+Rewards; thy shining chinking Heap; thy quickly-convertible Bank-bill, big
+with unseen Riches; thy often-varying Stock; the warm, the comfortable
+House; ... Come thou, and if I am too tasteless of thy valuable Treasures,
+warm my Heart with the transporting Thought of conveying them to others."
+His happy constitution, wrote his cousin Lady Mary, "made him forget
+everything when he was before a venison pasty or a flask of champagne";
+but behind those healthy exhilarations was, assuredly, a serenity based on
+a clear perception of the values of life. To a man of Fielding's happy
+social temperament, and who was yet also initiated into mysteries and
+occupied in converting ideal loveliness into 'an object of sight,' such
+matters as duns and pawnbrokers would seem precisely fit for oblivion in
+venison and champagne. In the creator of Tom Jones and of Sophia the most
+indestructible delight in living, and the keenest discernment of the
+unsubstantial qualities of that delight, appear to have been admirably
+interwoven.
+
+By June 11, 1748, the book was far enough advanced for the publisher,
+Andrew Millar, to pay £600 for it, as appears from a receipt now in the
+possession of Mr. Alfred Huth. [5] And it is eminently characteristic of
+the finances of a man who, as Lady Mary said, would have wanted money had
+his estates been as extensive as his imagination, that the receipt for
+this £600 is dated more than six months before the publication of the
+book. For it was not till February 28, 1749, that the _General Advertiser_
+announced
+
+    This day is published, in six vols., 12 mo
+    THE HISTORY OF TOM JONES,
+    A FOUNDLING
+    _Mores hominum multorum vidit_.
+    _By_ HENRY FIELDING, _Esqre_
+
+Henceforth Fielding ceases to be the boisterous politician, the witty
+dramatist; his poverty and his struggles for subsistence fall back, at his
+own bidding, among the accidents of life; and he stands revealed as the
+supreme genius, the creator of the English novel, the inheritor of that
+lasting fame which he had dared so confidently to invoke.
+
+The immediate success of the book, in that eighteenth-century world into
+which it was launched, is attested by the notice in the _London Magazine_
+of the very month of its publication. Under the heading of a "Plan of a
+late celebrated NOVEL," the _Magazine_ devotes its five opening pages to a
+summary of a book "which has given great Amusement and we hope Instruction
+to the polite Part of the Town." The summary is preceded by a description
+of _Tom Jones_ as a novel "calculated to recommend religion and virtue, to
+shew the bad consequences of indiscretion, and to set several kinds of
+vice in their most deformed and shocking light." The reviewer declares
+that "after one has begun to read it, it is difficult to leave off before
+having read the whole." And he concludes, "Thus ends this pretty novel,
+with a most just distribution of rewards and punishments, according to the
+merits of all the persons who had any considerable share in it." [6] Three
+months later Horace Walpole wrote, "Millar the bookseller has done very
+generously by him [Fielding]: finding Tom Jones, for which he had given
+him £600, sell so greatly, he has since given him another hundred." An
+admirer breaks out into rhyme, in the _Gentleman's Magazine_ for August
+1749,--
+
+  "let Fielding take the pen!
+  Life dropt her mask, and all mankind were men."
+
+thereby anticipating Thackeray's famous complaint that in his day no one
+dared "to depict to his utmost power a Man." Lady Bradshaigh, writing by a
+happy irony of fate to Richardson, says "as to Tom Jones I am fatigued
+with the name, having lately fallen into the company of several young
+ladies, who had each a 'Tom Jones' in some part of the world, for so they
+call their favourites." The gentlemen also had their Sophias, one indeed
+having bestowed that all-popular name on his 'Dutch mastiff puppy.' That
+eccentric eighteenth century philosopher, and enthusiastic Greek scholar,
+Lord Monboddo declared that _Tom Jones_ had more of character in it than
+any other work, ancient or modern, known to him, adding, "in short, I
+never saw anything that was so animated, and as I may say, _all alive_
+with characters and manners as _the History of Tom Jones_"; a criticism
+that recalls Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's remark that no man enjoyed life
+more than did Fielding. Doubtless it was his own magnificent capacity for
+living that endowed the very creatures of his pen with so abundant a
+vitality. In her own copy Lady Mary wrote _Ne plus Ultra_.
+
+To turn from the popular voices of the day to the comments of those
+capable of appraising genius, "What a master of composition Fielding was!"
+exclaimed Coleridge, "Upon my word I think 'Oedipus Tyrannus,' the
+'Alchemist,' and 'Tom Jones' the three most perfect plots ever planned."
+To Sir Walter Scott _Tom Jones_ was "truth and human nature itself."
+Gibbon described the book as "the first of ancient or modern romances";
+and, as we have seen, declared that its pages would outlive the Imperial
+Eagle of those Hapsburgs from whom Fielding was said to be descended.
+"There can be no gainsaying the sentence of this great judge," wrote
+Thackeray. "To have your name mentioned by Gibbon is like having it
+written on the dome of St Peter's. Pilgrims from all the world admire and
+behold it." Pilgrims from all the world have likewise admired _Tom Jones_.
+Translations have appeared in French, German, [7] Spanish, Swedish,
+Russian, Polish and Dutch; and as for the English editions, they range
+from the three editions issued within the year of publication to the
+several noble volumes newly edited in our own day, and the sixpenny copies
+on our railway bookstalls. So fully has time justified the invocation to
+future fame sent forth from the little ill-furnished parlour of the
+struggling barrister.
+
+To analyse the grounds for a chorus of praise ranging from the 'young
+ladies' of the eighteenth century to the utterances of distinguished
+critics, and popular authors of our own day, would be to confound literary
+criticism with biography. But there are some points appertaining to
+Fielding's great novel which cannot be here disregarded, in that they
+closely affect his personal character. Such are the light in which he
+himself regarded his masterpiece, the intention with which he wrote it,
+and the means which he selected to carry that intention into effect.
+
+All these he himself very plainly sets forth in his _Dedication_ to
+Lyttelton and in other passages of _Tom Jones_. As to his intention. "I
+declare," he says, in the _Dedication_, "that to recommend Goodness and
+Innocence hath been my sincere Endeavour in this History." And the means
+selected for this end, and for the companion object of persuading men from
+guilt, are as clearly stated. First as we have seen, Fielding plays the
+part of pure idealist, purposing to create a picture "in which virtue
+becomes as it were an object of sight." For such pictures we have but to
+think of Sophia Western, and of that final page of _Tom Jones_, than which
+no more charming representation of mutual affection, esteem, and well
+doing can be imagined. But besides this means of reaching his audience
+Fielding adopted, he tells us, a second method. He argues that no
+acquisitions of guilt can compensate a man for the loss of inward peace,
+for the attendant horror, anxiety, and danger, to which he subjects
+himself; thus endeavouring to enlist man's self-interest no less than his
+admiration, on the side of virtue. Again, he explains yet another method
+by which he essays to foil the progress of evil, viz. to show that virtue
+and innocence are chiefly betrayed "into the snares that deceit and
+villainy spread for them" by indiscretion; a moral which he has "the more
+industriously laboured ... since I believe it is much easier to make good
+Men, wise than to make bad Men good." For this purpose, he concludes,
+namely to show, as in a figure, the beauty of virtue, to persuade men that
+in following innocence and virtue they follow their own obvious interests,
+to arm them from the snares of villainy and deceit, "I have employed all
+the Wit and Humour of which I am Master in the following History; wherein
+I have endeavoured to laugh Mankind out of their favourite Follies and
+Vices."
+
+And, conscious that wit and humour require a rein quite unneeded by the
+methods of the professional moralist, Fielding further asserts that in
+these pages his laughter is worthy of the aim which he sets before him.
+Here, he carefully insists, are wit and humour wholly void of offence. He
+assures his reader that in the whole course of the work, he will find
+"nothing prejudicial to the Cause of Religion and Virtue; nothing
+inconsistent with the strictest Rules of Decency, nor which can offend
+even the chastest Eye in the Perusal." As the almost incredible change
+from the manners of 1749 to those of the following century, and of our own
+day, has injuriously affected the reputation of Fielding among readers
+ignorant of past conditions, this protest, in striking accord with the
+prologue for his first play acted when he was but a lad of twenty, cannot
+be too emphatically recorded. And no further justification of Fielding's
+words need be entered than that verdict of the eighteenth century scholar
+and bishop of the English Church, Doctor Warburton, when he declared that
+"Mr. Fielding [stands] the foremost among those who have given a faithful
+and chaste copy of life and manners."
+
+Such were the noble purposes to which Fielding consciously dedicated his
+genius in _Tom Jones_, and such was the careful restraint with which he
+exercised his chosen methods of wit and humour. That these purposes,
+executed by a supreme genius in the language and scenes of his own day,
+should ever have laid their author open to a charge of immorality is
+perhaps one of the most amazing pieces of irony in the whole history of
+English literature. But as this charge of moral laxity has been seriously
+brought against the pages of _Tom Jones_, and is perhaps not yet quite
+exploded, it cannot be wholly disregarded. The imputation amounts,
+briefly, to a too easy forgiveness for the youthful sins of Jones, and the
+involving that engaging youth in too deep a degradation. The answers to
+these charges are, firstly, that Fielding held strongly, and here
+exhibits, the humane and wise doctrine that a man should be judged, not by
+what he sometimes does, but by what he _is_. And, secondly, that as Sir
+Walter Scott pointed out, when dealing with this very matter, "the vices
+into which Jones suffers himself to fall are made the direct cause of
+placing him in the distressful situation which he occupies during the
+greater part of the narrative; while his generosity, his charity, and his
+amiable qualities become the means of saving him from the consequences of
+his folly." Fielding was not wholly concerned with the acts of a man; to
+him the admission of the Penitent Thief into Paradise, at the eleventh
+hour, could have been no stumbling block. And, further, Tom Jones not only
+suffers for his ill doing, but wins no heaven until he wholly purges
+himself from the sin which did so easily beset him.
+
+The distinction between doing and being is very fully enunciated by
+Fielding himself, in the _Introduction_ to Book vii. "A single bad Act,"
+he says, "no more constitutes a Villain in Life, than a single bad Part on
+the Stage". And again, "Now we, who are admitted behind the Scenes of this
+great Theatre of Nature, (and no Author ought to write any Thing besides
+Dictionaries and Spelling-Books who hath not this Privilege) can censure
+the Action, without conceiving any actual Detestation of the Person, whom
+perhaps Nature may not have designed to act an ill Part in all her Dramas:
+For in this Instance, Life most exactly represents the Stage, since it is
+often the same Person who represents the Villain and the Heroe". Coleridge
+has expressed the same truth in words written in a copy of _Tom Jones_,
+"If I want a servant or mechanic I wish to know what he _does_--but of a
+Friend I must know what he _is_. And in no writer is this momentous
+distinction so finely brought forward as by Fielding. We do not care what
+Blifil does ... but Blifil _is_ a villain and we feel him to be so." [8]
+
+It is true that, as Scott regrets the depth of degradation into which Tom
+Jones is suffered to fall, so Coleridge expresses a wish, "relatively to
+Fielding himself" that the great novelist had emphasised somewhat more the
+repentance of his hero: but this may be balanced by that other noble
+tribute to his morality, "I dare believe who consulted his heart and
+conscience only without adverting to _what the world_ would say could rise
+from the perusal of Fielding's _Tom Jones_, _Joseph Andrews_ and _Amelia_
+without feeling himself the better man--at least without an intense
+conviction that he could not be guilty of a base act." [9] To be forced to
+watch the temporary degradation of a noble nature, and the miseries
+ensuing, is surely one of the most effective means of rousing a hatred of
+vice. That such an exhibition should ever have been construed into moral
+laxity on the part of the author, especially when the restoration of the
+hero's character is drawn as entirely due to his ingrained worship of
+innocence and virtue, is almost incredible.
+
+In exact accordance with Fielding's character as moralist in intent,
+although supreme artist in execution, is the fact of the dedication of
+_Tom Jones_ to his life-long friend Lyttelton. George Lyttelton,
+statesman, scholar, and orator, was a friend of whom any man might be
+proud. It was said of him that he "showed the judgment of a minister, the
+force and wit of an orator, and the spirit of a gentleman." As theologian
+he wrote a treatise on _The Conversion of St. Paul_ which, a hundred years
+later, was described as being "still regarded as one of the subsidiary
+bulwarks of Christianity." As poet he won the praise of Gray for his
+tender and elegiac verse. Thomson sang of his "sense refined," and adds
+
+  Serene yet warm, humane yet firm his mind
+  As little touch'd as any man's with bad;
+
+And Pope drew his character as
+
+  "Still true to virtue and as warm as true."
+
+It was to this devout scholar, this refined gentleman, this warm-hearted
+follower of virtue, that _Tom Jones_ was dedicated, nay more, to him it
+owed both origin and completion. "To you, Sir," Fielding writes in his
+_Dedication_, "it is owing that this History was ever begun. It was by
+your Desire that I first thought of such a Composition.... Again, Sir,
+without your Assistance this History had never been completed.... I partly
+owe to you my Existence during great Part of the Time in which I have
+employed in composing it." And that Lyttelton cordially approved the book
+which owed so much to his own insight and generosity is evident from the
+references, in the _Dedication_, to his favourable judgment.
+
+With the appearance of _Tom Jones_ Fielding steps into his own place among
+the immortals. But lofty as his genius was, his feet were firmly planted
+in the world which he relished so keenly. To no man could be applied more
+happily the motto chosen by him for his title page, _mores hominum
+multorum vidit_--he saw the manners of many men. This characteristic
+emerges in a personal reminiscence of the novelist, at the very moment
+when the sheets of _Tom Jones_ were passing through the press. The
+great-nephew of his intimate friend Mrs Hussey relates; "Henry Fielding
+was fond of colouring his pictures of life with the glowing and variegated
+tints of Nature, by conversing with persons of every situation and
+calling, as I have frequently been informed by one of my great aunts, the
+late Mrs Hussey, who knew him intimately. I have heard her say, that Mr
+Fielding never suffered his talent for sprightly conversation to mildew
+for a moment; and that his manners were so gentlemanly, that even with the
+lower classes, with which he frequently condescended particularly to chat
+such as Sir Roger de Coverley's old friends, the Vauxhall water-men, they
+seldom outstepped the limits of propriety. My aunt ... [was] a fashionable
+sacque and mantua-maker, and lived in the Strand, ... One day Mr Fielding
+observed to Mrs Hussey, that he was then engaged in writing a novel, which
+he thought would be his best production; and that he intended to introduce
+into it the characters of all his friends. Mrs Hussey, with a smile,
+ventured to remark, that he must have many niches, and that surely they
+must already be filled. 'I assure you, my dear madam,' replied he, 'there
+shall be a bracket for a bust of you.' Some time after this, he informed
+Mrs Hussey that the work was in the press; but, immediately recollecting
+that he had forgotten his promise to her, went to the printer, and was
+time enough to insert, in vol. iii. p. 17, where he speaks of the shape of
+Sophia Western--'Such charms are there in affability, and so sure is it to
+attract the praises of all kinds of people.... It may indeed be compared
+to the celebrated Mrs Hussey.' To which observation he has given the
+following note: 'A celebrated mantua-maker in the Strand, famous for
+setting off the shapes of women.'" [10]
+
+Here is yet further proof, that Fielding loved not only to see the manners
+of many men, but also to render them whatever service lay within his
+power. Never were the warmest heart and the loftiest genius more happily
+united than in the creator of the English novel.
+
+Lyttelton not only suggested and approved the great Comic Epic, and
+enabled distressed genius to live while composing it; his own worth and
+benevolence, together with those of the generous Allen, afforded Fielding,
+as he tells us, the materials for the picture here presented of Allworthy.
+"The World," he says, speaking of this picture, "will not, I believe, make
+me the Compliment of thinking I took it from myself. I care not: This they
+shall own, that the two Persons from whom I have taken it, that is to say,
+two of the best and worthiest Men in the World, are strongly and zealously
+my Friends." And a point of still closer personal interest is the fact,
+already noticed, that in the lovely character and person of Sophia
+Western, Fielding raised an enduring memorial to that beloved wife whose
+death had occurred a few years before the publication of _Tom Jones_. The
+authenticity of the portrait is explicitly stated in the _Invocation_
+prefixed to Book xiii. Apostrophizing that 'gentle Maid,' bright 'Love of
+Fame,' Fielding bids her, in the eighteenth century phrase that falls so
+strangely on a modern ear, "Foretell me that some tender Maid, whose
+Grandmother is yet unborn, hereafter, when under the fictitious Name of
+_Sophia_ she reads the real worth which once existed in my _Charlotte_,
+shall, from her sympathetic Breast, send forth the _Heaving Sigh_." Then
+follows, immediately, his own desire that he too may live in the knowledge
+and honour of far distant readers. Fielding lies buried under southern
+skies, far from his wife's English grave; but in the immortal pages of his
+masterpiece they are not divided.
+
+[1] The Fiat appointing Fielding as Magistrate for the City and Borough of
+Westminster, now in the House of Lords, is dated July 30, 1748.
+
+[2] On the house identified with Mr Graves' description, and now known as
+"Fielding's Lodge," a tablet has recently been placed, through the energy
+of Mr R. G. Naish of Twerton.
+
+[3] See _Life of the Earl of Hardwicke_. G. Harris. 1847. Vol. II. pp.
+456-7.
+
+[4] _Tom Jones_. Dedication.
+
+[5] See Appendix for this, hitherto unpublished, receipt.
+
+[6] _London Magazine_. Feb. 1749.
+
+[7] In Germany an edition of 1771 was followed by a second in 1780, and a
+third in 1786. In 1765 a lyrical comedy founded on the famous novel was
+acted in Paris; and the same year it was transformed into a German comedy
+by J.H. Steffens.
+
+[8] S. T. Coleridge. Manuscript notes in a copy of _Tom Jones_, now in the
+British Museum.
+
+[9] Ibid.
+
+[10] J. T. Smith. _Nollekens and his Times_. Vol. i. pp. 124-5.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+MR JUSTICE FIELDING
+
+  "The principal Duty which every Man owes is to his Country."
+  _Enquiry into the ... Increase of Robbers_.
+
+To have created the English novel were, it might seem, achievement enough
+to tire for a while the most vigorous of intellects; but to the author of
+_Tom Jones_ the apathy of repose was unknown. At no period of Fielding's
+short life can he be discerned as doing nothing; and, indeed, to an
+insight so penetrating, to an ardour so irrepressible, the England of
+George the Second can have afforded but very little inducement to
+inaction.
+
+Thus, in the one month of October 1748, the pages of _Tom Jones_ must have
+been nearing completion, if indeed the sheets were not already passing
+through the press. The Hanoverian philippics of "Mr Trott-Plaid" were
+still resounding in the _Jacobite's Journal_. While, on the 26th. of the
+month, Fielding's oaths were received for an entirely new rôle, that of a
+Justice of the Peace for Westminster. [1] Ten days later the _Jacobite's
+Journal_ had ceased to exist; and that a rumour was abroad connecting this
+demise of the _Journal_ with the bestowal of a new and arduous post on its
+editor appears from a paragraph in the _London Evening Post_. On Nov. 8,
+that organ prepares its readers for the fact that the now defunct "Mr
+Trott-Plaid" may possibly "rise awful in the Form of a Justice." Within
+four weeks of this announcement 'Justice Fielding's' name appears for the
+first time in the Police-news of the day, in a committal dated December
+10th [2]. And two days later he is sending three thieves to the Gatehouse,
+and admitting a suspected thief to bail, "after an Examination which
+lasted several hours." And it is interesting to notice that throughout
+this first month of his magisterial work the now 'awful form' of Justice
+Henry Fielding was kept constantly tempered in the public mind by the fact
+of his still undiminished popularity as a dramatist. In this December his
+comedies, with the inimitable 'romp' Kitty Clive as _Miss Lucy_, or the
+_Intrigueing Chambermaid_ or _Chloe_, as the case might be, were played no
+fewer than nine times on the Drury Lane boards.
+
+Scarcely had Fielding bent his genius to these new responsibilities of
+examining Westminster suspects and sending the rogues of that city to
+prison, than he appears preparing for an extension of those duties over
+the county of Middlesex. To be a county magistrate in 1750, however,
+necessitated the holding of landed estate worth £100 per annum; and
+Fielding's estate, for many years, seems to have been his pen. In this
+difficulty he turned to the Duke of Bedford, whose public virtues, and
+private generosity, were so soon to be acknowledged in the Dedication of
+_Tom Jones_. It was but three weeks after his appointment that the
+Westminster magistrate wrote as follows to the giver of those "princely
+Benefactions":
+
+
+"Bow Street. Decr. 13. 1748.
+
+"My Lord,
+
+"Such is my Dependence on the Goodness of your Grace, that before my Gout
+will permit me to pay my Duty to you personally, and to acknowledge your
+last kind Favour to me, I have the Presumption to solicite your Grace
+again. The Business of a Justice of Peace for Westminster is very
+inconsiderable without the Addition of that for the County of Middlesex.
+And without this Addition I cannot completely serve the Government in that
+office. But this unfortunately requires a Qualification which I want. Now
+there is a House belonging to your Grace, which stands in Bedford St., of
+70l. a year value. This hath been long untenanted, and will I am informed,
+require about 300l. to put in Repair. If your Grace would have the
+Goodness to let me have a Lease of this House, with some other Tenement
+worth 30l. a year, for 21 years, it would be a complete Qualification. I
+will give the full Worth for this lease, according to the valuation which
+any Person your Grace shall be pleased to appoint sets upon it. The only
+favour I beg of your Grace is, that I be permitted to pay the Money in two
+years, at four equal half-yearly Payments. As I shall repair the House as
+soon as possible, it will be in Reality an Improvement of that small Part
+of your Grace's estate, and will be certain to make my Fortune.
+
+"Mr Butcher will acquaint your Grace more fully than perhaps I have been
+able to do; and if Your Grace thinks proper to refer it to him, I and mine
+will be eternally bound to pray for your Grace tho I sincerely hope you
+will not lose a Farthing by doing so vast a service to,
+
+"My Lord your Grace's
+"Most obliged most obed' humble servant
+"H. Ffielding." [3]
+
+It seems probable that the Duke found better means of helping wit and
+genius, than by the leasing of the dilapidated tenement in Bedford Street.
+At any rate a month later, on January 11, we find Fielding duly swearing
+to an estate as consisting of "several Leasehold Messuages or Tenements
+Lying or being in the several parishes of St Paul Covent Garden, St Martin
+in the ffields, St Giles in the ffields, and St Georges Bloomsbury ... now
+in the possession or occupation of [my] Tennants or Undertennants, for and
+during the Term of Twenty one years of the clear yearly value of £100...."
+This statement, which is preserved in the Middlesex Records, is followed
+by Fielding's signature, appended to an oath that his qualification to
+serve as a Justice of the Peace for the county is as above described. [4]
+
+On the day following this sworn statement, January 12, 1749, his oaths
+were received as a Justice of the Peace for Middlesex. [5] But even this
+did not satisfy all the requirements of those days of doctrinal
+inquisitions and Jacobite risings. The certificate may still be seen among
+the Middlesex Records, duly certified by Charles Tough, Minister of the
+Parish and Church of St Pauls, Covent Garden, and 'Sworn in Court,' that
+"Henry Fielding Esq. on Sunday the 26th day of March, 1749, did receive
+the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper in ye Parish Church aforesaid,
+immediately after Divine Service and Sermon, according to the usage of the
+Church of England." [6] And among the same archives the dusty _Oath Roll_
+is preserved, bearing, under date of April 5, 1749, the signature of
+_Henry ffielding_ to a declaration of disbelief in the doctrine of
+Transubstantiation; a comprehensive oath of faithful service to King
+George and abjuration of King James; an oath directed against the power of
+the Holy See; and an oath of true allegiance to King George. All which
+oaths and declarations, it appears from the endorsement of the _Roll_,
+were taken immediately after the administration of Holy Communion, as
+attested by two credible witnesses.[7]
+
+It is with this second Commission in the Peace that we enter on the last
+five years of Fielding's crowded life, years full of that valiant struggle
+with eighteenth century crime to which the health of the great novelist
+was ultimately sacrificed. For no magistrate ever fulfilled more
+faithfully, or at greater personal cost, the first obligation of his Oath,
+"Ye shall swear that as Justice of Peace ... ye shall do equall right to
+the Poor and to the Rich, after your Cunning Witt and Power and after the
+Laws and Customes of the Realm...." And Fielding brought to his new post
+something more than a zealous discharge of the daily and nightly duties of
+an eighteenth century police magistrate. His genius and his patriotism
+found opportunity in the squalid Bow Street Court-room for advocating
+reforms as yet untouched by the slow hand of the professional
+philanthropist. The names of those reformers, of the men and women who
+swept away the pestilential horrors of eighteenth century prisons, of the
+statesmen who abolished laws that hung a man for stealing a handkerchief,
+and destroyed the public gallows that gave the mob their _Tyburn holiday_,
+of the creators of our temperance legislation, of our poor-law system, of
+our model dwellings,--all these are held high in honour. Because Henry
+Fielding was above all things a great creative genius his wise and
+strenuous efforts to raise social conditions, and to eradicate social
+sores, have been unduly forgotten.
+
+"Whatever he desired, he desired ardently," says Murphy. We soon have
+evidence of Justice Henry Fielding's ardent desire to cleanse London from
+some of the crying evils of his time. Of these evils none pressed more
+cruelly on the honest citizens than the prevalence and brutality of street
+robberies. To the well-protected Englishman of to-day the London of 1750
+would seem a nightmare of lawlessness. Thieves, as Fielding tells us,
+attacked their victims with loaded pistols, beat them with bludgeons and
+hacked them with cutlasses; and as to the murderers of the period, he has
+recorded how he himself was engaged on _five_ different murders, all
+committed by different gangs of street robbers within the space of one
+week. The exploit of one such gang may be quoted, from a newspaper
+paragraph of the first month of Fielding's administration at Bow Street.
+"On Friday evening," says the _General Advertiser_ for January 23, 1749,
+"about twenty fellows arm'd with Pistols, Cutlasses, Hangers, &c. went to
+the Gatehouse and one of them knocking at the Door, it was no sooner
+open'd than they all rush'd in, and struck and desperately wounded the
+Turnkey, and all that oppos'd them, and in Triumph carried off the Fellow
+who pick'd General Sinclaire's pocket of his watch as he was going into
+Leicester House." Surely, cries the indignant newspaper, "this instance of
+Daring Impudence must rouse every Person of Property to assemble and
+consult means for their own Security at least; for if Goals can be forc'd
+in this manner, private Houses can make but little resistance against such
+Gangs of Villains as at present infest this Great Metropolis." It was
+admitted that the numbers and arms of street robbers rendered it
+ordinarily impossible to arrest them in the act; and Fielding tells us how
+"Officers of Justice have owned to me that they have passed by [men] with
+Warrants in their Pockets against them without daring to apprehend them;
+and indeed they could not be blamed for not exposing themselves to sure
+Destruction: For it is a melancholy Truth, that at this very Day a Rogue
+no sooner gives the Alarm within certain Purlieus, than twenty or thirty
+armed Villains are found ready to come to his Assistance." And the new
+Justice found no effectual means at his disposal for coping with what he
+very aptly calls the enslaved condition of Londoners, assaulted, pillaged,
+and plundered; unable to sleep in their own houses, or to walk the
+streets, or to travel in safety. There were the Watch, who, we learn from
+_Amelia_ were "chosen out of those poor old decrepid People, who are from
+their Want of bodily Strength rendered incapable of getting a Livelihood
+by Work. These Men, armed only with a Pole, which some of them are scarce
+able to lift, are to secure the Persons and Houses of his Majesty's
+Subjects from the Attacks of Gangs of young, bold, stout, desperate and
+well-armed Villains.... If the poor old Fellows should run away from such
+Enemies, no one I think can wonder, unless he should wonder that they are
+able even to make their Escape." [8] These lineal descendants of Dogberry
+were supplemented by constables who it appears had to apply to the
+military when called upon to cope with the mere suppression of a
+gaming-house; and by "Thief-catchers," individuals so popularly odious
+that "the Thief-catcher is in Danger of worse Treatment from the Populace
+than the Thief." While the law was thus handicapped, the thief, on his
+side, had the advantage of the irregular buildings and the immense number
+of lanes, alleys, courts, and bye-places of London and Westminster, which,
+says Fielding, "had they been intended for the very purpose of
+concealment, they could scarce have been better contrived. Upon such a
+view the whole appears as a vast Wood or Forest, in which a Thief may
+harbour with as great Security as Wild Beasts do in the Desarts of Africa
+or Arabia." Also the thief's organisation was excellent: "there are at
+this Time," Fielding observes, "a great Gang of Rogues whose Number falls
+little short of a Hundred, who are incorporated in one Body, have Officers
+and a Treasury; and have reduced Theft and Robbery into a regular System."
+Further, he could generally bribe or deter the prosecutor. And in a last
+resource "rotten Members of the Law" forged his defence, and abundant
+false witnesses supported it. An illuminating example of the methods
+employed by our Georgian ancestors towards "deterring" prosecution occurs
+in a smuggling case of 1748, perpetrated shortly before Fielding first
+took office. A party of smugglers caught a custom-house officer and a
+shoemaker on their way to give evidence. The officer had 'every joint of
+him' broken; and after other torture, the description of which is more
+suitable for eighteenth century pages than our own, was dispatched. The
+less fortunate shoemaker was hung by the middle over a dry well, and left
+there. Several days afterwards the smugglers, returning and hearing him
+groan, cut the rope, let him drop to the bottom, and threw in logs and
+stones to cover him. And it was not only from the common thief that the
+Londoner of 1750 suffered. That fine flower of eighteenth century
+lawlessness, the gentleman of the road, carried his audacities into the
+heart of the Town itself. "I was sitting in my own dining-room on Sunday
+night," writes Horace Walpole, to a friend, "the clock had not struck
+eleven, when I heard a loud cry of 'stop thief!' A highwayman had attacked
+a postchaise in Piccadilly: the fellow was pursued, rode over the
+watchman, almost killed him, and escaped."
+
+It was into a conflict with this epidemic of crime that Fielding, at
+forty-three, and with already broken health, flung his energies, to such
+purpose that in these last five years of his life it is but too easy to
+forget the creator of _Joseph Andrews_, of _Tom Jones_, and of _Amelia_,
+in his last 'ardent desire,' as ardently pursued, to purify the sorely
+diseased body politic. His method of attack was twofold. He dealt
+vigorously with the individual criminal; and he sought to remove some of
+the causes by which those criminals were engendered. The individual attack
+is, for the most part, but sordid reading. Thus from a fragment of the
+Westminster _Committment Books_, preserved with the Middlesex Records, we
+may see how in January and February of this year 1749 'Henry Fielding
+Esq.' committed to the New Prison such cases as:
+
+Thomas Thrupp                for riot
+Thomas Trinder               for burglary
+T. Chamberlain and Terence
+Fitz Patrick                 for assault
+C. O'Neal                    for assaulting two Watchmen
+Mary Hughes and Caterine
+Edmonds                      for assault and beating
+John Smithson                for exercising the art of pattenmaker
+                             without having been brought up thereto
+                             for seven years
+Cornelius York               for filing guineas
+Christo Kelsey               for ill fame
+Bryan Park                   for assault
+
+
+This sorry list, interspersed with cases of murder, of robbery with
+violence, and of smuggling, may doubtless be extended over the entire five
+years of Fielding's work on the Bench; and to reiterate the details of
+such work would be as tedious now as the monotonous discharge of these
+duties must once have been to the author of _Tom Jones_. [9] Of much more
+enduring interest is the great novelist's second line of attack on the
+problem confronting him.
+
+For Henry Fielding's insight was far too profound for him to fail to
+strike at the root of individual crime, in those conditions which bred the
+criminal as surely as, to use his own favourite simile, unclean
+surroundings breed disease. And he had not been six months on the Bench
+before finding his first opportunity in a _Charge_ delivered, as their
+Chairman, to the Westminster Grand Jury, on June 29, 1749. [10] This "very
+loyal, learned, ingenious, excellent and useful" Charge was published "By
+Order of the Court, and at the unanimous Request of the Gentlemen of the
+Grand Jury"; and it is, Mr Austin Dobson tells us, "still regarded by
+lawyers as a model exposition." It is also a stirring appeal to the worthy
+jurors to discharge their duties as befitted men called upon to exercise
+one of the most ancient and honourable of English liberties: "Grand
+Juries, Gentlemen," declared their new Chairman, "are in Reality the only
+Censors of this Nation. As such, the Manners of the People are in your
+Hands, and in yours only. You, therefore, are the only Correctors of
+them.... To execute this Duty with Vigilance, you are obliged by the Duty
+you owe both to God and to your Country." Here is the same zeal, now
+directed to stimulating the conscience of the Westminster Jurors, which
+moved _Captain Vinegar_ to lay about him so lustily on all the abuses
+within reach of his newspaper, and which inspired the 'father of the
+English Novel' with the admitted motive,--"I declare, that to recommend
+Goodness and Innocence hath been my sincere Endeavour in this History"--if
+not with the consummate art of his pages.
+
+Fielding specially directs the energies of his jurors to the repression of
+open profligacy, the more as, through the 'egregious folly' of their
+parents, the _Town_ had then become the 'seminaries of education' for
+youths of birth and station. And he bids them attend to those 'temples of
+iniquity' the masquerade rooms of the time, with a side glance at Foote's
+scandalous performances; to the gaming houses; to the prevalent vice of
+profane swearing, that "detestable Crime, so injurious to the Honour of
+God, so directly repugnant to His positive Commands, so highly offensive
+to the Ears of all good Men, and so very scandalous to the Nation in the
+Ears of Foreigners"; and to the libeller, a species of 'Vermin' whom "men
+ought to crush wherever they find him, without staying till he bite them."
+It is noteworthy also, that to the genius of Fielding, 'watching,
+brooding, creating,' the characteristic feature of his age seemed to be a
+"fury after licentious and luxurious pleasures." "Gentlemen," he cries,
+"our News-Papers, from the Top of the Page to the Bottom, the Corners of
+our Streets up to the very Eves of our Houses, present us with nothing but
+a View of Masquerades, Balls, and Assemblies of various Kinds, Fairs,
+Wells, Gardens, &c. tending to promote Idleness, Extravagance and
+Immorality, among all Sorts of People." Many of the public, he declares,
+make diversion "no longer the Recreation or Amusement, but the whole
+Business of their Lives"; and not content with three theatres they must
+have a fourth. What would he have said to a London in which not four but a
+hundred and twenty theatres draw nightly, and sometimes twice a day, their
+crowded audiences.
+
+Two days after the delivery of this _Charge_ (which the _General
+Advertiser_ praises as "excellent and learned") a three days street riot
+broke out, which it fell to Fielding to subdue. On Saturday July 1 a mob
+had gathered in the Strand, about a disorderly house where a sailor was
+said to have been robbed. Beadle Nathaniel Munns, arriving on the scene,
+found the mob crying out "Pull down the house, pull down the house!"; and
+sent for the constables. Meanwhile the mob broke open the house and
+demolished and stripped the same; and throwing the goods out of the
+windows, set fire to them, causing such danger of a general conflagration
+that 'the parish engines' were sent for. A constable, _not being able to
+find any magistrate in Town_, went to Somerset House to procure assistance
+from the military, and on his returning with a corporal and twelve men, a
+force that later that night was increased to an officer and forty men, the
+mob was at last dispersed. On the next day, however, Sunday, they
+reassembled, and proceeded to demolish a second house, and to burn the
+goods thereof with an even larger fire than that of the preceding night.
+Mr Saunders Welch, High Constable for Holborn and, Fielding tells us, "one
+of the best Officers who was ever concerned in the Execution of Justice,
+and to whose Care, Integrity and Bravery the Public hath, to my Knowledge,
+the highest Obligations," passing through Fleet Street at the time, saw
+this second fire, and was told by the owner of another house that the mob
+threatened to come to him next. Upon which Mr Welch "well knowing the
+Impossibility of procuring any Magistrate at that Time who would act,"
+went to the Tilt Yard and procured an officer and some forty men; and
+returning, found the third house in great part wrecked, the danger of fire
+here being aggravated by the extreme narrowness of the street on both
+sides and the fact that the premises of a bank were adjacent. This same
+Sunday night, also, the mob broke open the night-prison under Beadle
+Munns' house, rescuing two prisoners; and forced the Watch-house of the
+Liberty with stones and brick bats, to the imminent danger of the Beadle's
+life, as "sworn before me, Henry Fielding." Till three in the morning Mr
+Welch and the soldiers remained on duty, by which time the rioters had
+again dispersed. All this time Fielding, Mr Welch records, was out of
+town; but, by noon on Monday, the Justice was back in Bow Street: and, on
+being acquainted with the riot, immediately dispatched an order for a
+party of the Guards to bring the prisoners to his house, the streets being
+then full of a riotous crowd threatening danger of rescue. Fielding
+proceeded to examine the prisoners, a "vast mob" meanwhile being assembled
+in Bow Steet, and the streets adjacent. On information of the threatening
+aspect of the people he applied to the Secretary at War for a
+reinforcement of the Guards; and from his window, spoke to the mob,
+informing them of their danger, and exhorting them to disperse, but in
+vain. Rumours, moreover, came that four thousand sailors were assembling
+to march to the Strand that Monday night. In view of these rumours and of
+the riotous state of the streets, Fielding, the officer of the guard, and
+Mr Welch "sat up the whole night, while a large party of soldiers were
+kept ready under arms who with the peace officers patrolled the streets."
+And thanks to this vigorous action on the part of their new magistrate the
+citizens found peace restored within twelve hours of his return to town.
+
+The same day as that on which Fielding was addressing the riotous mob from
+his Bow Street windows, and sitting up all night with the officer of a
+military guard, he found time to write to the Duke of Bedford on his own
+behalf and on that of his family, concerning the provision for which he
+betrays so constant an anxiety.
+
+
+"Bow Street. July 3. 1749.
+
+"My Lord,
+
+"The Protection which I have been honoured with receiving at the Hands of
+your Grace, and the goodness which you were pleased to express some time
+toward me, embolden me to mention to your Grace that the Place of
+Solicitor to the Excise is now vacant by the Death of Mr Selwyn. I hope
+no Person is better qualified for it, and I assure you, my Lord, none
+shall execute it with more Fidelity. I am at this Moment busied in
+endeavouring to suppress a dangerous Riot, or I w'd have personally
+waited on your Grace to solicite a Favour which will make me and my
+Family completely happy.
+
+"I am, &c.,
+
+"H. Ffielding." [11]
+
+The vacant post was secured, alas, by another candidate.
+
+A few weeks after the riotous scenes which had enabled Fielding to show
+himself a man of prompt action in times of popular ferment, the
+publication is advertised of his _Charge_, published "by order of the
+Court and at the request of the Gentleman of the Grand Jury." And on the
+same day he submits to the Lord Chancellor a copy both of this pamphlet,
+and of a draft of a _Bill for the better preventing Street Robberies &c_,
+the design of which it appears Lord Hardwick had already encouraged.
+
+
+"Bow Street, July 21. 1749.
+
+"My Lord,
+
+"I beg your Lordship's acceptance of a Charge given by me to the Grand
+Jury of Westminster though I am but too sensible how unworthy it is of
+your notice.
+
+"I have likewise presumed to send my Draught of a Bill for the better
+preventing street Robberies &c. which your Lordship was so very kind to
+say you would peruse; I hope the general Plan at least may be happy in
+your Approbation.
+
+"Your Lordship will have the goodness to pardon my repeating a desire
+that the name of Joshua Brogden, may be inserted in the next commission
+of the Peace for Middlesex and Westminster for whose [integrity] and
+Ability in the Execution of his office. I will engage my credit with your
+Lordship, an Engagement which appears to me of the most sacred Nature.
+
+"I am,
+"My Lord, with the utmost Respect and Devotion,
+"Your Lordship's most Obed't
+"Most humble Servant
+"H. Ffielding. [12]
+
+"To the Right Hon'ble.
+"The Lord High Chancellor of G. Britain."
+
+All trace of the text of this draft Bill seems to have been lost; but the
+fact of the Lord Chancellor's consent to consider its provisions shows
+clearly enough how rapidly Fielding was adding to his now achieved fame as
+the author of _Tom Jones_ the very different reputation of an authority on
+criminal legislation.
+
+The application on behalf of Joshua Brogden, later if not at this time the
+Justice's Clerk, recalls the further pleasant tribute paid to the
+soundness of Mr Brogden's morals in the _Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon_.
+If all Fielding's modest magisterial income of £300 a year had gone, as he
+declares it should have done, to his clerk, that functionary would, he
+tells us, have been "but ill paid for sitting almost sixteen hours in the
+twenty four, in the most unwholesome, as well as nauseous air in the
+universe, and which hath in his case corrupted a good constitution without
+contaminating his morals." It was Joshua Brogden who had witnessed, a few
+months earlier, the agreement with Andrew Millar for _Tom Jones_. Could
+the good clerk but have played the part of a Boswell to his illustrious
+master we should have something more than our present scanty materials for
+the personal life of Henry Fielding.
+
+Yet another of Fielding's rare letters belongs to this year; a letter
+conveying his formal congratulations to Lyttelton, on that model
+statesman's second marriage, and in which his warm heart again makes
+application, not on behalf of his own scanty means, but for a friend.
+
+
+"Bow Street, Aug't 29, 1749.
+
+"Sir,
+
+"Permit me to bring up the Rear of your Friends in paying my Compliments
+of Congratulation on your late Nuptials. There may perhaps be seasons when
+the Rear may be as honourable a Post in Friendship as in War, and if so
+such certainly must be every time of Joy and Felicity. Your present
+situation must be full of these; and so will be, I am confident, your
+future Life from the same Fountain. Nothing can equal the excellent
+character your Lady bears among those of her own Sex, and I never yet knew
+them speak well of a woman who did not deserve their good words. How
+admirable is your Fortune in the Matrimonial Lottery! I will venture to
+say there is no man alive who exults more in this, or in any other
+Happiness that can attend you than myself; and you ought to believe me
+from the same Reason that fully persuades me of the satisfaction you
+receive from any Happiness of mine; this Reason is that you must be
+sensible how much of it I owe to your goodness; and there is a great
+Pleasure in Gratitude though it is second I believe to that of
+Benevolence; for of all the Delights upon Earth none can equal the
+Raptures which a good mind feels on conferring Happiness on those whom we
+think worthy of it. This is the sweetest ingredient in Power, and I
+solemnly protest I never wished for Power, more than a few days ago for
+the sake of a Man whom I love, and that more perhaps from the esteem I
+know he bears towards you than from any other Reason. This Man is in Love
+with a young Creature of the most apparent worth, who returns his
+affection. Nothing is wanting to make two very miserable People extremely
+Blessed but a moderate portion of the greatest of human Evils. So
+Philosophers call it, and so it is called by Divines, whose word is the
+rather to be taken, as they are, many of them, more conversant with this
+Evil than ever Philosophers were. The Name of this man is Moore to whom
+you kindly destined that Laurel, which, though it hath long been withered,
+may not probably soon drop from the Brow of its present Possessor; but
+there is another Place of much the same Value now vacant: it is that of
+Deputy Licensor to the Stage. Be not offended at this Hint; for though I
+will own it impudent enough in one who hath so many Obligations of his own
+to you, to venture to recommend another man to your Favour, yet Impudence
+itself may possibly be a Virtue when exerted on the behalf of a Friend; at
+least I am the less ashamed of it, as I have known men remarkable for the
+opposite Modesty possess it without the mixture of any other good Quality.
+In this Fault then you must indulge me; for should I ever see you as high
+in Power as I wish, and as it is perhaps more my Interest than your own
+that you should be, I shall be guilty of the like as often as I find a Man
+in whom I can, after much intimacy discover no want, but that of the Evil
+above mentioned. I beg you will do me the Honour of making my Compliments
+to your unknown Lady, and believe me to be with the highest Esteem,
+Respect, Love, and Gratitude
+
+"Sir,
+"Y'r most obliged
+"Most obed't
+"humble Servant
+
+"Henry Fielding.
+
+"To the Hon'ble
+"George Lyttelton, Esqr." [13]
+
+This Edward Moore was a poet held worthy, it would seem, to possess the
+Laureat's 'withered' laurel (even in 1749 Fielding cannot refrain from a
+thrust at Colley Cibber); a journalist; a writer of whom Dibden declared
+that the tendency of all his productions was to "cultivate truth and
+morality"; a tradesman in the linen business; and the son of a dissenting
+minister: a combination of circumstances closely recalling Fielding's
+friendship for the good dissenter, jeweller, and poet, George Lillo. And
+it is to an undated letter by Edward Moore, hitherto overlooked, that we
+owe one of the rare references to Henry Fielding from a contemporary pen.
+Moore is writing to a dissenting minister at Taunton, one Mr John Ward, of
+whom it was said that venerable as he himself was for learning, worth, and
+piety he deemed it "_an honour to have his name connected with that of
+Moore_,"--a further proof of the quality of man whom Fielding choose for
+friend. Moore had been prevented, by Fielding's illness, from appointing
+an evening on which he might invite the Taunton minister to his lodgings
+to meet there some of the first wits of the day. "It is not," he writes,
+"owing to forgetfulness that you have not heard from me before. Fielding
+continues to be visited for his sins so as to be wheeled about from room
+to room; when he mends I am sure to see him at my lodgings; and you may
+depend upon timely notice. What fine things are Wit and Beauty, if a Man
+could be temperate with one, or a Woman chaste with the other! But he that
+will confine his acquaintance to the sober and the modest will generally
+find himself among the dull and the ugly. If this remark of mine should be
+thought to shoulder itself in without an introduction you will be pleased
+to note that Fielding is a Wit; that his disorder is the Gout, and
+intemperance the cause." It is of course idle to contend that Fielding
+always carried a cool head. Murphy tells us that to him might justly be
+applied a parody on a saying concerning Scipio,--"always over a social
+bottle or a book, he enured his body to the dangers of intemperance, and
+exercised his mind with Studies." But we must in justice remember that the
+Augustan age of English literature concerned itself but very little with
+our modern virtue of sobriety. That Fielding, with the other great men of
+his day, very often drank more than was good for him, amounts to little
+more than saying that he wore a laced coat when he had one, and carried a
+sword at his side.
+
+The execution of one of the Strand rioters, Bosavern Penlez by name, in
+September, had roused much controversy; and as the evidence in the case
+was in Justice Fielding's possession, and the attacks were levelled at the
+Government, we find him plunged once more into political pamphleteering in
+the publication, under the date of 1749, of the learned little treatise
+entitled "_A True State of the Case of Bosavern Penlez' who suffered on
+account of the late riot in the Strand. In which the Law regarding these
+Offences and the Statute of George I. commonly called the Riot Act are
+fully considered_." The pamphlet opens with a warm protest against the
+abuse to which Fielding had been subjected by his political opponents. "It
+may easily be imagined," he writes, "that a Man whose Character hath been
+so barbarously, even without the least Regard to Truth or Decency,
+aspersed, on account of his Endeavours to defend the present Government,
+might wish to decline any future Appearance as a political Writer"; but
+more weighty considerations move him to lay the defence of the Riot Act in
+general, and of this application of it in particular, before a public
+which had been imposed upon "in the grossest and wickedest manner." We
+have already quoted the vivid depositions concerning this Strand riot,
+which were sworn before Fielding, and which he here reproduces; and his
+historical defence of the public need of suppressing riots, from the days
+of Wat Tyler onwards, may be left to the curious reader. Needless to say,
+Fielding makes out an excellent case against the toleration of mob law:--
+"When by our excellent Constitution the greatest Subject, no not even the
+King himself, can, without a lawful Trial and Conviction divest the
+meanest Man of his Property, deprive him of his Liberty, or attack him in
+his Person; shall we suffer a licentious Rabble to be Accuser, Judge,
+Jury, and Executioner; to inflict corporal Punishment, break open Men's
+Doors, plunder their Houses, and burn their Goods?" And, at the close,
+this pamphlet reveals the warm-hearted magistrate no less than the erudite
+lawyer. For of the two condemned prisoners, Wilson and Penlez, the case of
+the former seemed to Fielding "to be the Object of true Compassion."
+Accordingly he laid the evidence in his possession before "some very noble
+Persons," and, he adds, "I flatter myself that it might be a little owing
+to my Representation, that the Distinction between an Object of Mercy, and
+an Object of Justice at last prevailed". So the felon gained his respite,
+and a lasting niche for his name, in that he owed his life partly if not
+wholly to the generous compassion of Henry Fielding. The pamphlet seems to
+have made its mark, for a second edition was advertised within a month of
+publication.
+
+This eventful year, the year which had seen the publication of _Tom
+Jones_, the shackling of Fielding's genius within the duties of a London
+magistrate, the issue of two pamphlets occupied with criminal reform and
+administration, the drafting of a proposed Criminal Bill, and the
+suppression of a riot, closed sadly with the death of Fielding's little
+daughter, Mary Amelia, when barely twelve months old. She was buried at St
+Paul's, Covent Garden, on the seventeenth of December, 1749. And some time
+in the autumn or early winter Fielding himself appears to have been
+dangerously ill. This we learn from the following paragraph in the
+_General Advertizer_ for December 28: "Justice Fielding has no
+Mortification in his Foot as has been reported: that Gentleman has indeed
+been very dangerously ill with a Fever, and a Fit of the Gout, in which he
+was attended by Dr Thompson, an eminent Physician, and is now so well
+recovered as to be able to execute his Office as usual."
+
+[1] His Commission in the Peace for Westminster bears date October 25.
+1748.
+
+[2] An application is reported for the 2nd of December before "Justice
+Fielding" of Meards Court, St. Anne's, but for reasons given below this
+_may_ refer to John Fielding.
+
+[3] From the autograph now at Woburn Abbey, and printed in the
+_Correspondence of John Fourth Duke of Bedford_. Vol. i. p. 589.
+
+[4] Middlesex Records. Volume of _Qualification Oaths for Justices of the
+Peace_. 1749. From an entry dated July 13, 1749, in the same volume,
+Fielding appears to have then owned leases in the three first named
+parishes only.
+
+[5] See the King's Writ, now preserved in the Record Office.
+
+[6] Middlesex Records. _Sacramental Certificates_.
+
+[7] Middlesex Records. _Oath Rolls_.
+
+[8] _Amelia_. Book i. Chapter ii.
+
+[9] The Westminster _Session Rolls_, preserved among the Middlesex
+Records, contain many recognizances all signed by Fielding.
+
+[10] "On Friday last," announces the General Advertiser for May 17,
+"Counsellor Fielding, one of his Majesty's Justices of the Peace was
+chosen Chairman of the Sessions at Hicks Hall for the County of
+Middlesex"; a statement not very compatible with the incontestable
+evidence preserved in the _General Orders Books_ of the Middlesex Records,
+by which it appears that John Lane Esq're was elected Chairman of the
+Middlesex General Sessions and General Quarter Session from Ladyday 1749
+to September 1752. The personal paragraphist of 1749 was perhaps no less
+inaccurate than his descendant of to-day. But a few weeks later this
+honour of chairmanship was certainly accorded to Fielding by his brethren
+of the Bench for Westminster. An entry in the _Sessions Book_ of
+Westminster, 1749 runs as follows: "May. 1749, Mr Fielding elected
+chairman of this present Session and to continue untill the 2nd day of the
+next." _MSS Sessions Books for Westminster. Vol. 1749_. Middlesex Records.
+
+[11] From the autograph now at Woburn Abbey, and printed in the
+_Correspondence of John, Fourth Duke of Bedford_, vol. ii. p. 35.
+
+[12] From the hitherto unpublished autograph now in the British Museum.
+
+[13] This letter is now in the Dreer Collection of the Historical Society
+of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, U.S.A.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+FIELDING AND LEGISLATION
+
+    "The Subject, as well as the Child, should be left without excuse
+    before he is punished: for, in that case alone, the Rod becomes
+    the Hand either of the Parent or the Magistrate."
+    _Inquiry Into the Causes of the late Increase of Robbers_.
+
+There is no Bill for the suppression of street robberies on the Statute
+Book for 1749 or 1750; so the draft which Fielding, with characteristic
+energy, despatched to the Lord Chancellor but a few months after his
+appointment to the Bench, was, presumably, pigeon-holed. Meanwhile, the
+criminal conditions of the metropolis seem to have become, if anything,
+more scandalous. In February 1750, the _Penny Post_ reports the gaols in
+and about London to be "now so full of Felons and desperate Rogues that
+the Keepers have not fetters enow to put upon them; so that in some
+Prisons two or three are chained together to prevent their escape." And on
+the fifth of the same month the _General Advertiser_ hears that "near 40
+Highwaymen, street Robbers, Burglars, Rogues, Vagabonds, and Cheats have
+been committed within a week last past by Justice Fielding." But however
+full of business the Bow Street court-room might be, that dreary routine
+[1] would make, as we have said, but equally dreary reading. And the fact
+that both John and Henry Fielding appear to have been known as 'Justice
+Fielding' during the lifetime of the latter, lessens whatever biographical
+value might be extracted from the constant newspaper paragraphs recording
+the Fielding cases. It is clear that the house in Bow Street was the
+centre of an active campaign against the thieves, murderers, professional
+gamblers, and highwaymen, who were then so rife. Military guards conducted
+thither prisoners, brought for examination from Newgate, for fear of
+rescue from gangs lurking in the neighbouring streets. All "Persons who
+have been robbed" and their servants, were desired, by public
+advertisement, to attend Justice Fielding "at his House in Bow Street," to
+identify certain prisoners under examination. And thither came the
+"porters and beggars," the composing of whose quarrels Henry Fielding
+himself has told us, occupied his days. The generous spirit in which he
+treated such poor clients, and his tenderness for those driven by want
+into crime, are eminently characteristic of the man. By adjusting, instead
+of inflaming, these squalid quarrels, and by "refusing to take a shilling
+from a man who must undoubtedly would not have had another left," he
+reduced a supposed income of £500 a year to £300. And if the picture of
+the poor wretch, driven to highway robbery by the sight of his starving
+family, whom Tom Jones relieved from his own scanty purse, be not proof
+enough of the compassion that tempered Justice Fielding's sternness, we
+have his own express pleading for these unhappy victims of circumstance:
+"what can be more shocking," he cries, "than to see an industrious poor
+Creature, who is able and willing to labour forced by mere want into
+Dishonesty, and that in a Nation of such Trade and Opulence." So justly
+could Fielding apportion the contributary negligence of society towards
+the criminals bred by its apathy.
+
+And it was not only the impoverished porter who found help at Bow Street.
+"When," says Murphy, "in the latter end of [Mr Fielding's] days he had an
+income of four or five hundred a-year, he knew no use of money but to keep
+his table open to those who had been his friends when young, and had
+impaired their own fortunes." As Mr Austin Dobson says, in commenting on
+one of Horace Walpole's scurrilous letters, [2] "it must always have been
+a more or less ragged regiment which met about that kindly Bow Street
+board." The man who parted with his own hardly won arrears of rent to
+relieve the yet greater need of a College friend, was little likely to be
+less generous when the tardy 'jade Fortune' at last put some secured
+income into his hands.
+
+No special event marks the spring and summer of 1750. On the 11th of
+January the Westminster General Quarter Sessions opened, and on the
+following day Fielding was again elected as chairman "for the two next
+Quarter Sessions"; which election was repeated, "for the two next
+Sessions, [3]" in July. The Registers of St Paul's Covent Garden record
+the baptism of a daughter, Sophia, on the 21st of January. And an
+indication that the zealous magistrate was plunged, personally, into some
+of the tumults of the time occurs in the following trifling note to the
+Duke of Bedford.
+
+
+"My Lord,
+
+"In obedience to the Commands I have the Honour to receive from your
+Grace, I shall attend tomorrow morning and do the utmost in my Power to
+preserve the Peace on that occasion.
+
+"I am, with gratitude and Respect,
+"My Lord,
+"Your Grace's most obliged
+"most obedient humble servant.
+
+"Henry Ffielding. [4]
+
+"Bow Street,
+
+"May 14, 1750."
+
+By the autumn, however, a rumour was abroad that the now famous author of
+_Tom Jones_ was engaged on pages of a very different nature. The _General
+Advertiser_, for October 9, announces:--
+
+"We hear that an eminent Magistrate is now employed in preparing a
+Pamphlet for the Press in which the several causes that have conspired to
+render Robberies so frequent of late will be laid open; the Defects of our
+Laws enquired into, and Methods proposed which may discourage and in a
+great measure prevent this growing Evil for the future."
+
+This pamphlet, in which many a later reform was urged by Fielding's
+far-sighted zeal, seems to have been still in preparation for the next two
+months. And in November the reform of the law had to give place to a more
+immediate urgency in protecting the Lord Chancellor. The keepers of three
+gaming houses, closed by his lordship's orders, were reported to be
+plotting against that exalted dignitary; and the case, as appears from the
+following letter to a lawyer, Mr Perkins, was in Fielding's hands. [5]
+
+
+"Sir
+
+"I have made full enquiry after the three Persons and have a perfect
+account of them all. Their characters are such that perhaps three more
+likely Men could not be found in the Kingdom for the Hellish Purpose
+mentioned in the Letter. As the Particulars are many and the Affair of
+such Importance I beg to see you punctually at six this evening when I
+will be alone to receive you--and am, Sir,
+
+"Yr. most obed;
+"humble servant
+
+"He Ffielding.
+
+"Bow Street. Nov. 25. 1750."
+
+When the keepers of gambling houses dared to fly at such high game as the
+person of the Lord Chancellor, there is no wonder that the safety of his
+Majesty's ordinary lieges was of small account. "Robbery," writes Horace
+Walpole, a few weeks before the date of the above letter, "is the only
+thing which goes on with any vivacity." And at the close of the year a
+Royal Proclamation was actually published, promising £100 over and above
+other rewards, and a free pardon, to any accomplice who should apprehend
+offenders committing murder, or robbery by violence, in London streets or
+within five miles of London, providing such an accomplice had not himself
+dealt a mortal wound. So startling a confession of impotence on the part
+of the Government served very fitly to introduce the pamphlet, then on the
+eve of publication. And if further proof be needed of the conditions of
+public safety at the beginning of the year 1751, it may be seen in the
+passage of the King's Speech delivered at the opening of Parliament on the
+17th of January, in which his Majesty exhorted the Commons to suppress
+outrages and violences on life and property; words representing, of
+course, the policy of the Ministry.
+
+The title of Fielding's little book, dedicated to Lord Hardwick, and
+published about January 22, is _An Enquiry into the Causes of the late
+Increase of Robbers &c. with some Proposals for remedying this growing
+Evil. In which the Present Reigning Vices are impartially exposed; and the
+Laws that relate to the Provision for the Poor and to the Punishment of
+Felons are largely and freely examined_. The _Enquiry_ opens with a
+powerful denunciation of the licence then allowed to the three great
+causes, in Fielding's opinion, of the increasing demoralisation of the
+'most useful Part' of the people. These were, first, the immense number of
+places of amusement, all seducing the working classes to squander both
+their money and their time; this being "indeed a certain Method to fill
+the Streets with Beggars and the Goals with Debtors and Thieves." Here, in
+Fielding's view, new legislation was demanded. The second cause of the
+late excessive increase of crime, according to the _Enquiry_, was an
+epidemic of gin drinking, "a new Kind of Drunkenness unknown to our
+Ancestors [which] is lately sprung up amongst us." Gin, says Fielding,
+appeared to be the principal sustenance of more than an hundred thousand
+Londoners, "the dreadful Effects of which I have the Misfortune every Day
+to see, and to smell too." The crime resulting from such drunkenness was
+obvious; but Fielding, looking far beyond the narrow confines of his
+court-room, beheld a future gin-sodden race, and he appeals to the
+legislature to put a stop to a practice, the consequences of which must
+alarm "the most sluggish Degree of Public Spirit." It is surely something
+more than a coincidence that a few weeks after these warnings were
+published, Hogarth issued his awful plate of _Gin Lane_. A third source of
+crime, in Fielding's eyes, was the gambling among the 'lower Classes of
+Life,'--a school "in which most Highwaymen of great eminence have been
+bred," and a habit plainly tending to the "Ruin of Tradesmen, the
+Destruction of Youth, and to the Multiplication of every Kind of Fraud and
+Violence." In this case the 'Eminent Magistrate' finds new legislation
+less needed than a vigorous enforcement of existing laws; such, he adds,
+"as hath lately been executed with great Vigour within the Liberty of
+Westminster." Before long the pages of _Amelia_ were to bring home yet
+more forcibly to Fielding's readers the cruel results of the pleasures (or
+speculations) of the needy gambler,--the 'Destruction of Familys,' thereby
+incurred, no less than the breeding of highwaymen. Who does not remember
+"that famous scene when Amelia is spreading, for the recreant who is
+losing his money at the Kings Arms, the historic little supper of hashed
+mutton, which she has cooked with her own hands, and denying herself a
+glass of white wine to save the paltry sum of sixpence, 'while her Husband
+was paying a Debt of several Guineas incurred by the Ace of Trumps being
+in the hands of his Adversary'--a scene which it is impossible to read
+aloud without a certain huskiness in the throat." [6] The last great cause
+of crime which the _Enquiry_ considers, and with much learning and detail,
+is the condition of the poor. Here Fielding's views on our modern problem
+of the unemployed may be read. And here occurs a splendid denunciation of
+the 'House of Correction' or Bridewell of the period, a prison for idle
+and disorderly persons where "they are neither to be corrected nor
+employed: and where with the conversation of many as bad and sometimes
+worse than themselves they are sure to be improved in the Knowledge and
+confirmed in the Practice of Iniquity." The most impudent of the wretches
+brought before him, Fielding tells us, were always "such as have been
+before acquainted with the Discipline of Bridewell." These prisons, from
+which the disorderly and idle came out, "much more idle and disorderly
+than they went in," were, says Fielding, no other than "Schools of Vice,
+Seminaries of Idleness, and Common-sewers of Nastiness and Disease." A
+fixed (and lower) rate of wages, it is curious to note, is one remedy
+advocated in the _Enquiry_, for raising the condition of the poor.
+
+Such were the 'temptations' to robbery that Fielding would have removed,
+nobly conceiving the highest office of the legislature to be that of
+prevention rather than cure. The _Enquiry_ concludes with offering some
+more immediate palliatives for the diseased state of the body politic, in
+the removing of actual 'Encouragement to Robbery.' First among such
+encouragements Fielding places the fact that "the Thief disposes of his
+goods with almost as much safety as the honestest Tradesman"; and he urged
+the need of legislation to prohibit the amazing advertisements by which
+our ancestors promised to give rewards for the recovery of stolen goods
+"_and no questions asked_." Such advertisements he declares to be "in
+themselves so very scandalous and of such pernicious Consequence, that if
+Men are not ashamed to own they prefer an old Watch or a Diamond Ring to
+the Good of [the] Society it is a pity some effectual Law was not
+contrived to prevent their giving this public Countenance to Robbery for
+the future." And, under this head, he advocates legislation either for the
+regulating of pawnbrokers, or for the entire extirpation of a "Set of
+Miscreants which, like other Vermin, harbour only about the Poor and grow
+fat sucking their Blood." The subsequent legislation by which prosecutors
+were recompensed for loss of time and money, when prosecuting the 'wolves
+in society,' may be added to the measures forseen if not actually promoted
+by Fielding's enlightened zeal. And in nothing was he more in advance of
+his age than in his denunciation of that scandal of the eighteenth
+century, the conduct and frequency of public executions. It has taken our
+legislators a hundred years to provide the swift, solemn and private
+executions urged by Henry Fielding, in place of the brutal 'Tyburn
+holiday' enacted every six weeks for the benefit of the Georgian mob.
+Another matter demanding legislation was the great probability of escape
+afforded to thieves by the narrow streets and the common-lodging houses of
+the day. Of the latter, crowded with miserable beds from the cellar to the
+garret, let out, at twopence a night the single beds, and threepence the
+double ones, Fielding draws a picture as terrible as any of his friend
+Hogarth's plates. And he concludes "Nay I can add what I myself once saw
+in the Parish of Shoreditch where two little Houses were emptied of near
+seventy Men and Women," and where the money found on all the occupants
+(with the exception of a pretty girl who was a thief) "did not amount to
+one shilling." In all these houses gin, moreover, was sold at a penny the
+quartern. Housed thus, in conditions destructive of "all Morality, Decency
+and Modesty," with the street for bed if they fall sick ("and it is almost
+a Miracle that Stench, Vermin, and Want should ever suffer them to be
+well"), oppressed with poverty, and sunk in every species of debauchery,
+"the Wonder in Fact is," cries Fielding, "... that we have not a thousand
+more Robbers than we have; indeed that all these wretches are not thieves
+must give us either a very high Idea of their Honesty or a very mean one
+of their Capacity and Courage." And, leaving for a moment legislative
+reform, Fielding delivers a vigorous attack on the national sluggishness
+of public spirit which helped to render robbery a fairly safe profession.
+With such sluggishness his ardent nature had very little sympathy. "With
+regard to Private Persons," he protests, "there is no Country I believe in
+the World where that vulgar Maxim so generally prevails that what is the
+Business of every Man is the business of no Man; and for this plain
+Reason, that there is no Country in which less Honour is gained by serving
+the Public. He therefore who commits no crime against the Public, is very
+well satisfied with his own Virtue; far from thinking himself obliged to
+undergo any Labour, expend any Money, or encounter any Danger on such
+Account." And in no part of the _Enquiry_ does the writer more truly show
+his wisdom than in the pages on 'false Compassion' that plausible weakness
+which refuses to prosecute the oppressors of the helpless and innocent,
+and which at that time, in the person of his Majesty, King George II. was,
+it appears, very active in pardoning offenders when convicted. Fielding's
+arguments are incontestable; but his apologue may have found even more
+favour in the age of wit. He hopes such good nature may not carry those in
+power so far, "as it once did a Clergyman in _Scotland_ who in the fervour
+of his Benevolence prayed to God that He would be graciously pleased to
+pardon the poor Devil."
+
+To the devil, whether in man or in society, Fielding was ever a 'spirited
+enemy'; and his first biographer tells us that "to the unworthy he was
+rather harsh." But the last page of this little book breathes that spirit
+of tenderness for hard pressed humanity which in Fielding was so
+characteristically mingled with a wholesome severity. If the legislature
+would take proper care to raise the condition of the poor, then he
+declares the root of the evil would be struck: "nor in plain Truth will
+the utmost severity to Offenders be justifiable unless we take every
+possible Method of preventing the offence ... the Subject as well as the
+child should be left without Excuse before he is punished: for in that
+Case alone the Rod becomes the Hand either of the Parent or the
+Magistrate." And his last word is one of compassion for the "many
+Cart-loads of our Fellow-creatures [who] once in six weeks are carried to
+Slaughter"; of whom much the greater part might, with 'proper care and
+Regulations' have been made "not only happy in themselves but very useful
+Members of the Society which they now so greatly dishonour in the Sight of
+all Christendom."
+
+Henry Fielding is himself his own best illustration when he declares that
+the "good Poet and the good Politician do not differ so much as some who
+know nothing of either art affirm; nor would _Homer_ or _Milton_ have made
+the worst Legislators of their Times."
+
+To the reader of to-day the _Enquiry_ betrays no party flavour, but its
+sedate pages clearly stirred up the hot feeling of the times. Early in
+February the Advertiser announced "_This Day is published A Letter to
+Henry Fielding Esqre. occasioned by his Enquiry into the causes of the
+late increase of Robbers &c_." And about the end of the month there
+appeared _Considerations_, in two numbers of the _True Briton_, "on
+Justice Fielding's 'Enquiry,' shewing his Mistakes about the Constitution
+and our Laws and that what he seems to propose is dangerous to our
+Properties, Liberties and Constitution." On March 7 was announced
+_Observations on Mr Fielding's Enquiry_, by one B. Sedgley. Some
+opposition squib, too, must have been launched, to judge by the following
+item from an advertisement column of the same date: "a Vindication of the
+Rights and Privileges of the Commonality of England, in Opposition to what
+has been advanced by the Author of the Enquiry, or to what may be
+promulgated by any Ministerial Artifices against the public Cause of Truth
+and Liberty. _By_ Timothy Beck_ the Happy Cobler of Portugal-street_."
+[7] Perhaps some collector of eighteenth century pamphlets may be able to
+reveal these comments of the '_Happy Gobler of Portugal-street_' upon the
+'artifices' of Henry Fielding. [8]
+
+In the February following the publication of the _Enquiry_ a Parlimentary
+Committee was appointed "to revise and consider the Laws in being, which
+relate to Felonies and other Offences against the Peace." [9] The
+Committee included Lyttelton and Pitt, and there is of course every
+probability that Fielding's evidence would be taken; but it seems
+impossible now to discover what share he may have had in this move by the
+Government towards fresh criminal legislation. There is, however, the
+evidence of his own hand that in the matter of prison administration his
+efforts were not limited to academic pamphlets, or to the indictment, so
+soon to be published, contained in the terrible prison scenes of _Amelia_.
+The following letter to the Duke of Newcastle [10] shows an anxious
+endeavour to secure such good government as was possible for at least one
+of the gaols.
+
+
+"My Lord
+
+"It being of the utmost consequence to the Public to have a proper Prison
+Keeper of the new Prison at the Time, I beg leave to recommend Mr William
+Pentlow a Constable of St George Bloomsbury to your Grace's Protection in
+the present Vacancy. He is a Man of whose Courage and Integrity I have
+seen the highest Proofs, and is indeed every way qualified for the
+charge. I am with the most Perfect Respect,
+
+"My Lord,
+"Your Grace's most obedient
+"and most humble servant,
+
+"Henry Ffielding
+"Bow Street Jan. 15. 1750 [1751]."
+
+A second edition of the _Enquiry_ appeared early in the spring; and
+according to the _Journals of the House of Commons_ it was resolved, in
+April, that a Bill be brought in on the resolution of the Committee
+appointed two months previously to consider criminal legislation. Again it
+can only be surmised that Fielding's assistance would be invoked in the
+drafting of this Bill. That his vigorous denunciations of the national
+danger of the gin curse were in complete accord with the feeling of the
+Government is apparent from the fact that two months later, in June 1751,
+the _Tippling Act_ [11] received the royal assent, by which Act very
+stringent restrictions were imposed on the sale of spirits.
+
+In June Fielding again appears as Chairman of the Westminster Sessions.
+[12] And in September cases occur as brought before John Fielding and
+others "at Henry Fielding's house in Bow Street," [13] from which it
+appears that Fielding's blind half-brother was already acting as his
+assistant. In the following month John Fielding appears among the Justices
+of the Westminster Quarter Sessions. [14]
+
+The year that had seen the publication of the _Enquiry_, affords proof
+enough of Fielding's active labours in criminal and social reform; but the
+last month of this year is marked by an occurrence of much greater import
+for English literature, the publication of the third great novel,
+_Amelia_.
+
+[1] Doubtless faithfully rendered in the old print, here reproduced, of
+Fielding's blind half-brother, assistant, and successor, Sir John
+Fielding, hearing a Bow Street case.
+
+[2] See Appendix.
+
+[3] Middlesex Records. _MSS. Sessions Books_. 1750.
+
+[4] From the hitherto unpublished autograph, now at Woburn Abbey.
+
+[5] This hitherto unpublished letter is now in the British Museum. It is
+addressed to "--Perkins, Esq. at his Chambers No. 7, in Lincolns Inn
+Square," and is sealed with Fielding's seal, a facsimile of which appears
+on the cover of the present volume.
+
+[6] _Fielding_. Austin Dobson. p. 156.
+
+[7] _The General Advertiser_. March 7, 1751.
+
+[8] The _London Magazine_ for February devoted five columns to an
+"Abstract of Mr Fielding's Enquiry"; and in the following month the
+_Magazine_ again noticed the book, by printing a long anonymous letter in
+which Fielding is attacked as a 'trading author' and a 'trading justice,'
+and in which the writer shows his intellectual grasp by advocating in all
+seriousness a law prohibiting the sovereign from gambling!
+
+[9] See _Journals of the House of Commons_. Vol. xxii. p. 27, and the
+_London Magazine_. Vol. xx. p. 82. The _Catalogue of Printed Papers. House
+of Commons_, 1750-51, includes "A Bill for the more effectual preventing
+Robberies Burglaries and other Outrages within the City and Liberty of
+Westminster--" &c.
+
+[10] This hitherto unpublished letter is now in the British Museum. It is
+endorsed "Jan. 15, 1750(1)."
+
+[11] 24 George II. c. 40. June 1751.
+
+[12] Middlesex Records. _Sessions Book_. 1751.
+
+[13] _General Advertiser_. Sept. 9. 1751.
+
+[14] Middlesex Records. _Sessions Book_. October, 1751.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+AMELIA
+
+    "of all my Offspring she is my favourite Child."
+    The _Covent Garden Journal_. No. 8.
+
+On the 2nd of December 1751 the _General Advertiser_ announces that
+
+    _On Wednesday the 18th of this Month will be published_
+
+    IN FOUR VOLUMES DUODECIMO
+
+    AMELIA
+
+    By HENRY FIELDING, Esq;
+    _Beati ter et amplius
+    Quos irrupta tenet Copula_. HOR.
+
+And the puff preliminary of the period may be read in the same columns,
+declaring that the "earnest Demand of the Publick" had necessitated the
+use of four printing presses; and that it being impossible to complete the
+binding in time, copies would be available "sew'd at Half-a-Guinea a
+Sett." Sir Walter Scott tells us that, at a sale to booksellers before
+publication, Andrew Millar, the publisher, refused to part with _Amelia_
+on the usual discount terms; and that the booksellers, being thus
+persuaded of a great future for the book, eagerly bought up the
+impression. Launched thus, and heralded by the popularity with which _Tom
+Jones_ had now endowed Fielding's name, the entire edition was sold out on
+the day of publication; an event which evoked the observation from Dr
+Johnson that _Amelia_ was perhaps the only book which being printed off
+betimes one morning, a new edition was called for before night. The Doctor
+gave not only unstinted praise, but also an involuntary tribute to
+_Amelia_. He read the book through, without pausing, from beginning to
+end. And he pronounced Amelia herself to be "the most pleasing heroine of
+all the romances." [1]
+
+But to the majority of readers Amelia is, assuredly, something more than
+the most charming of heroines. She is the delightful companion; the wise
+and tender friend; a woman whose least perfection was that dazzling beauty
+which shone with equal lustre in the 'poor rags' lent her by her old
+nurse, or in her own clothing, just as the happy purity of her nature only
+glows more brightly for the dark scenes through which she moves. In the
+whole range of English literature there is surely no figure more warmly
+human, and yet less touched with human imperfection; none more simply and
+naturally alive, and yet truer in every crisis (and there were few of the
+sorrowful things of life unknown to her) to the best qualities of generous
+womanhood. And if it is largely for her glowing vitality that we love
+Amelia, we love her none the less in that she is no fool. It was hardly
+necessary to tell us, as Fielding is careful to do, that her sense of
+humour was keen, and that her insight into the ridiculous was tempered
+only by the deeper insight of her heart. Her understanding of her husband
+is as perfect as her love for him; and that love is far too profound to
+allow a moment's suggestion of mere placid amiability. Amelia, whether
+quizzing the absurdities of the affected fine ladies of her own rank, or
+cooking her husband's supper in the poor lodgings of their poverty;
+whether so radiant with happiness after seeing her little children
+handsomely entertained that with flushed cheeks and bright eyes, "she was
+all a blaze of beauty," or, pale with distress, bravely carrying her own
+clothes and the children's trinkets to the pawnbroker; whether betraying
+her own noble qualities of silence and forgiveness, or losing her temper
+with Mrs Bennett,--commands equal affection and admiration. "They say,"
+wrote Thackeray, "that it was in his own home that Fielding knew her and
+loved her: and from his own wife that he drew the most charming character
+in English fiction--Fiction? Why fiction! Why not history? I know Amelia
+just as well as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu."
+
+Lady Mary, and her daughter Lady Bute, have left very definite statements
+concerning this portrait which their cousin was alleged to have hidden
+under the fair image of Amelia. Lady Bute we are told was no stranger "to
+that beloved first wife whose picture he drew in his Amelia, where, as she
+said, even the glowing language he knew how to employ did not do more than
+justice to the amiable qualities of the original...." [2] And Lady Mary
+herself writes, "H. Fielding has given a true picture of himself and his
+first wife, in the characters of Mr and Mrs Booth [Amelia and her
+husband], some compliments to his own figure excepted; and I am persuaded
+several of the incidents he mentions are real matters of fact." [3]
+Against these persuations we must place the fact that this book contains
+no such explicit statement as that which in _Tom Jones_ assures us of the
+original of the beautiful Sophia. But we shall not love Amelia the less if
+we see her, with her courage and her beauty, her happy gaiety of spirit,
+her tenderness and strength, solacing the distresses and calming the
+storms of Fielding's restless genius, rather than devoting those qualities
+to assuaging the misfortunes of Captain William Booth. For indeed Captain
+Booth has but one substantial title to our regard, and that is his
+adoration for his wife. True, he is a pretty figure of a man; he has a
+handsome face; he fights bravely, and would kick a rogue through the
+world; he believes in and loves his friends; and he plays charmingly with
+his children. But, deprive him of the good genius of his life, and Captain
+Booth would very speedily have sunk into the ruin and despair of any other
+profligate young gamester about the Town; and for this his adoration the
+culprit wins our forgiveness, even as Amelia not only forgave but forgot,
+when by virtue of her own unconscious goodness the Captain retrieved
+himself, at last, from the folly of his ways. Undoubtedly the man whom
+Amelia loved, and who had the grace to return that passion, was no
+scoundrel at heart.
+
+It is impossible, now, to discover with any certainty the incidents which
+Lady Mary was persuaded were matters of fact. The experiences of Captain
+Booth, when essaying to turn gentleman farmer, have been quoted as copies
+of Fielding's own ambitions at East Stour; but surely on very slender
+evidence. Much more personal seem many of the later scenes in the poor
+London lodgings, scenes of cruel distress and perfect happiness, of bitter
+disappointments and sanguine hope. Here, very probably, we have echoes of
+the struggles of Harry and Charlotte Fielding, in the days of hackney
+writing and of baffled efforts at the Bar; just as the dry statement by
+Arthur Murphy, that Fielding was "remarkable for ... the strongest
+affection for his children," comes to life in the many touching pictures
+of Amelia and Booth with their little son and daughter. The pursuit of
+such identity of incident may the more cheerfully be left to the
+anecdotist, in that the biographical value of _Amelia_, is far more than
+incidental. For the book is, as has been said, a one-part piece. Round the
+single figure of Amelia all the other characters revolve; and it was of
+Amelia that Fielding himself has told us, in words that are a master key
+to his own character "of all my offspring she is my favourite Child." As
+surely as a man may be known by his choice in a friend, so is the nature
+of the artist betrayed when he avows his partiality for one alone among
+all the creations of his genius.
+
+As to the remaining figures in this "model of human life," to quote
+Fielding's own descriptive phrase of his book, those which tell us most of
+their author are that worthy, authoritative, humourous clergyman, Dr
+Harrison; the good Sergeant Atkinson; and that fiery pedant Colonel Bath,
+with his kind heart hidden under a ferocious passion for calling out every
+man whom he conceived to have slighted his honour. Dr Harrison does not
+win quite the same place in our hearts as the man whom Thackeray calls
+'dear Parson Adams'; his cassock rustles a little too loudly; the saint is
+a trifle obscured in the Doctor. But yet we love him for his warm and
+protecting affection for his 'children' as he calls Amelia and Booth; for
+his dry humour; and for that generosity which was for ever draining his
+ample purse. And perhaps we like him none the less for his scholar's
+raillery of that early blue-stocking Mrs Bennet; while his dignity never
+shows to greater advantage than when he throws himself bodily on the
+villain Murphy, achieving the arrest of that felon by the strength of his
+own arm, and the nimbleness of his own legs. And to this good Doctor is
+given a saying eminently characteristic of Justice Fielding himself. We
+are told that "it was a maxim of his that no man could descend below
+himself in doing any act which may contribute to protect an innocent
+person, or to bring a rogue to the gallows." Another trait of the Doctor
+recalls Fielding's oft reiterated aversion to what he calls grave formal
+persons: "You must know then, child," said he, to poor Booth, sunk in the
+melancholy problem of supporting a wife and three children on something
+less than £40 a year, "that I have been thinking on this subject as well
+as you; for I can think, I promise you, with a pleasant countenance." Of
+Amelia's foster-brother Sergeant Atkinson (from whom Major William Dobbin
+is directly descended) it is enough to say that the noble qualities
+concealed beneath the common cloth of his sergeant's coat perfectly
+confirm a sentence written many years before by the hand of his author. "I
+will venture to affirm," Fielding declares, in his early essay on the
+_Characters of Men_, "that I have known ... _a Fellow whom no man should
+be seen to speak to_, capable of the highest acts of Friendship and
+Benevolence."
+
+Fielding's energies in this his last novel, a novel be it remembered
+written in the midst of daily contact with the squalid vices exhibited in
+an eighteenth century court-room, seem to have been almost wholly absorbed
+in creating the most perfect escape from those surroundings in the person
+of Amelia. Beside the figure of his 'favourite child,' the vicious
+criminals of his stage, the malefic My Lord, the loathsome Trent, the
+debased Justice, the terrible human wrecks in Newgate, are but dark
+figures in a shadowy back-ground. Still, the great moralist shows no lack
+of vigour in his delineations of such offspring of vice. The genius that
+knew how to rouse every reader of _Tom Jones_ to 'lend a foot to kick
+Blifil downstairs,' awards in the last pages of _Amelia_, a yet more
+satisfying justice to that nameless connoisseur in profligacy, My Lord.
+
+In his Dedication to Ralph Allen, Fielding states that his book "is
+sincerely designed to promote the Cause of Virtue, and to expose some of
+the most glaring Evils, as well public as private, which at present infest
+this Country". The statement seems somewhat needless when prefacing pages
+which enshrine Amelia; and where also are displayed Blear Eyed Moll in the
+prison yard of Newgate, as Newgate was twenty years before the prison
+reforms of Howard were heard of; Justice Thrasher and his iniquities; the
+'diabolisms' of My Lord and of his tool Trent; the ruinous miseries of
+excessive gambling; and the abuses of duelling. Indeed the avowedly
+didactic purpose of the moralist seems at times to cloud a little the fine
+perception of the artist. There are passages, in this book which, much as
+they redound to the honour of their writer, are indisputably heavy
+reading. But what shall not be forgiven to the creator of Amelia. "To have
+invented that character," cries Thackeray, also becoming didactic, "is not
+only a triumph of art, but it is a good action." And he tells us how with
+all his heart he loves and admires the 'kindest and sweetest lady in the
+world'; and how he thinks of her as faithfully as though he had
+breakfasted with her that morning in her drawing-room, or should meet her
+that afternoon in the Park.
+
+It is recorded that Fielding received from Andrew Millar £1000 for the
+copyright of _Amelia_. But the reception of the new novel, after the first
+rush for copies, seems to have done little credit either to the brains or
+to the heart of the public. And in the month following _Amelia's_
+appearance, Fielding satirises the comments of the Town, in two numbers of
+his _Covent Garden Journal_; protesting that though he does not think his
+child to be entirely free from faults--"I know nothing human that is
+so,"--still "surely she does not deserve the Rancour with which she hath
+been treated by the Public." As ironic specimens of the faults complained
+of in his heroine, he quotes the accusations that her not abusing her
+husband "for having lost Money at Play, when she saw his Heart was already
+almost broke by it, was _contemptible Meanness_"; that she condescends to
+dress her husband's supper, and to dress her children, to whom moreover
+she shows too much kindness; that she once mentions the DEVIL; that she is
+a _low_ character; and that the beauty of her face is hopelessly flawed by
+a carriage accident. Such are some of the charges brought against the
+lovely Amelia by the "Beaus, Rakes, fine Ladies, and several formal
+Persons with bushy wigs and canes at their Noses," who, in Fielding's
+satire, crowd the Court where his book is placed on trial for the crime of
+dullness. Then Fielding himself steps forward, and after pleading for this
+his 'favourite Child,' on whom he has bestowed "a more than ordinary Pains
+in her Education," he declares, with the same hasty petulance that
+characterised that previous outburst in the preface to _David Simple_,
+that indeed he "will trouble the World no more with any children of mine
+by the same Muse." Two months later the _Gentleman's Magazine_ prints a
+spirited appeal against this resolution. "His fair heroine's nose has in
+my opinion been too severely handled by some modern critics," [4] writes
+Criticulus, after a passage of warm praise for the characterisation, the
+morality, and the 'noble reflections of the book'; and he proceeds to
+point out that the writings of such critics "will never make a sufficient
+recompense to the world, if _Mr Fielding_ adheres to what I hope he only
+said in his warmth and indignation of this injurious treatment, that he
+will never trouble the public with any more writings of this kind." The
+words of the enlightened _Criticulus_ echo sadly when we remember that in
+little more than two years the great genius and the great heart of Henry
+Fielding were to be silenced.
+
+The _London Magazine_ for 1751 devotes the first nine columns of its
+December number to a resume of the novel, and continues this compliment in
+another nine columns of appendix. With a fine patronage the reviewer
+concludes that "upon the whole, the story is amusing, the characters kept
+up, and many reflections which [sic] are useful, if the reader will but
+take notice of them, which in this unthinking age it is to be feared very
+few will." Some imperfections he kindly excuses on the score of "the
+author's hurry of business in administering impartial justice to his
+majesty's good people"; but he cannot excuse what he declares to be the
+ridicule of _Liberty_ in Book viii.; and he solemnly exhorts the author
+that as "he has in this piece very justly exposed some of the private
+vices and follies of the present age" so he should in his next direct his
+satire against political corruption, otherwise 'he and his patrons' will
+be accused of compounding the same. [5] It seems incredible that any
+suggestion should ever have attached to the author of _Pasquin_ and the
+_Register_, as to one who could condone public corruption. And as for the
+accusation of tampering with "Liberty" the like charge was brought, we may
+remember, by the "Happy Cobler of Portugal Street" against Fielding's
+_Inquiry into the Encrease of Robbers_. The literary cobblers who pursued
+_Amelia_ with the abuse of their poor pens may very well be consigned to
+the oblivion of their political brother. The comment of one hostile pen
+cannot however be dismissed as coming from a literary cobbler, and that is
+the 'sickening' abuse, to use Thackeray's epithet, which Richardson
+dishonoured himself in flinging at his great contemporary. That abuse the
+sentimentalist poured out very freely on _Amelia_; but, as Mr Austin
+Dobson says, "in cases of this kind _parva seges satis est_, and Amelia
+has long since outlived both rival malice and contemporary coldness. It is
+a proof of her author's genius that she is even more intelligible to our
+age than she was to her own." [6]
+
+In Fielding's satiric description of the Court before which his Amelia
+stood her trial, he describes himself as an 'old gentleman.' The adjective
+seems hardly applicable to a man of forty five; but, to quote again from
+Mr Austin Dobson, "however it may have chanced, whether from failing
+health or otherwise, the Fielding of _Amelia_ is suddenly a far older man
+than the Fielding of _Tom Jones_. The robust and irrepressible vitality,
+the full veined delight of living, the energy of observation and strength
+of satire, which characterise the one, give place in the other to a calmer
+retrospection, a more compassionate humanity, a more benignant criticism
+of life." Murphy's Irish tongue declares a similar feeling in his
+comparison of the pages of this, the last of the three great novels, to
+the calm of the setting sun; a sun that had first broken forth in the
+'morning glory' of _Joseph Andrews_, and had attained its 'highest warmth
+and splendour' in the inimitable pages of _Tom Jones_. There is indeed a
+mature wisdom and patience in Amelia such as none but a pedant could
+demand of her enchanting younger sister Sophia. In these later pages
+Sophia has grown up into a gracious womanhood, while losing none of her
+girlhood's gaiety and charm. That Amelia, his older and wiser though
+scarce sadder child, was the nearest, as he himself tells us, to
+Fielding's own heart, is one more indication that here is the perfected
+image of that beloved wife, from whose youthful grace and beauty his
+genius had already modelled one exquisite memorial.
+
+[1] _Anecdotes_. Mrs Piozzi. p. 221.
+
+[2] Letters and Works of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Introductory
+Anecdotes, p. cxxiii.
+
+[3] Ibid. Vol. ii. p. 289.
+
+[4] It is curious that to this unlucky incident, based according to Lady
+Louisa Stuart, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's grand-daughter, on a real
+accident to Mrs Fielding, Dr Johnson attributed the failure of the book
+with the public: "that vile broken nose ruined the sale," he declared.
+Early in January Fielding himself protests in his _Covent Garden Journal_
+that every reader of any intelligence would have discovered that the
+effects of Amelia's terrible carriage accident had been wholly remedied by
+"a famous Surgeon"; and that "the Author of her History, in a hurry,
+forgot to inform his Readers of that Particular." The particular has by
+now fallen into its due insignificance, and, save for Johnson's
+explanation therein of the poor sale of the book, is scarce worth
+recalling.
+
+[5] _London Magazine_. December 1751. p. 531 and Appendix.
+
+[6] _Fielding_. Austin Dobson. p. 161.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+JOURNALIST AND MAGISTRATE
+
+    "However vain or romantic the Attempt may seem I am sanguine
+    enough to aim at serving the noble Interests of Religion, Virtue,
+    and good Sense, by these my lucubrations."
+    The _Covent Garden Journal_. No. 5.
+
+Nothing could be more characteristic of Fielding's active spirit than were
+the early months of 1752. For, no sooner had he deposited the four volumes
+of _Amelia_ in the hands of the public, essaying to win his readers over
+to a love of virtue and a hatred of vice, by placing before their eyes
+that true "model of human life," than we find him launching a direct
+attack on the follies and evils of the age, by means of his old weapon,
+the press.
+
+The first number of the _Covent Garden Journal_ appeared on the 4th of
+January, and its pages, produced under Fielding's own management and
+apparently largely written by his own pen, provided satires on folly,
+invectives against vice, and incitements to goodness and sense, delivered
+in the name of one _Sir Alexander Drawcansir, Knt. Censor of Great
+Britain_. [1] The new paper ran but for seventy-two numbers; perhaps for
+all the wit and learning, the fire and zest of its columns, the public
+were reluctant to buy their own lashings. But it may be doubted whether,
+except in the pages of his three great novels, Henry Fielding ever
+revealed himself more completely than in these his last informal
+'lucubrations.' Here, the active Justice, the accomplished scholar, the
+lawyer, and man of the world, the first wit of his day, talks to us of a
+hundred topics, chosen indeed on the spur of the moment, but discussed in
+his own incomparable words, and with the now mature authority of one, who
+had "dived into the inmost Recesses of Human Nature." No subject is too
+abstruse, none too trifling, for _Mr Censor_ to illumine. Freed from the
+political bands of the earlier newspapers, this last _Journal_, produced
+be it remembered by a man in shattered health, and distracted by the
+squalid business of a Bow Street Court-room, ranges over an amazing
+compass of life and manners.
+
+Thus, one January morning, _Sir Alexander's_ readers would open their
+paper to find him deploring the decline of "a Religion sometime ago
+professed in this Country, and which, if my Memory fails me not was called
+Christian." The following Saturday they are presented with a learned and
+pleasant argument to prove that every male critic should be eighteen years
+of age, and "BE ABLE TO READ." A few days later the pages of writers
+purveying the prevalent "Infidelity, Scurrility, and Indecency" are
+ingeniously allotted to various uses. In February the _Journal_ accords a
+noble tribute "to that great Triumvirate Lucian, Cervantes, and Swift";
+not indeed "for that Wit and Humour alone, which they all so eminently
+possesst, but because they all endeavoured with the utmost Force of their
+Wit and Humour, to expose and extirpate those Follies and Vices which
+chiefly prevailed in their several Countries." The design of Aristophanes
+and Rabelais on the other hand, appears to _Mr Censor_, if he may speak
+his opinion freely, "very plainly to have been to ridicule all Sobriety,
+Modesty, Decency, Virtue, and Religion out of the world." From such
+considerations it is an easy passage to a definition of 'real Taste' as
+derived from a "nice Harmony between the Imagination and the Judgment";
+and to these final censorial warnings:--"_Evil Communications corrupt good
+Manners_ is a quotation of St Paul from Menander. EVIL BOOKS CORRUPT AT
+ONCE BOTH OUR MANNERS AND OUR TASTE." Four days after this learned
+'lucubration' the voice of the warm-hearted magistrate speaks in a
+reminder of the prevailing abject misery of the London poor who "in the
+most miserable lingering Manner do daily perish for Want in this
+Metropolis." And in almost the next number his Honour gives his readers
+letters from the fair _Cordelia_, from _Sarah Scandal_, and from other
+correspondents, of a wit pleasant enough to drive London's poverty far
+from their minds. Two days after attending to these ladies, the _Censor_
+takes up his keenest weapons in an attack on that "detestable vice of
+slander" by which is taken away the "_immediate Jewel of a Man's Soul_,"
+his good name; a crime comparable to that of murder. Here we have _Sir
+Alexander_ speaking with the same voice as did the playwright and
+journalist of ten years previously, when he declared, in his
+_Miscellanies_, that to stab a man's character 'in the dark' is no less an
+offence than to stab his flesh in the same treacherous manner. Indeed,
+throughout these last columns of weekly satire, wit, and learning,
+Fielding remains true to the constant tenor of his genius. He exposes the
+miser, the seducer of innocence, the self-seeker, the place-hunter, the
+degraded vendor of moral poison, the 'charitable' hypocrite, with the same
+fierce moral energy as that with which, when but a lad of one and twenty,
+he first assailed the vices of the society in which his own lot was cast.
+His unconquerable energy, an energy that neither sickness nor distress
+could abate, still assaults that "cursed Maxim ... that Everybody's
+business is Nobody's." And his wit has lost none of its point when
+thrusting at the lesser follies of the day; at the fair Clara's devotion
+to her pet monkey; at the insolence of the Town Beau at the playhouse; at
+the arrogance of carters in the streets; at the vagaries of fashion
+according to which Belinda graces the theatre with yards of ruff one day,
+and on the next discards that covering so entirely that the snowy scene in
+the boxes "becomes extremely delightful to the eyes of every Beholder."
+
+It is quite impossible to convey, within the limits of a few pages, all
+that _Sir Alexander_ tells us of what he sees and hears, as the
+tragi-comedy of life passes before his Bow Street windows. For Fielding
+possessed in the highest degree the art of hearing, to use his own
+analysis, not with the ear only (an organ shared by man with "other
+Animals") but also with the head, and with the heart; just as his eye
+could penetrate beneath the velvet coat of the prosperous scoundrel, the
+reputation of the illiterate author, or the sorry rags of some honest hero
+of the gutter. And his _Covent Garden Journal_ is, in truth, his journal
+of eleven months of a life into the forty odd years of which were
+compressed both the insight of genius, and the activities of twenty
+average men. Such a record cannot be sifted into a summary. The
+acknowledged motive of this last of Fielding's newspapers is, however,
+concise enough; and does equal honour to his patriotism and his humanity.
+The age, as it seemed to him, was an age of public degradation. Religion
+was vanishing from the life of the people; politics were a petty question
+of party jealousy; literary taste was falling to the level of alehouse wit
+and backstairs scandal; the youth of the nation were completing their
+education, when fifteen or sixteen years old, by a course of the Town, and
+then qualifying for a graduate's degree in like knowledge, by a foreign
+tour; the 'mob' was gaining a dangerous excess of power; the leaders of
+society were past masters and mistresses of vice and folly; the poor in
+the streets were sunk in misery, or brutalised into reckless crime. This
+was the England that _Mr Censor_ saw from his house in Bow Street; this
+was the England which he set out to purify; and the means which he chose
+were his own familiar weapons of satire and ridicule. Of these, ridicule,
+he declares, when his _Journal_ was but four weeks old, "is commonly a
+stronger and better method of attacking Vice than the severer kind of
+Satire." In accordance with which view, _General Sir Alexander_ is
+represented, in a mock historic forecast, as having, in the space of
+twelve months, entirely cleansed his country from the evils afflicting it,
+by means of a "certain Weapon called a Ridicule." These evils moreover
+Fielding held to be most readily combated by assailing "those base and
+scandalous Writings which the Press hath lately poured in such a torrent
+upon us that the Name of an Author is in the ears of all good Men become
+almost an infamous appelation"; and, accordingly, the first number of his
+new paper discloses _Sir Alexander_ in full crusade against these
+Grub-Street writers. But that he soon perceived the quixotic impolicy of
+such a campaign, appears very clearly, as early as the fifth number of the
+_Journal_:--"when Hercules undertook to cleanse the Stables of Augeas (a
+Work not much unlike my present Undertaking) should any little clod of
+Dirt more filthy perhaps than all the rest have chanced to bedawb him, how
+unworthy his Spirit would it have been to have polluted his Hands, by
+seizing the dirty clod, and crumbling it to Pieces. He should have known
+that such Accidents were incident to such an Undertaking: which though
+both a useful and heroic office, was yet none of the cleanliest; since no
+Man, I believe, ever removed great quantities of Dirt from any Place
+without finding some of it sticking to his skirts." Such dirty clods were
+undoubtedly thrown by nameless antagonists, as unworthy of Fielding's
+steel as was one whose name has come down to us, the despicable Dr John
+Hill, who once suffered a public caning at Ranelagh; and one clod, "more
+filthy perhaps than all the rest," soiled the hands of Smollett. [2] But
+the dirt which was very freely flung on to our eighteenth-century Hercules
+has, by now, fallen back, with great justice, on to the heads of his
+abusers. Fielding has placed on record, in the _Journal_, his conviction
+that the man who reads the works of the five heroic satirists, Lucian,
+Cervantes, Swift, Moliere and Shakespeare, "must either have a very bad
+Head, or a very bad Heart, if he doth not become both a Wiser and a better
+Man." To-day, 'party and prejudice' having subsided, we are ready to say
+the same of the readers of the _Covent Garden Journal_; perceiving that,
+if _Mr Censor_, like his five great forerunners, chose to send his satire
+"laughing into the World," it was that he might better effect the
+'glorious Purpose' announced in the fifth number of his paper: "However
+vain or romantic the Attempt may seem, I am sanguine enough to aim at
+serving the noble Interests of Religion, Virtue, and good Sense, by these
+my Lucubrations."
+
+To most men the production, twice a week, of a newspaper so wide in scope
+as the _Covent Garden Journal_ (for its columns included the news of the
+day, as well as the manifold 'censorial' energies of _Sir Alexander_)
+would have been occupation enough; especially with a "constitution now
+greatly impaired and enfeebled," and when "labouring under attacks of the
+gout, which were, of course, severer than ever."
+
+But there is no hint of either editorial or valetudinarian seclusion in
+the fragmentary glimpses obtainable of Mr Justice Fielding during these
+eleven months of 1752. Thus, by an advertisement recurring throughout the
+_Journal_, he expressly invites to his house in Bow Street, "All Persons,
+who shall for the Future suffer by Robbers Burglars &c.," that they may
+bring him "the best Description they can of such Robbers, &c., with the
+Time, and Place, and Circumstances of the Fact"; and that this invitation
+was likely to bring half London within his doors appears from Fielding's
+own description of the condition of the capital at the time. "There is not
+a street," he declares, speaking of Westminster, "which doth not swarm all
+day with beggars, and all night with thieves. Stop your coach at what shop
+you will, however expeditious the tradesman is to attend you, a beggar is
+commonly beforehand with him; and if you should directly face his door the
+tradesman must often turn his head while you are talking to him, or the
+same beggar, or some other thief at hand will pay a visit to his shop!"
+And nothing could prove more conclusively the arduousness of Fielding's
+work as a magistrate than the record of the last ten days of January,
+1752. On the night of the 17th a peculiarly brutal murder had been
+perpetrated on a poor higgler in Essex; and the _Journal_ for January 28,
+tells us how Fielding "spent near eight hours," examining, separately,
+suspected persons, "at the desire of several gentlemen of Fortune in the
+County of Essex"; having on the previous Friday and Saturday, been engaged
+"above Twenty hours in taking Depositions concerning this Fact." Then, on
+the day after the arrival of the murder suspects, we find two of the
+Shoreditch constables bringing no fewer than ten "idle lewd and
+disorderly" men and women before the Justice; a woman was charged by a
+diamond seller on suspicion of feloniously receiving "three Brilliant
+Diamonds"; Mr Welch, the notable High Constable of Holborn, brought
+seventeen "idle and lewd Persons" whom he had apprehended the night
+before; and, to complete this single day's work, an Italian was brought
+in, "all over covered with [the] Blood" of a brother Italian, whose head
+he had almost cut off. Twenty-nine cases on one day, and these in the
+midst of eight hour examinations concerning a murder, were surely work
+enough to satisfy even Fielding's energies. And, as another entry in his
+_Journal_ mentions the examination of a suspected thief "very late at
+Night," there seems to have been no hour out of the twenty-four in which
+the great novelist did not hold himself at the service of the public.
+
+Meanwhile, the criminal licence of the streets was now receiving
+Ministerial attention. The King's Speech, delivered at the opening of
+Parliament in the previous November, had contained a passage which might
+have been inspired by Fielding himself: "I cannot conclude," said His
+Majesty, "without recommending to you in the most earnest manner, to
+consider seriously of some effectual provisions to suppress those
+audacious crimes of Robbery and Violence which are now become so
+frequent...and which have proceeded in great Measure from that profligate
+Spirit of Irreligion, Idleness, Gaming, and Extravagance, which has of
+late extended itself in an uncommon degree, to the Dishonour of the
+Nation, and to the great Offence and Prejudice of the sober and
+industrious Part of the People." Six weeks later the first number of the
+_Journal_, makes comment on the need of fresh legislation to suppress
+drunkenness; and on the twenty first of the month _Sir Alexander_
+announces, with something of special information in his tone, that the
+immediate suppression of crimes of violence "we can with Pleasure assure
+the Public is at present the chief attention of Parliament."
+
+It must have been with something of the pleasure which he so earnestly
+desires in one of the last utterances of his pen--"the pleasure of
+thinking that, in the decline of my health and life, I have conferred a
+great and lasting Benefit on my Country,"--that Fielding saw the royal
+assent given, in the following March, to an Act for the "_better
+preventing Thefts and Robberies and for regulating Places of Public
+Entertainment, and punishing Persons keeping disorderly Houses_."
+[3] For this Act is directed to the suppression of four of the abuses so
+strongly denounced, twelve months previously, in his own _Enquiry_; and
+when we recall the fact that he had already submitted, to the Lord
+Chancellor, draft legislation for the suppression of robberies, it is at
+least a plausible surmise that here we have a memorial of Henry Fielding's
+patriotic energy, preserved on the pages of the Statute Book itself.
+[4] The four points so specially urged in the _Enquiry_, and here made
+law, are the suppression of the "multitude of places of Entertainment" for
+the working classes; the better suppression of Gaming Houses; the
+punishment of the scandalous advertisements offering rewards 'and no
+questions asked' for stolen goods; and the payment of certain prosecutors
+for their expenses in time and trouble, when a conviction had been
+obtained.
+
+In this same month of March another Act, which closely concerned
+Fielding's official work, received the royal assent. This was an Act "for
+better preventing the horrid Crime of Murder." [5] The pressing need of
+such a measure had been already urged in the _Covent Garden journal_. In
+February the _Journal_ declares that _"More shocking Murders have been
+committed within the last Year, than for many Years before. To what can
+this be so justly imputed as to the manifest decline of Religion among the
+lower People. A matter, which even, in a Civil Sense, demands the
+attention of the Government."_ And Mr Censor returns to the subject on
+March 3: _"More Murders and horrid Barbarities have been committed within
+the last twelvemonth, than during many preceding years. This as we have
+before observed, is principally to be attributed to the Declension of
+Religion among the Common People."_ By the end of the month the
+above-named Act had received the royal assent; and the first clause
+thereof again yielded Fielding the satisfaction of seeing a measure which
+he had warmly recommended in his Enquiry now placed on the Statute Book,
+namely the clause that the execution of the criminal be made immediate on
+his conviction. This Act, moreover, provides for the abatement of another
+scandal exposed by Fielding many years previously, in the pages of
+Jonathan Wild, that of the excessive supply of drink allowed to condemned
+prisoners.
+
+In the following month Fielding carried out a scheme, conceived he tells
+us "some time since," for combating this prevalence of murder. This was
+his shilling pamphlet, published about April 14, entitled "Examples of the
+Interposition of Providence in the _Detection_ and _Punishment_ of MURDER.
+Containing above thirty cases, in which this dreadful crime hath been
+brought to light in the most extraordinary and miraculous manner." The
+advertisement describes the _Examples_ as _"very proper to be given to all
+the inferior Kind of People; and particularly to the Youth of both sexes,
+whose natural Love of Stories will lead them to read with Attention what
+cannot fail of Infusing in to their tender Minds an early Dread and
+Abhorrence of staining their Hands with the Blood of their
+Fellow-creatures"_ Low as was the price, a "large allowance" was made by
+Andrew Millar to those who bought any quantity; and Fielding distributed
+the little volume freely in Court.
+
+The thirty-three _Examples_ are introduced and concluded by Fielding's own
+denunciation of this, "the blackest sin, which can contaminate the hands,
+or pollute the soul of man." And from these pages we may learn his own
+solemnly declared belief in a peculiarly "immediate interposition of the
+Divine providence" in the detection of this crime; and also his faith in
+"the fearful and tremendous sentence of eternal punishment" as that
+divinely allotted to the murderer. He warns the murderer, moreover, that
+by hurrying a fellow-creature to a sudden and unprepared death he may be
+guilty of destroying not only his victim's body, but also his soul. And it
+may be questioned whether Fielding ever put his unrivalled mastery of
+style to a nobler intention than in the closing words of this pamphlet,
+words designed to be read by the lowest of the people: "Great courage may,
+perhaps, bear up a bad mind (for it is sometimes the property of such)
+against the most severe sentence which can be pronounced by the mouth of a
+human judge; but where is the fortitude which can look an offended
+Almighty in the face? Who can bear the dreadful thought of being
+confronted with the spirit of one whom we have murdered, in the presence
+of all the Host of Heaven, and to have justice demanded against our guilty
+soul, before that most awful judgement-seat, where there is infinite
+justice as well as infinite power?"
+
+The dedication of this pamphlet, dated Bow Street, April 8, 1752, is
+addressed to Dr Madox, Bishop of Worcester, and in it Fielding recalls a
+conversation he had some time previously had with that prelate, in which
+he had mentioned the plan of such a book, and received immediate
+encouragement from his lordship. A further appreciation of the _Examples_
+appears in a paragraph in the _Journal_ for May 5: "Last week a certain
+Colonel of the Army bought a large number of the book called _Examples of
+the Interposition of Providence in the Detection and Punishment of
+Murder_, in Order to distribute them amongst the private soldiers of his
+Regiment. An Example well worthy of Imitation!"
+
+Fielding never allows us to forget for any length of time one or another
+of his contrasting activities, however absorbed he may seem to be in some
+one field of action. Now, when he is plunged in a hand-to-hand struggle
+with the criminal conditions of London, when he is admonishing the gayer
+end of the Town with his weekly censorial satire and ridicule, and while
+he is watching the enactment of new legislation for which he had so
+strenously pleaded,--he suddenly reappears in his earlier rôle of
+classical scholar. On June 17, the columns of the _Journal_ advertise
+proposals for "A New Translation into English of the Works of LUCIAN. From
+the original Greek. With Notes, Historical, Critical and Explanatory. By
+Henry Fielding Esquire; and the Rev. Mr William Young." To which notice
+there is added, a few days later, the assurance that "Everything which
+hath the least Tendency to the Indecent will be omitted in this
+Translation." The most delightful, perhaps, of all the leading articles in
+the _Covent Garden Journal_ is that in which the merits of this "Father of
+True Humour" are delineated. The facetious wit, the "attic Elegance of
+Diction," the poignant satire, the virtues and abilities of Lucian are
+here so persuasively presented that scarce a reader but surely would
+hasten, as he laid his paper down, to Mr Fielding's or Mr Young's house,
+or to Millar in the Strand or Dodsley in Pall Mall, where orders (with a
+guinea to be paid on booking the same) were received. And this essay is
+also memorable for the express declaration therein contained that Fielding
+had "formed his stile" upon that of Lucian; and, again, as betraying a
+note of disappointment, an acknowledgment that worldly fortune had indeed
+treated him somewhat harshly, such as Fielding's sanguine courage very
+seldom permits him to utter. The concluding words, written on his own
+behalf and on that of Mr Young, are words of gentle protest to the public
+for their lack of support to "two gentlemen who have hitherto in their
+several capacities endeavoured to be serviceable to them without deriving
+any great Emolument to themselves from their Labours." And when he tells
+us how that 'glory of human Nature, Marcus Aurelius' employed Lucian "in a
+very considerable Post in the Government," since that great emperor "did
+not, it seems, think, that a Man of Humour was below his Notice or unfit
+for Business of the gravest Kind," we cannot but remember that the
+business on which the Government of George II. thought fit to employ the
+inimitable genius of Henry Fielding was that of a Bow Street magistrate.
+
+The onerous drudgery of that business, or else lack of response from a
+public deaf to its own interests, seems to have brought to nothing the
+project of this translation; and so English literature is the poorer for
+the loss of the works of the 'Father of Humour' translated by the
+incomparable pen of the 'Father of the English Novel.'[6]
+
+Four months after the publication of the proposals for _Lucian_, Fielding
+took formal leave of the readers of his _Covent Garden Journal_, telling
+them that he no longer had "Inclination or Leisure," to carry on the
+paper. His brief farewell words contain an assurance very like that
+solemnly made, we may remember, five years before the publication of _Tom
+Jones_. At present, he declares, he has "No intention to hold any further
+correspondence with the gayer Muses"; just as eight years before he had
+announced that henceforth the 'infamous' Nine should have none of his
+company. To this declaration is added a protest against the injustice of
+attributing abuse to a writer who "never yet was, nor ever shall be the
+author of any, unless to Persons who are or ought to be infamous." From
+the tenor of this parting speech it is clear that Fielding was, at the
+time, feeling keenly the imputation, flung by some of his contemporaries,
+of producing 'scandalous Writings'; unmindful for the moment of his own
+calmer and wiser utterance, when he declared that men who engage in an
+heroic attempt to cleanse their age will undoubtedly find some of the dirt
+thereof sticking to their coats. "As he disdained all littleness of
+spirit, where ever he met with it in his dealings with the world, his
+indignation was apt to rise," says his contemporary Murphy; and we know
+from earlier protests how cruelly Fielding suffered from the attribution
+to his pen of writings utterly alien to his character. "... really," he
+cries, in the last words of the _Journal_, "it is hard to hear that
+scandalous Writings have been charged on me for that very Reason which
+ought to have proved the Contrary namely because they have been
+Scandalous."
+
+The year 1752 closes with the birth of another daughter, born presumably
+in the house in Bow Street, as her baptism under the name of Louisa is
+entered in the registers of St Paul's, Covent Garden.
+
+The curtain that, in Fielding's case, hangs so closely over all the
+pleasant intimate details of life, lifts once or twice during this year of
+incessant activity, and discloses just those warmhearted acts of kindness
+that help us to think of Harry Fielding with an affection almost as warm
+and personal as that we keep for Dick Steele or Oliver Goldsmith.
+Fielding, we know, had "no other use for money" than to help those even
+less fortunate than himself; and several incidents of this year show how
+he turned his opportunities, both as journalist and magistrate, to like
+generous uses. Thus there is the story of how, one day in March, "A poor
+girl who had come from Wapping to see the new entertainment at Covent
+Garden Theatre had her pocket cut off in the crowd before the doors were
+opened. Tho' she knew not the Pickpocket she came immediately to lay her
+complaint before the Justice and with many tears lamented not the loss of
+her Money, but of her Entertainment. At last, having obtained a sufficient
+Passport to the Gallery she departed with great satisfaction, and
+contented with the loss of fourteen shillings, though she declared she had
+not much more in the world." [7] Another day, or night rather, it is a
+poor troup of amateur players who had good reason to be grateful to the
+kindly Justice:--"last Monday night an Information was given to Henry
+Fielding Esquire: that a set of Barber's apprentices, Journeymen
+Staymakers, Maidservants &c. had taken a large room at the Black House in
+the Strand, to act the Tragedy of the Orphan; the Price of Admittance One
+shilling. About eight o'clock the said Justice issued his Warrant,
+directed to Mr Welch, High Constable, who apprehended the said Actors and
+brought them before the said Justice, who out of compassion to their Youth
+only bound them over to their good behaviour. They were all conducted
+through the streets in their Tragedy Dresses, to the no small diversion of
+the Populace." [8] And in May both the ample energies and scanty purse of
+Justice Fielding were occupied in collecting a subscription for a young
+baker and his wife and child, who, by a disastrous fire, were suddenly
+plunged into destitution. For these poor people Fielding obtained no less
+a sum than £57, within a fortnight of his announcement of their distress
+in the columns of the _Journal_. The list of subscribers, published on May
+16, shows a guinea against his own name, and a like sum, it may be noted,
+from the wealthy Lyttelton.
+
+The splendour of Fielding's genius has shone, as Gibbon foretold,
+throughout the world. His indefatigable labours in cleansing England from
+some of the evils that then oppressed her deserve to be remembered, if not
+by all the world, at least by the citizens of that country which, in the
+decline of 'health and life,' he yet strove so eagerly to benefit.
+
+[1] A dramatic satire, advertised in March at Covent Garden Theatre and
+written (as stated by Dibdin, _History of the Stage_. Vol. v. p. 156), by
+the actor Macklin, bore for sub-title _Pasquin turned Drawcansir, Censor
+of Great Britain_. The name, and the further details of the advertisement,
+recall Fielding's early success with his political _Pasquin_: but all
+further trace of this 'Satire' seems lost. See Appendix C.
+
+[2] _A faithful Narrative..._. By Drawcansir.... Alexander. 1752.
+
+[3] 25. G II. cap 36.
+
+[4] All trace seems now lost of the actual part Fielding may have taken in
+the drafting of this Act.
+
+[5] 25. G. II. c. 37.
+
+[6] It would seem, from the following advertisement, that Fielding's
+inexhaustible pen published, about this time, a sixpenny pamphlet on 'a
+late Act of Parliament'; but all trace of it has been lost:--"A speech
+made in the Censorial Court of Alexander Drawcansir, Monday, 6th June,
+1752, concerning a late Act of Parliament. Printed for the Author. Price
+6d." _The General Advertiser_, June 27, 1752.
+
+[7] The _General Advertiser_ March 4. 1752.
+
+[8] The _General Advertiser_, April 15, 1752.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+POOR LAW REFORM
+
+  "... surely there is some Praise due to the bare Design of doing a
+  Service to the Public."--Dedication of the _Enquiry_.
+
+
+It is evident that the beginning of the year 1753 found Fielding fully
+conscious that now he could only anticipate a 'short remainder of life.'
+But neither that consciousness, nor the increasing burden of ill-health,
+availed to dull the energies of these last years. Scarcely had that
+indomitable knight, General Sir Alexander Drawcansir retired from the
+active public service of conducting the _Covent Garden Journal_ when his
+creator reappeared with an astonishingly comprehensive and detailed plan
+of poor-law reform; a plan adapted to the whole kingdom, and which
+according to a legal comment involved "nothing less than the repeal of the
+Act of Elizabeth and an entire reconstruction of the Poor Laws." [1]
+Poor-law reform was at this time occupying the attention of the
+nation, and apparently also of the legislature. And we know, from the
+_Enquiry into the Increase of Robberies_, that the question of lessening
+both the sufferings and the criminality of the poor had for years occupied
+Fielding's warm heart and active intellect. But the extent to which he
+devoted these last months of his life to the cause of the poorest and most
+degraded deserves more than a passing recognition. He tells us, in the
+_Introduction_ to the pamphlet embodying his great scheme, that he has
+applied himself long and constantly to this subject; that he has "read
+over and considered all the Laws, in anywise relating to the Poor, with
+the utmost Care and Attention," in the execution of which, moreover, he
+has been for "many Years very particularly concerned"; and that in
+addition to this exhaustive study of the laws themselves, he has added "a
+careful Perusal of everything which I could find that hath been written on
+this Subject, from the Original Institution in the 43d. of _Elizabeth_ to
+this Day." Such was the laborious preparation, extending presumably over
+many months, which the author of _Tom Jones_, and the first wit of his
+day, devoted to solving this vast problem of social reform.
+
+Fielding was far too well skilled in the art of effective construction to
+present the public with undigested note-books from his voluminous reading.
+His scheme, based on all the laws, and upon all the comments on all the
+laws, regarding the poor, enacted and made for two hundred years, is a
+marvel of conciseness and practical detail; and, together with an
+_Introduction_ and an _Epilogue_, does but occupy the ninety pages of a
+two-shilling pamphlet.
+
+The pamphlet was published at the end of January 1753, with the title _A
+Proposal for making an effectual Provision for the Poor, for amending
+their Morals, and for rendering them useful Members of the Society. To
+which is added a Plan of the Buildings proposed, with proper
+Elevations ... By Henry Fielding, Esq.; Barrister-at-Law, and one of His
+Majesty's Justices of the Peace for the County of Middlesex_. The
+dedication, dated January 19, is to Henry Pelham, then Chancellor of the
+Exchequer, and from it we learn that Fielding had personally mentioned his
+scheme to this Minister. The Introduction presents an eloquent appeal for
+some effectual remedy for the intolerably diseased state of the body
+politic as regarded the distresses and vices of the poor, their unseen
+sufferings no less than their frequent misdeeds. Fielding protests against
+the popular ignorance of these sufferings in words that might have been
+spoken by some pleader for the East End 'Settlements' of to-day. "If we
+were," he declares, "to make a Progress through the Outskirts of this
+Town, and look into the Habitations of the Poor, we should there behold
+such Pictures of human Misery as must move the Compassion of every Heart
+that deserves the Name of human. What indeed must be his Composition who
+could see whole Families in Want of every Necessary of Life, oppressed
+with Hunger, Cold, Nakedness, and Filth, and with Diseases, the certain
+Consequence of all these; what, I say, must be his Composition, who could
+look into such a Scene as this, and be affected only in his Nostrils?" As
+an instance of Fielding's personal knowledge of the London slums of his
+day, a reference made by Mr Saunders Welch to their joint work is of
+interest. Writing in the same year, 1753, he mentions assisting "Mr Henry
+Fielding in taking from under one roof upwards of seventy lodgers of both
+sexes." [2]
+
+To this little known misery of the poor, who "starve and freeze and rot
+among themselves," was added the problem of streets swarming with beggars
+during the day, and with thieves at night. And the nation groaned under
+yet a third burden, that of the heavy taxes levied for the poor, by which
+says Fielding "as woeful experience hath taught us, neither the poor
+themselves nor the public are relieved." To attack such a three-headed
+monster as this was an adventure better fitted, it might seem, for that
+club which "Captain Hercules Vinegar" had wielded thirteen years before,
+when in the full tide of his strength, than for the pen of a man in
+shattered health, and already serving the public in the daily labours of a
+principal magistrate. But nothing could restrain the ardour of Fielding's
+spirit, how frail so ever had become its containing 'crust of clay,' when
+great abuses and great misery made their call on his powers; or
+countervail against the hope, with which the _Introduction_ to his plan
+concludes. If that plan fails, he shall indeed, he declares have "lost
+much Time, and misemployed much Pains; and what is above all, shall miss
+the Pleasure of thinking that in the Decline of my Health and Life, I have
+conferred a great and lasting Benefit on my Country."
+
+The _Plan_ is that of the erection of a vast combined county workhouse,
+prison, and infirmary; where the unemployed should find, not only work but
+_skilled instruction_, the poor relief, and the sick a hospital; where
+discipline and good order should be stringently enforced; and where two
+chaplains should labour at that 'correction and amendment' of the mind
+which "in real truth religion is alone capable of effectually executing."
+The entire scheme is worked out with extraordinary detail, in fifty-nine
+clauses; and is preceded by an elaborate architectural plan of the
+proposed institution (which was to house no less than five thousand six
+hundred persons) with its workshops, its men's quarters rigorously divided
+from those for the women, its recreation ground, its provision shops, its
+cells for the refractory and for prisoners, and its whipping post. And the
+pamphlet concludes by lengthy arguments in favour of the various clauses;
+and by a personal protest concerning the disinterestedness of proposals
+which "some few enemies" might assert to show signs of a design for
+private profit. Fielding touchingly disavows any thought of occupying,
+officially, the great house raised by his imagination. To a man in his
+state of health such a project would, he says, be to fly in the face of
+the advice of his 'Master,' Horace; "it would be indeed _struere dotnos
+immemor sepulchri_." And, he adds, those who know him will hardly be so
+deceived "by that Chearfulness which was always natural to me; and which,
+I thank God, my Conscience doth not reprove me for, to imagine that I am
+not sensible of my declining Constitution." The concluding words of this,
+Fielding's last legislative effort, betray a like calm assurance that his
+day's work was drawing to its close. He has now, he tells us, "no farther
+Design than to pass my short Remainder of Life in some Degree of Ease, and
+barely to preserve my Family from being the Objects of any such Laws as I
+have here proposed."
+
+It is wholly in keeping with the genius of Henry Fielding that almost the
+last endeavour of his intellect should have been devoted to relieving the
+wretchedness and lessening the vices of the poorest and most miserable of
+his countrymen. The _Proposal for ... the Poor_ is written by the hand of
+the accomplished lawyer and indefatigable magistrate; but the energy that
+accomplished so great a labour, in spite of broken health and among a
+thousand interruptions, sprang from the heart which had already
+immortalised the ragged postilion of _Joseph Andrews_ and the starving
+highwayman of _Tom Jones_.
+
+This last January but one of Fielding's life was not only occupied by the
+publication of proposals for an 'entire reconstruction of the Poor Laws.'
+In 1753 a London magistrate, or at least Mr Justice Fielding, was at the
+service of the public on Sunday no less than during the week; and on the
+first Sunday of the New Year the Bow Street room echoed to threats that
+read strangely enough when we think of the unknown petty thief,
+threatening sudden death to 'our immortal Fielding.' "Yesterday," says the
+_General Advertiser_ for Monday, January 8, "John Simpson and James Ellys
+were commited to Newgate by Henry Fielding Esq., for shop-lifting." The
+charge was one of stealing five silk handkerchiefs, and when the two men
+"were brought before the Justice they behaved in a very impudent saucy
+manner, and one of them said hewished he had a Pistol about him, he would
+blow the Justice's Brains out; upon which a Party of the Guards was sent
+for who conducted them safe to Newgate." The Bow Street house, moreover,
+must have been full not only of prisoners and witnesses brought before the
+Justice, but also of victims of all manner of theft. For two comprehensive
+notices appear in the _Advertiser_ for this month, repeating the previous
+invitation accorded to such sufferers in the _Covent Garden Journal_. On
+January 1, all persons cognizant of any burglary robbery or theft are
+desired to communicate immediately with Mr Brogden, clerk to Justice
+Fielding, "at his office at the said Justice's in Bow Street." And again,
+towards the end of the month, "All Persons that have been robbed on the
+Highway in the County of Middlesex within this three months last past, are
+desired to apply to Mr Brogden, at Mr Justice Fielding's in Bow Street,
+Covent Garden." And here, too, came the solicitors that sought counsel's
+opinion on their client's behalf, with their fees; the magistrate of this
+period being under no disability in regard to his private practice.
+
+It was to his reputation as an advising barrister, and perhaps a little to
+the kindness of heart that must have been familiar to all who knew him,
+that Fielding owed his connection with that extraordinary popular
+excitement of 1753, the mysterious case of the servant girl Elizabeth
+Canning. On the 29th of January 'Betty Canning' presented herself, after a
+month's disappearance, at the door of her mother's house in London, in a
+deplorable state of weakness and distress, and declared that she had been
+kidnapped by two men on New Year's night, taken to a house on the Hertford
+road, and there confined by an old gipsy woman for twenty-eight days, in a
+hay loft, with a pitcher of water and a few pieces of bread for sole
+sustenance. On the twenty ninth day, according to her own account, she
+escaped through a window and made her way back to her home. Her
+neighbours, fired with pity for her sufferings, subscribed means for a
+prosecution; and, says Fielding, in the pamphlet which he published two
+months after these events, "Mr. _Salt_, the Attorney who hath been
+employed in this Cause, ... upon this Occasion, as he hath done upon many
+others, ... fixed upon me as the Council to be advised with." Then we have
+the following little domestic sketch, the only picture left to us of Henry
+Fielding as a practising barrister: "Accordingly, upon the _6th of
+February_, as I was sitting in my Room, Counsellor _Maden_ being then
+with me, my Clerk delivered me a Case, which was thus, as I remember,
+indorsed at the Top, The Case of Elizabeth Canning _for_ Mr Fielding's
+_opinion_, and at the Bottom, _Salt_, Solr. Upon the Receipt of this Case,
+with my Fee, I bid my Clerk give my Service to Mr. _Salt_ and tell him,
+that I would take the Case with me into the Country, whither I intended to
+go the next Day, and desired he would call for it the _Friday_ Morning
+afterwards; after which, without looking into it, I delivered it to my
+Wife, who was then drinking Tea with us, and who laid it by."
+
+Mr Brogden however presently returned upstairs, bringing the solicitor
+with him, who earnestly desired his counsel not only to read the case at
+once but also to undertake in his capacity of magistrate an examination of
+the injured girl, and of a supposed confederate of the gipsy. This task
+Fielding at first declined, principally on the ground that he had been
+"almost fatigued to death with several tedious examinations" at that time,
+and had intended to refresh himself with a day or two's interval in the
+country, where he had not been "unless on a Sunday, for a long time." The
+persuasions of the solicitor, curiosity as to the extrordinary nature of
+the case, and "a great compassion for the dreadful condition of the girl,"
+however induced him to yield; and the next day the eighteen year old
+heroine of a story that was soon to set all London quarrelling, was
+brought in a chair to Bow Street, and then led upstairs, supported by two
+friends, into the presence of the Justice. An issue of warrants followed
+upon her examination, and a further examination of a suspected confederate
+of the gipsy; the gipsy herself and her chief abettor having already been
+arrested by another magistrate. Some days later, Fielding being then out
+of town, "several noble Lords" sent to his house, desiring to be present
+while he examined the gipsy woman; and the matter being arranged, "Lord
+Montfort," says Fielding, "together with several gentlemen of fashion came
+at the appointed time." The company being in the Justice's room, the
+prisoners and witnesses were brought up; and apparently some charge was
+afterwards brought against Fielding as to the manner of his examination,
+for he here takes occasion to declare, what all who knew him must have
+known to be the truth, "I can truly say, that my Memory doth not charge me
+with having ever insulted the lowest Wretch that hath been brought before
+me." Public opinion became hotly divided as to whether Betty Canning had
+indeed suffered all she declared at the hands of the gipsy, Mary Squires,
+or had maliciously endeavoured to perjure away the old woman's life. The
+Lord Mayor, Sir Crisp Gascoyne, and Fielding's old antagonist the
+despicable Dr Hill ardently supported the gipsy; Fielding, in the pamphlet
+already quoted, and which was published in March, as warmly espoused the
+cause of the maid servant whom he calls "a poor, honest, innocent, simple
+Girl, and the most unhappy and most injured of all human Beings." The
+excitement of the Town over this melodramatic mystery is reflected in the
+fact that a second edition of Fielding's pamphlet (entitled _A clear state
+of the Case of Elizabeth Canning_) was advertised within a few days of its
+first publication. [3] And, also, in the appearance of the sixpenny print,
+here for the first time reproduced, in which occurs the only
+representation of Henry Fielding known to have been drawn during his life
+time. This print, which bears the inscription "drawn from the life by the
+Right Honourable the Lady Fa--y K--w," shows Fielding's tall figure, his
+legs bandaged for gout, the sword of Justice in his hand and her scales
+hanging out of his pocket, speaking on behalf of his trembling client
+Elizabeth Canning; while opposed to him are my Lord Mayor, the notorious
+Dr Hill, and the old gipsy. The background is adorned with pictures of the
+newly built Mansion House, and of the College of Surgeons. [4]
+
+But for the glimpses it affords us of Fielding as a barrister, and for his
+characteristic championship of what he was convinced was the cause of
+innocence oppressed, this once famous case might have been left
+undisturbed in the dust of the _State Trials_, had it not incidentally
+been the means of preserving two of the extremely rare letters of the
+novelist. These letters, [5] hitherto unpublished, are addressed by
+Fielding to the Duke of Newcastle, and were both written in the month
+following the publication of his pamphlet. The fact that both letters are
+dated from Ealing shows that his connection with what was then a pleasant
+country village was earlier than has been supposed; and the acute
+suggestions in the second letter seem to indicate a suspicion of some of
+Betty Canning's supporters, if his conviction in the girl's own innocence
+still remained unshaken.
+
+
+"My Lord Duke
+
+"I received an order from my Lord Chancellor immediately after the
+breaking up of the Council to lay before your Grace all the Affidavits I
+had taken since the Gipsey's Trial which related to that Affair. I then
+told the Messenger that I had taken none, as indeed the fact is the
+Affidavits of which I gave my Lord Chancellor an Abstract having been all
+sworn before Justices of the Peace in the Neighbourhood of Endfield, and
+remain I believe in the Possession of an Attorney in the City.
+
+However in Consequence of the Commands with which your Grace was pleased
+to honour me yesterday, I sent my Clerk immediately to the Attorney to
+acquaint him with these Commands, which I doubt not he will instantly
+obey. This I did from my great Duty to your Grace for I have long had no
+Concern in this Affair, nor have I seen any of the Parties lately unless
+once when I was desired to send for the Girl (Canning) to my House that a
+great Number of Noblemen and Gentleman might see her and ask her what
+Questions they pleased. I am, with the highest Duty,
+
+"My Lord,
+"Your Graces most obedient
+"and most humble servant
+"Henry Ffielding.
+"Ealing. April 14, 1753
+"His Grace the
+"Duke of Newcastle."
+
+
+"My Lord Duke,
+
+"I am extremely concerned to see by a Letter which I have just received
+from Mr Jones by Command of your Grace that the Persons concerned for the
+Prosecution have not yet attended your Grace with the Affidavits in
+Canning's Affair. I do assure you upon my Honour that I sent to them the
+Moment I first received your Grace's Commands and having after three
+Messages prevailed with them to come to me I desired them to fetch the
+Affidavits that I might send them to your Grace being not able to wait
+upon you in Person. This they said they could not do, but would go to Mr
+Hume Campbell their Council, and prevail with him to attend your Grace
+with all their Affidavits many of which, I found were sworn after the Day
+mentioned in the order of Council. I told them I apprehended the latter
+could not be admitted, but insisted in the strongest terms on their
+laying the others immediately before your Grace, and they at last
+promised me they would, nor have I ever seen them since. I have now again
+ordered my Clerk to go to them to inform them of the last Commands I have
+received, but as I have no Compulsory Power over them I can not answer
+for their Behaviour, which indeed I have long disliked, and have
+therefore long ago declined giving them any Advice, nor would I unless in
+Obedience to your Grace have anything to say to a set of the most
+obstinate Fools I ever saw; and who seem to me rather to act from a
+Spleen against my Lord Mayor, than from any Motive of protecting
+Innocence, tho' that was certainly their Motive at first. In Truth, if I
+am not deceived, I Suspect they desire that the Gipsey should be
+pardoned, and then to convince the World that she was guilty in order to
+cast the greater Reflection on him who was principally instrumental in
+obtaining such Pardon. I conclude with assuring your Grace that I have
+acted in this Affair, as I shall on all Occasions with the most dutiful
+Regard to your Commands, and that if my Life had been at Stake, as many
+know, I could have done no more.
+
+"I am, with the highest Respect,
+"My Lord Duke
+"Y Grace's most obedient,
+"and most humble servant,
+"Henry Ffielding.
+"Ealing
+"April 27. 1753.
+"His Grace the Duke of Newcastle."
+
+The dates of these letters show Fielding to have been at Ealing in the
+early spring of this year; and thus afford some confirmation of Lysons'
+remark in his _Environs of London_, published forty years later that
+"Henry Fielding had a country house at Ealing where he resided the year
+before his death." [6] In May a connection with Hammersmith is indicated,
+in the burial there of his little daughter Louisa. The entry in the
+Hammersmith Registers is as follows: "May 10th. Louisa, d. of Henry
+Fielding Esqr."
+
+The nearer Fielding's life draws to its premature close, the greater his
+physical suffering, so much the more eager seems his desire to leave
+behind him some practical achievement. We have already seen and wondered
+at his gigantic scheme for poor-law reform, published in the beginning of
+this year of fast declining 'health and life.' Six months later came the
+commission in the execution of which the remains of that health and life
+were literally sacrificed in the effort to win some provision for his
+family, in the event of his own death. Early in August the distinguished
+Court surgeon John Ranby had persuaded him to go immediately to Bath. And
+he tells us, in that _Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon_, [7] from which we
+have, from his own lips, the details of these last months, "I accordingly
+writ that very night to Mrs Bowden, who, by the next post, informed me she
+had taken me a lodging for a month certain." At this moment, when
+preparing for his journey, and while "almost fatigued to death with
+several long examinations, relating to five different murders, all
+committed within the space of a week, by different gangs of street
+robbers," Fielding received what might indeed be called a fatal summons to
+wait on the Duke of Newcastle, at his house in Lincoln's Inn Fields, to
+consult on a means for "putting an immediate end to those murders and
+robberies which were every day committed in the streets." This visit cost
+him a severe cold; but, notwithstanding, he produced, in about four days,
+a scheme for the destruction of the "then reigning gangs" of robbers and
+cut-throats, and for the future protection of the public, which was
+promptly accepted, and the execution of which was confided into Fielding's
+hands. "I had delayed my Bath-journey for some time," he proceeds,
+"contrary to the repeated advice of my physical acquaintance, and to the
+ardent desire of my warmest friends, tho' my distemper was now turned to a
+deep jaundice; in which case the Bath-waters are generally reputed to be
+almost infallible. But I had the most eager desire of demolishing this
+gang of villains and cut-throats." After some weeks the requisite funds
+were placed at Fielding's disposal; and so successful were his methods,
+that within a few days, the whole gang was dispersed, some in custody,
+others in flight. His health was by this time "reduced to the last
+extremity"; but still, he tells us, he continued to act "with the utmost
+vigour against these villains." And, amid all his 'fatigues and
+distresses,' the satisfaction he so ardently desired came to him. During
+the "remaining part of the month of November and in all December," those
+darkest of months, not only was there no such thing as a murder, but not
+one street robbery was committed. When we recall the amazing condition of
+London at this time, when street robberies and murders were of almost
+daily occurrence, we realise the magnitude of this achievement on the part
+of a dying man. "Having thus fully accomplished my undertaking," Fielding
+continues, "I went into the country in a very weak and deplorable
+condition, with no fewer or less diseases than a jaundice, a dropsy, and
+an asthma, altogether uniting their forces in the destruction of a body so
+entirely emaciated, that it had lost all its muscular flesh." It was now
+too late to apply the Bath treatment; and even had it been desirable it
+was no longer possible, for the sick man's strength was so reduced that a
+ride of six miles fatigued him intolerably. The Bath lodgings, which
+Fielding, surely with his old invincible hopefulness, had hitherto kept
+were accordingly relinquished; and even his sanguine nature realised the
+desperate condition of his case. At this point in his narration he breaks
+off with a characteristically frank disclosure of the chief motive which
+had inspired him to the heroic exertions of these later months of 1753. At
+the beginning of the winter his private affairs it seems, "had but a
+gloomy aspect." The aspect of his own tenure of life we know. And hence to
+distress of body was added that keenest of all distresses of the mind, the
+despair of putting his family beyond the reach of necessity. It was gladly
+therefore that Fielding offered up the 'poor sacrifice' of his shattered
+health, in the hope of securing a pension for his family, in case his own
+death were hastened by these last labours for the public.
+
+If sickness was not allowed to hinder Fielding's energies for the benefit
+of the public, and for the future provision of his family, neither did he
+permit it to dull the activities of friendship. Early in December, when
+his illness must have been acute, he wrote the following hitherto
+unpublished letter to the Lord Chancellor, on behalf of his friend Mr
+Saunders Welch: [8]
+
+
+"My Lord,
+
+"As I hear that a new Commission of the Peace is soon to pass the Great
+Seal for Westm'r. give me Leave to recommend the name of Saunders Welch,
+as well as to the next Commission for Middx. Your Lordship will, I hope,
+do me the Honour of believing, I should not thus presume, unless I was
+well satisfied that the Merit of the Man would justifie my Presumption.
+For this besides a universal Good Character and the many eminent services
+he hath done the Public, I appeal in particular to Master Lane; and shall
+only add, as I am positive the Truth is, that his Place can be filled
+with no other more acceptable to all the Gentlemen in the Commission, and
+indeed to the Public in general. I am with the highest Duty and Respect,
+
+"My Lord,
+"Your Lordship's most obedient
+"and most humble servant,
+"Henry Ffielding."
+"Decr 6. 1753
+"To the Lord High Chancellor"
+
+[1] _Life of Henry Fielding_. Frederick Lawrence, p. 138.
+
+[2] Saunders Welch. _A Letter on the subject of Robberies, wrote in the
+year 1753_.
+
+[3] See the _Public Advertiser_ 1753 March 17, 20, 24 &c.
+
+[4] This unique contemporary print of Fielding may be seen in the British
+Museum, Print Room, _Social Satires_, No. 3213.
+
+[5] Record Office. _State Papers. Domestic_ G. II., 127, no. 24.
+
+[6] Lysons. _Environs of London_. 1795. Vol. ii. p. 229.
+
+[7] The quotations from the _Voyage to Lisbon_ are from the edition
+recently prepared by Mr Austin Dobson, for the 'World's Classics.'
+
+[8] This letter is now in the British Museum. The endorsement on the back
+is: "Dec. 6, 1753 from Mr Fielding recommending Mr. Saunders Welch to be
+in the Com. of ye Peace for Westmr and Middx."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+VOYAGE TO LISBON--DEATH
+
+    "satisfied in having finished my life, as I have probably lost it in
+     the service of my country."
+    _Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon_.
+
+To a man dying of a complication of disorders the terrible winter of
+1753-4 brought added danger; a winter which, says Fielding, "put a lucky
+end, if they had known their own interests, to such numbers of aged and
+infirm valetudinarians." But this, too, his splendid constitution
+struggled through; and in February 1754, he was back in town, in a
+condition less despaired of, he tells us, by himself than by any of his
+friends.
+
+And if he did not allow himself to despair, neither did he, even now,
+relinquish all his magistrate's work. On the 26th of February cases are
+actually recorded as brought before him. [1] But within a few days,
+apparently, of this date treatment employed on the advice of Dr Joshua
+Ward, so weakened a body already 'enervate' and emaciated, that at first
+the patient "was thought to be falling into the agonies of death." On
+March 6, he was, he tells us, at his worst--that "memorable day when the
+public lost Mr Pelham. From that day I began slowly, as it were, to draw
+my feet out of the grave; till in two months time I had again acquired
+some little degree of strength."
+
+Before the expiration of these two months that 'little degree of strength'
+was again being expended in the drudgery of the Bow Street court-room.
+"Yesterday," states the _Public Advertiser_ of April 17, "Elizabeth Smith
+was committed to Newgate by Henry Fielding Esqre; being charged with
+stealing a great quantity of Linnen." [2] And five days later, on April
+22, a committal is recorded in the Middlesex _Sessions Book_. [3]
+
+Although Fielding could now leave his sickroom, when called thence to
+commit a thief to Newgate, a newspaper paragraph, dated a little earlier
+in this same month of April, shows that the public were apprehensive that
+the protection afforded them by their indefatigable magistrate was now of
+a very precarious duration. The writer refers to the complete success of
+Mr Fielding's _Plan_ for the subjugation of criminals, executed the
+previous winter, pointing out that "the Public who had such Reason to
+suspect the contrary have suffered fewer Outrages than have happened any
+Winter this Twenty years." And without making any direct statement as to
+the fast failing strength of the author and executor of that _Plan_, he
+continues in words that plainly indicate the abdication of those zealous
+energies: "The whole Plan we are assured is communicated to Justice John
+Fielding and Mr Welch who are determined to bring it to that perfection of
+which it is capable." This 'assurance' of the _Advertiser_ is confirmed by
+Fielding's own words in the _Voyage to Lisbon_. "I therefore" he says,
+speaking clearly of the winter or spring of 1753-4, "resigned the office
+[of principal Justice of the Peace in Westminster] and the farther
+execution of my plan to my brother, who had long been my assistant."
+
+This blind brother, who in his turn became famous as a London magistrate,
+was now a Justice of the Peace for Middlesex [4] as well as for
+Westminster; and was at this time living in the Strand, as the Resident
+Proprietor [5] of that enterprising _Universal Register Office_ which has
+won incidental immortality in his brother's pages, and which combined such
+heterogeneous activities as those of an Estate Office, Registry for
+servants of good character, Lost Property Office, Curiosity Shop and
+General Agency.
+
+Another announcement in the columns of the _Advertiser_ links this last
+Spring of Fielding's life with that earlier Spring of 1743, when as a
+popular play-wright and a struggling barrister, absorbed in anxiety for
+the health of a beloved wife and with his own health already attacked, he
+published that masterpiece of irony _Jonathan Wild_. Now, while he was
+still slowly drawing his 'feet out of the grave,' after those critical
+first days of March, a new edition of the _History_ of that "Great Man,"
+with "considerable Corrections and Additions," was advertised; the actual
+date of publication being, apparently, about March 19. The new edition
+appeared with a prefatory note, "from the Publisher to the Reader," which
+although it bears no signature conveys, undoubtedly, Fielding's intention,
+if not his actual words. There is the familiar protest against the
+"scurrility of others," the odium of which had fallen on the innocent
+shoulders of "the author of our little book"; and there is a solemn
+declaration that the said little book shows no reason for supposing any
+'personal application' to be meant in its pages "unless we will agree that
+there are without those Walls [i.e. of Newgate], some other bodies of men
+of worse morals than those within; and who have consequently, a right to
+change places with its present inhabitants." Then follows an explicit
+reference to a chapter in the _History_ of the arch-villain Wild, which is
+obviously designed to satirise the condition of English politics, if not
+the person of any one politician. The disclaimer, seems on the whole, to
+partake very properly of the ironic nature of the ensuing pages; although
+it recalls that youthful declaration of the young dramatist, prefixed to
+his first comedy acted nearly thirty years before, that no private
+character was the target of his pen.
+
+At the end of these two months of March and April, spent as we have seen
+in acquiring some little degree of strength, and in at least attempting to
+expend the same on the consignment of petty thieves to Newgate, Fielding
+again submitted his dropsy to the surgeon, the consequences of which he
+now bore much better. This improvement, he tells us, he attributed greatly
+to "a dose of laudanum prescribed by my surgeon. It first gave me the most
+delicious flow of spirits, and afterwards as comfortable a nap." Lady Mary
+Wortley Montagu has recorded how her cousin's 'happy constitution,' even
+when half-demolished, could enjoy, with undiminished zest "a venison
+pasty, or a flask of champagne." Surely none other than Henry Fielding
+could have recorded with like zest this 'delicious flow of spirits' and
+'comfortable nap' derived from a dose of laudanum.
+
+The month of May, with its promise of relief from the still lingering
+winter, had now begun. Fielding therefore resolved, he says, to visit a
+little country house of his "which stands at Ealing, in the county of
+Middlesex, in the best air, I believe, in the whole kingdom." [6] Towards
+the end of the month, he had resort to a long forgotten eighteenth century
+panacea, the tar-water discovered by Bishop Berkeley; and very soon
+experienced effects far beyond his "most sanguine hopes." Success beyond
+Fielding's most sanguine hopes must have been great indeed; and
+accordingly we hear how this tar-water, from the very first, lessened his
+illness, increased his appetite, and very slowly added to his bodily
+strength. By the end of the month a third application by his surgeon
+revealed distinctly favourable symptoms; but still both the dropsy and the
+asthma were becoming more serious; and the summer, which the doctors
+seemed to think the sick man's 'only chance of life' seemed scarce likely
+to visit England at all in that sunless year. "In the whole month of May
+the sun scarce appeared three times" we learn, from the _Voyage_. Fearing
+therefore the renewed assaults of winter, before he had recruited his
+forces so as "to be in anywise able to withstand them," Fielding resolved,
+with the approval of a very eminent physician, to put an already formed
+project into immediate execution. This was to seek further recovery in
+some warmer climate. At first Aix was thought of, but here the
+difficulties of travel in the reign of George II. for invalids of slender
+means, proved insuperable. The journey by land, "beside the expense of
+it," Fielding found to be "infinitely too long and fatiguing"; and no ship
+was announced as sailing within 'any reasonable time' for that part of the
+Mediterranean. Lisbon accordingly was decided upon; and John Fielding soon
+discovered a ship with excellent passenger accommodation, and which was
+due to sail in three days. "I eagerly embraced the offer," writes
+Fielding, as though he were starting on a pleasure cruise, instead of
+facing all the miseries of travel, when unable to make the least use of
+his limbs, and when his very appearance "presented a spectacle of the
+highest horror"; and he adds "I began to prepare my family for the voyage
+with the utmost expedition." Twice, however, the captain put off his
+sailing, and at length his passenger invited him to dinner at Ealing, a
+full week after the declared date of departure. Meanwhile Fielding's
+condition seems at least to have become no worse, for the _Public
+Advertiser_ of June 22 has "the pleasure to assure the Publick that the
+Report of the Death of Henry Fielding Esquire; inserted in an Evening
+paper of Thursday is not true, that Gentleman's Health being better than
+it has been for some Month's past."
+
+It was not till the 26th of June that, in the memorable opening words of
+the _Voyage_, "the most melancholy sun I had ever beheld arose, and found
+me awake at my house at Fordhook. By the light of this sun, I was, in my
+own opinion, last to behold and take leave of some of those creatures on
+whom I doated with a mother-like fondness, guided by nature and passion,
+and uncured and unhardened by all the doctrine of that philosophical
+school where I had learnt to bear pains and to despise death." The morning
+was spent with his children, the eldest of whom was then a boy of six; and
+"I doubt not," he writes, "whether, in that time, I did not undergo more
+than in all my distemper." At noon his coach was at the door, and this
+"was no sooner told me than I kiss'd my children round, and went into it
+with some little resolution." His wife, behaving "more like a heroine and
+philosopher, tho' at the same time the tenderest mother in the world," and
+his eldest daughter, followed him; and the invalid was swiftly driven the
+twelve miles to Rotherhithe. Here the task of embarking a man quite bereft
+of the use of his limbs had to be accomplished. This difficulty was
+overcome with the aid of Saunders Welch, the friend of whom Fielding says
+"I never think or speak of but with love and esteem" [7]; and, at last,
+the traveller was "seated in a great chair in the cabin," after fatigues,
+the most cruel of which he declares to have been the inhuman jests made
+upon his wasted and helpless condition by the rows of sailors and watermen
+through whom he had been compelled to pass.
+
+From this moment we may read of the pleasures and thoughts, the
+experiences and meditations, but scarcely ever of the sufferings of the
+dying novelist, in the pages of what has been well called "one of the most
+unfeigned and touching little tracts in our own or any other literature"
+[8] Confined for six weeks in the narrow prison of an eighteenth century
+trading vessel; unable to move save when lifted by unskilled hands; with
+food often intolerable to the healthiest appetite; with no relaxation save
+the company of the rough old sea-dog who commanded the _Queen of
+Portugal_; and fully conscious that his was a mortal illness,--the
+inexhaustible courage, the delight in man and in nature, the genius of
+Henry Fielding still triumphed over every external circumstance.
+Throughout the voyage, fortune, moreover, seemed determined to heap on the
+unhappy traveller all manner of additional discomforts; and yet when we
+lay down this little volume "begun in pain, and finished almost at the
+same period with life," [9] the pictures left on the mind glow almost as
+brightly as those which fill the pages written in the full vigour of
+Fielding's manhood, and which, as Coleridge said, breathe the air of a
+spring morning.
+
+First came a delay of three days off the squalid shores of Wapping and
+Rotherhithe, whereby opportunity was afforded of "tasting a delicious
+mixture of the air of both these sweet places," and of enjoying such a
+concord of the voices of seamen, watermen, fishwomen, oyster women and
+their like as Hogarth indicated "in that print of his which is enough to
+make a man deaf to look at." This delay, moreover, threatened to bring
+Fielding within need of a surgeon when none should be procurable. His
+friend Mr William Hunter of Covent Garden, brother of the more famous John
+Hunter, relieved this apprehension; but now fresh trouble occurred in the
+torments of toothache which befell Mrs Fielding. A servant was despatched
+in haste to Wapping, but the desired 'toothdrawer,' arrived after the ship
+had at last, on Sunday morning, the 30th of June, left her unsavoury
+moorings. That Sunday morning "was fair and bright," and the diarist
+records how, dropping down to Gravesend, "we had a passage thither I think
+as pleasant as can be conceiv'd." The yards of Deptford and Woolwich were
+'noble sights'; the Thames with its splendid shipping excelled all the
+rivers of the world; and the men of war, the unrivalled Indiamen, the
+other traders, and even the colliers and small craft, all combined to form
+"a most pleasing object to the eye, as well as highly warming to the heart
+of an Englishman, who has any degree of love for his country, or can
+recognise any effect of the patriot in his constitution." And here
+Fielding gives us a notable example of his own healthy taste in
+recreation; a taste agreeing very ill with the scurrilous popular myths
+concerning him, but entirely consonant with the manifest atmosphere of his
+genius. He deplores the general neglect of "what seems to me the highest
+degree of amusement: that is, the sailing ourselves in little vessels of
+our own"; an amusement which need not "exceed the reach of a moderate
+fortune, and would fall very short of the prices which are daily paid for
+pleasures of a far inferior rate."
+
+Fortune, as we have said, seemed to grudge every little pleasure that
+could have alleviated the condition of the helpless invalid on board the
+_Queen of Portugal_. The relief obtained from Mr Hunter, he tells us, "the
+gaiety of the morning, the pleasant sailing with wind and tide, and the
+many agreeable objects with which I was constantly entertained during the
+whole way, were all suppressed and overcome by the single consideration of
+my wife's pain, which continued incessantly to torment her." The second
+despatch of a messenger, in great haste to bring the best reputed operator
+in Gravesend recalls Murphy's words: "Of sickness and poverty he was
+singularly patient and under pressure of those evils he could quietly read
+_Cicero de Consolatione_; but if either of them threatened his wife he was
+impetuous for her relief." The remedies both of the Gravesend 'surgeon of
+some eminence,' and of yet another practitioner, who was sent for from
+Deal, were ineffectual; but about eight in the evening of the following
+day, when the ship under contrary winds, was at anchor in the Downs, Mrs
+Fielding fell asleep; and to that accident we owe one of the most
+characteristic passages in the _Voyage_. His wife's relief from pain
+would, Fielding tells us, "have given me some happiness, could I have
+known how to employ those spirits which were raised by it: but
+unfortunately for me, I was left in a disposition of enjoying an agreeable
+hour, without the assistance of a companion, which has always appeared to
+me necessary to such enjoyment; my daughter and her companion were both
+retired sea-sick to bed; the other passengers were a rude school boy of
+fourteen years old, and an illiterate Portuguese friar, who understood no
+language but his own, in which I had not the least smattering. The captain
+was the only person left, in whose conversation I might indulge myself;
+but unluckily for me, besides his knowledge being chiefly confined to his
+profession, he had the misfortune of being so deaf, that to make him hear
+my words, I must run the risque of conveying them to the ears of my wife,
+who, tho' in another room (called, I think, the state-room; being indeed a
+most stately apartment capable of containing one human body in length, if
+not very tall, and three bodies in breadth) lay asleep within a yard of
+me. In this situation necessity and choice were one and the same thing;
+the captain and I sat down together to a small bowl of punch, over which
+we both soon fell fast asleep, and so concluded the evening." In the
+record of the previous day, while sketching the humours of Jacks in
+office, Fielding incidentally shows himself as no less careful of the
+respect due to his wife than he was solicitous for her comfort. A
+ruffianly custom-house officer had appeared in their cabin, wearing a hat
+adorned with broad gold lace, and 'cocked with much military fierceness.'
+On eliciting the information that 'the gentleman' was a riding surveyor,
+"I replied," says Fielding, "that he might be a riding surveyor, but could
+be no gentleman, for that none who had any title to that denomination,
+would break into the presence of a lady, without any apology or even
+moving his hat. He then took his covering from his head, and laid it on
+the table, saying he asked pardon." To this 'riding surveyor' we owe also
+an indication that Fielding found room in the narrow confines of a cabin
+for his Plato; for the rude insolence of that functionary recalls to his
+mind the Platonic theory of the divine original of rulers, and he proceeds
+to quote a long passage from the _Laws_, which even his ready scholarship
+could scarce have had by heart.
+
+Contrary winds continued to baffle all Captain Veal's seamanship, and
+afforded his passenger opportunities for a spirited protest concerning the
+need of some regulation both of the charges of long-shore boatmen, and of
+the manners of captains in the Royal Navy. On the evening of July 8 the
+_Voyage_ records that "we beat the sea off Sussex, in sight of Dungeness,
+with much more pleasure than progress; for the weather was almost a
+perfect calm, and the moon, which was almost at the full, scarce suffered
+a single cloud to veil her from our sight"; and on the 18th of the month
+the _Queen of Portugal_ put in to Ryde, at which place she remained
+wind-bound for no less than eleven days.
+
+These eleven days Fielding spent, by his wife's persuasions, on shore, at
+the poor village inn which, together with a little church and some thirty
+houses, then constituted the village of Ryde. Of the hardships and humours
+of that sojourn the _Voyage_ affords an account worthy of a place among
+the pages of either of the three great novels. The landlady, an incredibly
+mean and heartless shrew, inflicted daily annoyances and extortions on her
+wind-bound victims. The squalid building, partly constructed of
+wreck-wood, could scarce house the party. The food supplies, other than
+those the visitors brought with them, were chiefly 'rusty bacon, and worse
+cheese,' with very bad ale to drink. And on the first afternoon, the house
+was found to be so damp from recent scrubbing that Mrs Fielding, who
+"besides discharging excellently well her own, and all the tender offices
+becoming the female character; who besides being a faithful friend, an
+amiable companion, and a tender nurse, could likewise supply the wants of
+a decrepit husband, and occasionally perform his part," hastily snatched
+the invalid from "worse perils by water than the common dangers of the
+sea," and ordered dinner to be laid in a dry and commodious barn. So
+seated, "in one of the most pleasant spots, I believe, in the kingdom,"
+and regaled on bacon, beans, and fish, "we completed," says Fielding, "the
+best, the pleasantest, and the merriest meal, with more appetite, more
+real, solid luxury, and more festivity, than was ever seen in an
+entertainment at White's."
+
+On Sunday the three ladies went to church, "attended by the captain in a
+most military attire, with his cockade in his hat, and his sword by his
+side" (Captain Veal had commanded a privateer); and Fielding, while left
+alone, pursued those researches into human nature of which he never
+wearied by conversation with the landlord, a fine example of henpecked
+humanity. On the following day the ladies, again attended by Captain Veal,
+enjoyed a four mile walk, professing themselves greatly charmed with the
+scenery, and with the courtesy of a lady who owned a great house on this
+part of the coast, and who "had slipt out of the way, that my wife and her
+company might refresh themselves with the flowers and fruits with which
+her garden abounded." Within twenty four hours this generous householder
+had sent a message to the inn, placing all that her garden or house
+afforded at the disposal of the travellers. Fielding's man-servant was
+despatched with proper acknowledgements, and returned "in company with the
+gardener, both richly laden with almost every particular which a garden at
+this most fruitful season of the year produces."
+
+That evening, on a change of wind, Captain Veal came to demand his
+passengers' instant return. This would have been "a terrible circumstance
+to me, in my decayed condition," admits Fielding, "especially as very
+heavy showers of rain, attended with a high wind, continued to fall
+incessantly; the being carried thro' which two miles in the dark, in a wet
+and open boat, seemed little less than certain death." Happily the wind
+again veered till the following morning, when Fielding and the three
+ladies, together with their manservant and maid, were safely re-embarked,
+not however without much agitation over the temporary loss of their
+tea-chest. This calamity was first compensated by the prompt aid of the
+hospitable lady aforementioned, and then averted by the diligent search of
+William the footman who at last discovered the hiding place of the missing
+'sovereign cordial,' and thus, concludes his master, "ended this scene,
+which begun with such appearance of distress, and ended with becoming the
+subject of mirth and laughter." Once more on board, Ryde and its beautiful
+prospect, its verdant elms, its green meadows, and shady lanes all
+combining in Fielding's opinion to make a most delightful habitation,
+faded from view. And, by seven o'clock, "we sat down" he says, "to regale
+ourselves with some roasted venison, which was much better drest than we
+imagined it would be, and an excellent cold pasty which my wife had made
+at Ryde, and which we had reserved uncut to eat on board our ship, whither
+we all cheerfully exulted in being returned from the presence of Mrs
+Humphreys, [the landlady] who by the exact resemblance she bore to a fury,
+seemed to have been with no great propriety settled in Paradise."
+
+It is while commenting on the charm of the view from Ryde,--"I confess
+myself so entirely fond of a sea prospect, that I think nothing on the
+land can equal it,"--that Fielding incidentally utters that extraordinary
+reference to Sir Robert Walpole as "one of the best of men and of
+ministers." The only explanation of these words at all consonant with what
+we know of Fielding's life seems to be that here he adopts once more his
+familiar use of irony.
+
+The cheerfulness of spirit with which the invalid encountered every fresh
+distress, and 'exulted' in every pleasant sight and trifling pleasure,
+during those days at Ryde, is very fully reflected in the following
+letter, happily preserved from the untoward fate which has apparently
+befallen every other intimate word from his pen. It was written to his
+brother John, on the first day of anchorage off Ryde.
+
+
+"On board the Queen of Portugal, Richd. Veal at anchor on the Mother Bank,
+off Ryde, to the care of the Post Master of Portsmouth--this is my Date
+and y'r Direction.
+
+"July 12 1754
+
+"Dear Jack, After receiving that agreeable Lre from Mess'rs. Fielding &
+Co., we weighed on monday morning and sailed from Deal to the Westward
+Four Days long but inconceivably pleasant passage brought us yesterday to
+an Anchor on the Mother Bank, on the Back of the Isle of Wight, where we
+had last Night in Safety the Pleasure of hearing the Winds roar over our
+Heads in as violent a Tempest as I have known, and where my only
+Consideration were the Fears which must possess any Friend of ours (if
+there is happily any such), who really makes our Well being the Object of
+his Concern especially if such Friend should be totally inexperienced in
+Sea Affairs. I therefore beg that on the Day you receive this Mrs Daniel
+may know that we are just risen from Breakfast in Health and Spirits this
+twelfth Instant at 9 in the morning. Our Voyage hath proved fruitful in
+Adventures all which being to be written in the Book you must postpone
+yr. Curiosity. As the Incidents which fall under yr Cognizance will
+possibly be consigned to Oblivion, do give them to us as they pass. Tell
+yr Neighbour I am much obliged to him for recommending me to the care of
+a most able and experienced Seaman to whom other Captains seem to pay
+such Deference that they attend and watch his Motions, and think
+themselves only safe when they act under his Direction and Example. Our
+Ship in Truth seems to give Laws on the Water with as much Authority and
+Superiority as you Dispense Laws to the Public and Examples to yr
+Brethern in Commission, Please to direct yr Answer to me on Board as in
+the Date, if gone to be returned, and then send it by the Post and
+Pacquet to Lisbon to
+
+"Y'r affec't. Brother
+"H. Fielding [10]
+
+"To John Fielding Esq. at his House in Bow Street Cov. Garden London."
+
+It is probable, as Mr Austin Dobson has pointed out, that the Mrs Daniel,
+whose anxieties Fielding here shows himself anxious to relieve, was his
+second wife's mother. And by this time his brother was doubtless occupying
+that house in Bow Street so frequently advertised to the public, when any
+work was on foot for their protection, as the residence of 'Henry
+Fielding, Esqre.'
+
+The almost diabolic figure of the Ryde landlady had scarcely left his
+pages, when Fielding found a new subject for his portraiture, in the
+pretentious ill-bred follies of a young officer, a nephew of the captain,
+who arrived on board to visit his uncle, and who serves as an excellent
+foil for the simple-hearted merits of the elder man. A rising wind,
+however, cut short the Lieutenant's stories, and two nights later blew a
+hurricane which Fielding declares, "would have given no small alarm to a
+man, who had either not learnt what it is to die, or known what it is to
+be miserable"; continuing, in words that need no comment, "my dear wife
+and child must pardon me, if what I did not conceive to be any great evil
+to myself, I was not much terrified with the thoughts of happening to
+them: in truth, I have often thought they are both too good, and too
+gentle, to be trusted to the power of any man." The sea he loved so well
+was not to be Fielding's grave. Early the next morning the _Queen of
+Portugal_ was at anchor in Torbay; and the whole party sat down "to a very
+chearful breakfast."
+
+For a whole week the travellers were kept wind-bound off the Devon coast,
+now at anchor, now making vain efforts to proceed. We hear of the 'fine
+clouted cream,' and the delicious cyder of the county (two hogsheads of
+which latter Fielding purchased as presents for his friends); of the
+excellence of the local fish named 'john dóree,' of the scandalous need of
+legislation for the protection of sea-men when ashore from land-sharks, a
+digression which includes a pleasant interpretation of the myth of Ulysses
+and Circe as none other than the dilemma of a Homeric merchant skipper
+whose crew Circe "some good ale-wife," had made drunk "with the spirituous
+liquors of those days"; of the difficulty with which Fielding could
+persuade his wife "whom it was no easy matter for me to force from my
+side" to take a walk on shore; and of the captain's grievous lamentations,
+which "seemed to have some mixture of the Irish howl in them," [11] when
+his cat was accidentally suffocated. Also, to these last wind-bound days
+belongs that famous incident which does perhaps no less honour to the hot
+tempered tyrannical old skipper than to his illustrious passenger.
+
+Fielding, having just finished dinner, was enjoying some good claret in
+the cabin, with his wife and her friend--a cheerful moment, when
+conversation 'is most agreeable,' when Tom, the captain's general
+factotum, burst in on them and began, without saying a 'by your leave', to
+bottle half a hogshead of small beer. After requests and protests, equally
+unavailing, this functionary found himself, says Fielding, threatened
+"with having one bottle to pack more than his number, which then happened
+to stand empty within my reach." Thereupon Tom reported his version of the
+matter to the captain, who came thundering down to the cabin in a rage
+that knew no bounds of language or civility. This behaviour from a man who
+had received not only liberal payment from his passenger for
+accommodation, but also such frequent stores of fresh provisions that
+Fielding's private purse had indeed gone some way in maintaining the
+ship's crew, that passenger justly resented, and to a hasty resolve of
+quitting the ship by a hoy that should carry him to Dartmouth, he added
+threats of legal action. The 'most distant sound of law,' however, he
+tells us, "frightened a man, who had often, I am convinced, heard numbers
+of cannon roar round him with intrepidity. Nor did he sooner see the hoy
+approaching the vessel, than he ran down again into the cabin, and his
+rage being perfectly subsided, he tumbled on his knees, and a little too
+abjectly implored for mercy. I did not suffer a brave man and an old man,
+to remain a moment in this posture; but I immediately forgave him." It is
+this incident that Thackeray chooses to complete his picture of the great
+novelist; adding that memorable comparison between the "noble spirit and
+unconquerable generosity" of Fielding, and the lives of many unknown
+heroes of the sea: "Such a brave and gentle heart, such an intrepid and
+courageous spirit I love to recognise in the manly the English Harry
+Fielding."
+
+Within a week of this reconciliation the ship had made such progress
+southward that the captain 'in the redundancy of his good humour, declared
+he would go to church at Lisbon on Sunday next' (not the least pleasant of
+the pictures which Fielding gives us of the privateer is that of his
+summoning all hands on deck on a Sunday morning and then reading prayers
+'with an audible voice'); but again the wind played him false, becalming
+him near Cape Finisterre. This last calm, however, brought with it
+sufficient compensation: "tho' our voyage was retarded, we were
+entertained with a scene which as no one can behold without going to sea,
+so no one can form an idea of anything equal to it on shore. We were
+seated on the deck, women and all, in the serenest evening that can be
+imagined. Not a single cloud presented itself to our view, and the sun
+himself was the only object which engrossed our whole attention. He did
+indeed set with a majesty which is incapable of description, with which,
+while the horizon was yet blazing with glory, our eyes were called off to
+the opposite part to survey the moon, which was then at full, and which in
+rising presented us with the second object that this world hath offered to
+our vision. Compared to these the pageantry of theatres, or splendor of
+courts, are sights almost below the regard of children."
+
+Four days later, at midnight, the anchor was cast off Lisbon, after a calm
+and moonlit passage up the Tagus, a passage, Fielding writes, "incredibly
+pleasant to the women, who remained three hours enjoying it, while I was
+left to the cooler transports of enjoying their pleasures at second-hand;
+and yet, cooler as they may be, whoever is totally ignorant of such
+sensation, is, at the same time, void of all ideas of friendship."
+
+On the day following, the 24th of June, he landed, and that evening
+enjoyed the long unknown luxury of a good supper, in a kind of
+coffee-house "very pleasantly situated on the brow of a hill, about a mile
+from the city, [which] hath a very fine prospect of the River Tajo from
+Lisbon to the sea." With that pleasant prospect the Voyage closes. Begun
+as it was to while away the enforced solitude of his cabin, a condition,
+which no man, he tells us, disliked more than himself and which mortal
+sickness rendered especially irksome, these pages, some of which "were
+possibly the production of the most disagreeable hours which ever haunted
+the author," reveal Fielding to us if not as Mr Lowell has said "with
+artless inadvertence" at least with perfect fullness. The undimmed gaiety
+of spirit, the tender affection, the constant desire to remove those evils
+which he found oppressing his country-men by sea not less than on land,
+the 'enthusiasm for righteousnes,' the humour of the first of English
+novelists, burn here as brightly as though the writer were but midway in
+his life's voyage. The hand that exposed evil in its native loathsomeness
+in a Blifil and a Wild has not lost its cunning in depicting Mrs
+Humphreys; the eye that delighted in the green fields of England saw in
+the southern sunset that which made human creations 'almost below the
+regard of children.' And to the last the patriotic energies of the author
+of _Pasquin_ and of the _Champion_, of the whole hearted social reformer,
+of the tireless magistrate, knew no relaxation. Page after page of the
+_Voyage_ justify the passage in which he tells us how "I would indeed have
+this work, which, if I live to finish it (a matter of no great certainty,
+if indeed of any great hope to me), will be probably the last I shall ever
+undertake, to produce some better end than the mere diversion of the
+reader"; and manifest his desire, here explicitly stated, to finish life
+"as I have probably lost it, in the service of my country."
+
+We have no knowledge concerning the four months following the last entry
+in the pages of the _Voyage to Lisbon_. On October 8, 1754, the end so
+calmly expected came; and in the beautiful English cemetery, facing the
+great Basilica of the Heart of Jesus, was laid to rest all that an alien
+soil could claim of 'our immortal Fielding.'
+
+[1] The _Public Advertiser_, 1754, February 26.
+
+[2] The _Public Advertiser_ 1754, April 17.
+
+[3] Middlesex Records. _Sessions Book_. 1754.
+
+[4] See the Middlesex Records.
+
+[5] See the _Public Advertiser_. February, 1754.
+
+[6] This little house was apparently replaced by a larger house; and it is
+probably this second building of which a sketch is inserted in a copy of
+Lysons' _Environs_ to be seen in the Guildhall Library. It is now pulled
+down.
+
+[7] Dr Johnson spoke of Saunders Welch as "one of my best and dearest
+friends."
+
+[8] Austin Dobson. _Fielding_, p. 170.
+
+[9] "Dedication" of the _Voyage_, written possibly by John Fielding.
+
+[10] Austin Dobson. _Fielding_, p. 179. From the autograph in the
+possession of Mr Frederick Locker.
+
+[11] This and the following passage occur in the second version of the
+_Voyage to Lisbon_.
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX A
+
+_The Hapsburg genealogy_
+
+It appears that the Hapsburg descent, formerly claimed by the Denbigh
+family, must now be abandoned. The arguments against this descent,
+published by Mr Horace Round, have been accepted by Burke. Further, Dr G.
+F. Warner permits me to publish his statement that "I have myself seen
+the documents upon which it [the claim] rests, and found them to be
+unmistakeable forgeries."
+
+As regards Henry Fielding's family it is interesting to find that his
+grandfather the Rev. and Hon. John Fielding was not only Canon of
+Salisbury, and a Doctor of Divinity, but also Archdeacon of Dorsetshire.
+Canon John Fielding was buried at Salisbury. His son George (Henry
+Fielding's uncle) was Lt. Colonel of the "Royal Regiment of the Blues,"
+and Groom of the Bed-chamber to Queen Anne and to George II. He is buried
+in St George's Chapel, Windsor. (J. Nichols. _History and Antiquities
+of Leicestershire_. 1810. Vol. iv. pt. i. p. 394.)
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX B
+
+_Receipt and Assignment of "Tom Jones"_
+
+The following documents are in the possession of Alfred Huth Esq., and
+are now first published
+
+June 11 1748.
+
+Rec'd. of Mr. Andrew Millar Six hundred Pounds being in full for the sole
+Copy Right of a Book called the History of a Foundling in Eighteen Books.
+And in Consideration of the said Six Hundred Pounds I promise to asign
+over the said Book to the said Andrew Millar his Executors and assigns
+for ever when I shall be thereto demanded.
+
+£   s   d
+£600, 00, 00. Hen. Ffielding
+
+The said Work to contain Six Volumes in Duodecimo.
+
+Know all Men by these Presents that I Henry Fielding of St. Paul's Covent
+Garden in the County of Middlesex Esq'r. for & in consideration of the
+Sum of Six hundred Pounds of lawful Money of Great Britain to me in hand
+paid by Andrew Millar of St. Mary le Strand in the County afores'd.
+Bookseller the Receipt whereof is hereby acknowledged and of which I do
+Acquit the s'd. Andrew Millar his Executors & Assigns, have bargained
+sold delivered assigned & set over all that my Title Right and Property
+in & to a certain Book printed in Six Volumes, known & called by the Name
+& Title of The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, inv'd. written by me
+the s'd. Henry Fielding, with all Improvements, Additions or Alterations
+whatsoever which now are or hereafter shall at any time be made by me the
+s'd. Henry Fielding, or any one else by my authority to the s'd. Book To
+Have and to Hold the s'd. bargained Premises unto the s'd. Andrew Millar,
+his Ex'ors Adm'ors or Assigns for ever And I do hereby covenant to & with
+the s'd. Andrew Millar his Ex'ors Adm'ors & Assigns that I the s'd. Henry
+Fielding the Author of the s'd. bargained Premises have not at any time
+heretofore done committed or suffered any Act or thing whatsoever by
+means whereof the s'd bargained Premises or any part thereof is or shall
+be impeached or encumbered in any wise And I the s'd Henry Fielding for
+myself my Ex'ors Adm'ors & Assigns shall warrant & defend the s'd
+bargained Premises for ever against all Persons whatsoever claiming under
+me my Ex'ors Adm'ors or Assigns.
+
+In Witness whereof I have hereunto set my hand & seal this twenty fifth
+day of March One thousand seven hundred & forty nine.
+
+H F fielding [Illustration: Seal.]
+
+Signed sealed & delivered
+by the within named Henry
+Fielding the day and year within
+mentioned, in the presence of
+Jos. Brogden
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX C
+
+    "_Pasquin turned Drawcansir_"
+
+The _General Advertiser_ for March 13, 1752, Page 3, advertises, as
+for Macklin's Benefit, at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden,
+
+"A New Dramatic Satire of Two Acts, call'd
+Covent Garden Theatre; or Pasquin turned Drawcansir
+Censor of Great Britain
+
+Written on the Model of the Comedies of Aristophanes and the Pasquinades
+of the Italian Theatre in Paris; With Chorusses of the People after the
+manner of the Greek Drama. The Parts of the Pit, and Boxes, the Stage,
+and the Town to be performed by themselves for their Diversion; the Part
+of several dull disorderly Characters in and about St. James, to be
+performed by certain Persons for Example; and the Part of
+Pasquin-Drawcansir to be performed by his Censorial Highness, for his
+Interest.
+
+The Satire to be introduced by an Oration, and to conclude by a
+Peroration: Both to be spoken from the Rostrum, in the Manner of certain
+Orators by Signer Pasquin."
+
+This advertisement is also in the _Covent Garden Journal_, with the
+addition of "galleries" after the word _Boxes_. According to Dibdin,
+_History of the Stage_, Vol. V. (preface dated 1800) p. 156, this satire
+was _by_ Macklin.
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX D
+
+_The Walpole 'anecdote'_
+
+The following reference to Fielding occurs in a letter by Horace Walpole,
+to George Montagu, dated May 18, 1749. It may be prefaced by the
+statement that Fielding's strenuous opposition to Sir Robert Walpole was
+not likely to be overlooked by Sir Robert's son; and by Mr Austin
+Dobson's comment "his [Horace Walpole's] absolute injustice, when his
+partisan spirit was uppermost, is everywhere patent to readers of his
+Letters ... the story no doubt exaggerated when it reached him, loses
+nothing under his transforming and malicious pen." Walpole writes: "He
+[Rigby] and Peter Bathurst t'other night carried a servant of the
+latter's, who had attempted to shoot him, before Fielding; who, to all
+his other vocations, has, by the grace of Mr Lyttelton, added that of
+Middlesex justice. He sent them word he was at supper, that they must
+come next morning. They did not understand that freedom, and ran up,
+where they found him banqueting with a blind man, a whore, and three
+Irishmen, on some cold mutton and a bone of ham, both in one dish, and
+the dirtiest cloth. He never stirred nor asked them to sit. Rigby, who
+had seen him so often come to beg a guinea of Sir C. Williams, and
+Bathurst, at whose father's he had lived for victuals, understood that
+dignity as little, and pulled themselves chairs; on which he civilised."
+
+The 'blind man' was doubtless the half brother later to be knighted for
+his distinguished public services, Sir John Fielding; and, adds Mr Austin
+Dobson, "it is extremely unlikely the lady so discourteously
+characterised could have been any other than his wife, who Lady Stuart
+tells us 'had few personal charms.' There remain the 'three Irishmen' who
+may, or may not, have been perfectly presentable members of society. At
+all events, their mere nationality, so rapidly decided upon, cannot be
+regarded as a stigma." Bearing in mind, on the one hand, our knowledge of
+Fielding as he reveals himself in his own pages, and in his friendships,
+and on the other the character earned by Horace Walpole's pen, it seems
+matter for doubt whether this 'anecdote' deserves even a place in an
+appendix.
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX E
+
+_Fielding's Will_
+
+Fielding's will was discovered in the Prerogative Court of Canterbury, by
+Mr G. A. Aitken. It is undated:--
+
+IN THE NAME OF GOD AMEN--I HENRY FIELDING of the parish of Ealing in the
+County of Middlesex do hereby give and bequeath unto Ralph Allen of Prior
+Park in the County of Somerset Esqr and to his heirs executors
+administrators and assigns for ever to the use of the said Ralph his
+heirs &c all my Estate real and personal wheresoever and whatsoever and
+do appoint him sole EXECUTOR of this my last Will--Beseeching him that
+the whole (except my shares in the Register Office) may be sold and
+forthwith converted into Money and Annuities purchased thereout for the
+lives of my dear Wife Mary and my daughters Harriet and Sophia and what
+proportions my said Executor shall please to reserve to my sons William
+and Allen shall be paid them severally as they shall attain the age of
+twenty and three And as for my Shares in the Register or Universal
+Register Office I give ten thereof to my aforesaid Wife seven to my
+Daughter Harriet and three to my daughter Sophia my Wife to be put in
+immediate possession of her shares and my Daughters of theirs as they
+shall severally arrive at the Age of 21 the immediate Profits to be then
+likewise paid to my two Daughters by my Executor who is desired to retain
+the same in his Hands until that time--Witness my Hand--HENRY
+FIELDING--Signed and acknowledged as his last Will and Testament by the
+within named Testator in the presence of--MARGARET COLLIER--RICHD
+BOOR--ISABELLA ASH--
+
+Proved 14th November 1754.
+
+Extracted from the Principal Registry of the Probate Divorce and
+Admiralty Division of the High Court of Justice
+
+In the Prerogative Court of Canterbury
+
+November 1754
+
+HENRY FIELDING Esquire--On the fourteenth day Administration (with the
+Will annexed) of the Goods Chattels and Credits of Henry Fielding late of
+Ealing in the County of Middlesex but at Lisbon in the Kingdom of
+Portugal Esquire deceased was granted to John Fielding Esquire the Uncle
+and Curator or Guardian lawfully assigned to Harriet Fielding Spinster a
+Minor and Sophia Fielding an Infant the natural and lawfull Daughters of
+the said Deceased and two of the Residuary Legatees named in the said
+Will for the use and benefit of the said Minor and Infant and until one
+of them shall attain the age of twenty one years for that Ralph Allen
+Esquire the sole Executor and Residuary Legatee in Trust named in the
+said Will hath renounced as well the Execution thereof as Letters of
+Administration (with the said Will annexed) of the Goods Chattels and
+Credits of the said deceased and Mary Fielding Widow the Relict of the
+said deceased and the other Residuary Legatee named in the said Will hath
+also renounced Letters of Administration (with the said Will annexed) of
+the Goods Chattels and Credits of the said deceased--the said John
+Fielding having been first sworn duly to administer.
+
+In addition to the property mentioned here, Fielding possessed a library,
+as Mr Austin Dobson discovered, [1] which when sold six months after his
+death, "for the Benefit of his Wife and Family," realised £364, 7s. 1d. or
+"about £100 more than the public gave in 1785 for the books of Johnson."
+[2] Also according to the _Recollections of the Late John Adolphus_, by
+Henderson, Fielding purchased a 90 years' lease of a house near
+Canterbury, for one of his daughters.
+
+Of the children mentioned in this will, William became, a contemporary
+writer tells us, "an eminent barrister at law and inherits the integrity
+of his father and a large share of his brilliant talents." [3] Mr Austin
+Dobson refers to William Fielding as being like his father "a strenuous
+advocate of the poor and unfortunate," and adds that the obituary notice
+in the _Gentleman's Magazine_ records his worth and piety. [4] Harriet
+Fielding is said to have been of "a sweet temper and great understanding."
+[5] Allen Fielding became Vicar of St. Stephens Canterbury, and was
+"greatly beloved by all, especially the little children," writes a
+descendant. Allen Fielding's four sons all took Orders, and of the second,
+Charles, it was written on his death, that "he had not only a heart that
+could feel for others, but a heart that lived in giving." [6] The noble
+qualities of Henry Fielding found their echo in his descendants.
+
+[1] Austin Dobson. _Fielding_. Appendix IV. p. 212-13; _and Eighteenth
+Century Vignettes_, 1896, pp. 164-178.
+
+[2] Austin Dobson. _Fielding_. Appendix IV. p. 212-13; _and Eighteenth
+Century Vignettes_, 1896, pp. 164-178.
+
+[3] J. Nichols. _History and Antiquities of Leicestershire_. 1810. Vol.
+iv. Pt. I. p. 594.
+
+[4] Austin Dobson. _Fielding_, p. 192.
+
+[5] T. Whitehead. _Original Anecdotes of the late Duke of Kingston_, 1795.
+p. 95.
+
+[6] _Some Hapsburghs, Fieldings, Denbighs and Desmonds_, by J. E. M. F.
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX F
+
+_Fielding's Tomb and Epitaph_
+
+Fielding's present tomb, in the beautiful English cemetery at Lisbon, was
+erected in 1830. On one side is inscribed:
+
+    LUGET BRITANNIA GREMIO NON DARI
+    FOVERE NATUM
+
+On the other side are the following lines:
+
+    Henrici Fielding
+    A Somersetensibus apud Glastoniam oriundi
+    Viri summo ingenio
+    en quae restant:
+    Stylo quo non alius unquam
+    Intima qui potuit cordis reserare mores hominum excolendos
+    suscepit
+    Virtuti decorum, vitio foeditatem asseruit, suum cuique tribuens;
+    Non quin ipse subinde irritaretur evitandis
+    Ardensin amicitia, in miseria sublevanda effusus
+    Hilaris urbanus et conjux et pater adamantus.
+    Aliis non sibi vixit
+    Vixit sed mortem victricem vincit dum natura durat dum saecula
+    currunt
+    Naturae prolem scriptis prae se ferens
+    Suam et sua genlis extendet famam. [1]
+
+[1] _Somerset and Dorset Notes and Queries_. Vol. viii. p. 353.
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX G
+
+_Fielding's posthumous play "The Fathers"_
+
+Fielding's play _The Fathers_ or _The Good-natured Man_ seems to have been
+lost (apparently after being submitted to Sir Charles Hanbury Williams)
+till twenty years after Fielding's death. It was discovered by M'r Johnes,
+M.P. for Cardigan, in 1775, or 1776, who sent it to Garrick. Garrick
+recognised it as "Harry Fielding's Comedy"; and, after revision, it was
+produced at Drury Lane on November 30, 1778. Garrick not only appeared in
+the cast, but also wrote both prologue and epilogue. A note, in the
+Morrison Manuscripts, from Garrick to D'r John Hoadley, dated January 3,
+1776, concludes thus "We have found the lost sheep, Henry Fielding's Good
+Natured Man which was mislaid near twenty years." [1] In the following
+pleasant letter Sir John Fielding commends Mrs Fielding's Benefit night to
+Dr Hunter.
+
+"Sir John Fielding presents his compliments to Dr. Hunter, and acquaints
+him that the Comedy of 'The Good-natured Man' written by the late Mr.
+Henry Fielding will be performed at Drury Lane next Monday being the
+Author's Widow's night.
+
+"He was your old and sincere friend. There are no other of his Works left
+unpublished. This is the last opportunity you will have of shewing any
+respect to his Memory as a Genius, so that I hope you will send all your
+Pupils, all your Patients, all your Friends, & everybody else to the Play
+that Night, by which Means you will indulge your benevolent feelings and
+your Sentiments of Friendship. [2]
+
+"Bow Street, Dec'r 4, 1778."
+
+[1] Morrison Manuscripts. Catalogue.
+
+[2] _The Athenaeum_. February 1. 1890.
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX H
+
+_Undated Accounts of Fielding at Salisbury and at Barnes_
+
+Research has so far failed to identify the period of Fielding's
+traditional residence in Salisbury. According to the following passage in
+_Old and New Sarum or Salisbury_, by R. Benson and H. Hatcher, 1843, he
+occupied three houses in or near Salisbury. "It is well known that
+Fielding the Novelist married a lady of Salisbury named Craddock [sic] and
+was for a time resident in our City. From tradition we learn that he first
+occupied the house in the Close at the south side of St Anne's Gate. He
+afterwards removed to that in St Anne's Street next to the Friary; and
+finally established himself in the Mansion at the foot of Milford Hill,
+where he wrote a considerable portion of his _Tom Jones_." [1]
+
+Fielding's residence in Barnes is no less illusive. The following passage
+occurs in the edition of 1795 of _Lyson's Environs of London_: "Henry
+Fielding, the celebrated Novelist, resided at Barnes, in the house which
+is now the property of Mr Partington." [2] In the edition of 1811 the
+house is described as "now the property of Mrs Stanton, widow of the late
+Admiral Stanton." [3] In Manning and Bray's _Surrey_ the name of the house
+is given: "On Barnes Green is a very old house called Milbourne House....
+It was once the residence of Henry Fielding the celebrated novel writer.
+The widow of Admiral Stanton is the present owner of this house." [4] The
+Barnes Rate-books appear to throw no light on the date of Fielding's
+residence at Milbourne House. It is noteworthy that both the Barnes and
+Salisbury statements indicate a man of some means, living as befitted a
+Fielding.
+
+[1] _History of Wiltshire_. Sir R. C. Hoare; volume entitled "Old and New
+Sarum or Salisbury," by R. Benson and H. Hatcher, 1843. p 602.
+
+[2] Lysons. _Environs of London_, edition of 1795. Vol. i. part iii. p.
+544.
+
+[3] _Ibid_. Edition 1811. Vol. i. p. 10.
+
+[4] Manning and Bray. _History of Surrey_, 1814, vol. iii. p. 316.
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX I
+
+_An undated letter of Fieldings to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu_
+
+The following undated letter is printed in _The Letters and Works of
+Lady Mary Wortley Montagu_ edited by Lord Wharncliffe and W. M.
+Thomas. Lord Wharncliffe includes it with the letters from originals
+among the Wortley papers. [1]
+
+
+Wednesday evening
+
+Madam,--I have presumed to send your ladyship a copy of the play which
+you did me the honour of reading three acts of last spring, and hope it
+may meet as light a censure from your ladyship's judgment as then; for
+while your goodness permits me (what I esteem the greatest, and indeed
+only happiness of my life) to offer my unworthy performances to your
+perusal, it will be entirely from your sentence that they will be
+regarded, or disesteemed by me. I shall do myself the honour of calling
+at your ladyship's door to-morrow at eleven, which, if it be an improper
+hour, I beg to know from your servant what other time will be more
+convenient. I am with the greatest respect and gratitude, madam,
+
+Your ladyship's most obedient, most devoted humble servant.
+
+[1] Letters and Works of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, edited by Lord
+Wharncliffe and W. M. Thomas. Vol. ii. p. 3, note I, and p. 22.
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX J
+
+FIELDING'S _Tom Thumb_
+
+This play appears to have carried some political significance in
+Fielding's day; if it was not, indeed, written with a political intention.
+This may be gathered from an article in the _Daily Post_ of March 29,
+1742, apropos of a performance of the _Tragedy of Tragedies_, that night,
+at Drury Lane. The article attributes, in detail, political intentions to
+the _Tragedy_--"a Piece at first calculated to ridicule some particular
+Persons and Affairs in Europe (at the Time it was writ) but more
+especially in this Island."
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Henry Fielding: A Memoir, by G. M. Godden
+
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+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Henry Fielding: A Memoir, by G. M. Godden
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
+other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
+whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of
+the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
+www.gutenberg.org.  If you are not located in the United States, you'll have
+to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook.
+
+Title: Henry Fielding: A Memoir
+
+Author: G. M. Godden
+
+Posting Date: February 21, 2015 [EBook #8136]
+Release Date: May, 2005
+First Posted: June 17, 2003
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HENRY FIELDING: A MEMOIR ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Charles Aldarondo, Tiffany Vergon, Robert
+Connal and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
+
+
+
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+</pre>
+
+
+<p class="centered"><a name="i336"><img src="images/336.jpg" alt=
+"Henry Fielding" width="399" height="500"></a></p>
+
+<h1>HENRY FIELDING</h1>
+
+<h2><em>A MEMOIR</em><br>
+INCLUDING NEWLY DISCOVERED LETTERS<br>
+AND RECORDS WITH ILLUSTRATIONS<br>
+FROM CONTEMPORARY PRINTS</h2>
+
+<p><br>
+</p>
+
+<h2>BY</h2>
+
+<h2>G. M. GODDEN</h2>
+
+<p><br>
+</p>
+
+<p class="quoted">"I am a man myself, and my heart is interested in
+whatever can befall the rest of mankind."<br>
+ JOSEPH ANDREWS.</p>
+
+<h2>PREFACE</h2>
+
+<p>New material alone could justify any attempt to supplement the
+<em>Fielding</em> of Mr Austin Dobson. Such material has now come
+to light, and together with reliable facts collected by previous
+biographers, forms the subject matter of the present volume. As
+these pages are concerned with Fielding the man, and not only with
+Fielding the most original if not the greatest of English
+novelists, literary criticism has been avoided; but all incidents,
+disclosed by hitherto unpublished documents, or found hidden in the
+columns of contemporary newspapers, which add to our knowledge of
+Fielding's personality, have been given.</p>
+
+<p>The new material includes records of Fielding's childhood;
+documents concerning his estate in Dorsetshire; the date and place,
+hitherto undiscovered, of that central event in his life, the death
+of his beloved wife, whose memorial was to be the imperishable
+figure of "Sophia Western"; letters, now first published, adding to
+our knowledge of his energies in social and legislative reform, and
+of the circumstances of his life; many extracts from the columns of
+the daily press of the period; notices, hitherto overlooked, from
+his contemporaries; and details from the unexplored archives of the
+Middlesex Records concerning his strenuous work as a London
+magistrate. The few letters by Fielding already known to exist have
+been doubled in number; and a reason for the extraordinary rarity
+of these letters has been found in the unfortunate destruction,
+many years ago, of much of his correspondence. The charm of the one
+intimate letter that we possess from the pen of the 'Father of the
+English Novel,' that written to his brother John, during the voyage
+to Lisbon, enhances regret at the loss of these letters.</p>
+
+<p>Among the contemporary prints now first reproduced that entitled
+the <em>Conjurors</em> is of special interest, as being the only
+sketch of Fielding, drawn during his lifetime, known to exist.
+Rough as it is, the characteristic figure of the man, as described
+by his contemporaries and drawn from memory in Hogarth's familiar
+plate, is perfectly apparent. The same characteristics may be
+distinguished in a small figure of the novelist introduced into the
+still earlier political cartoon, entitled the <em>Funeral of
+Faction</em>.</p>
+
+<p>Such in brief are the reasons for the existence of this volume.
+It remains to express my warmest acknowledgment of Mr Austin
+Dobson's unfailing counsel and assistance. My thanks are also due
+to Mr Ernest Fielding for permission to reproduce the miniature
+which appears as the frontispiece; to Mr Aubrey Court, of the House
+of Lords; to Mr E. S. W. Hart, for his help throughout the
+necessary researches among the Middlesex Records; to Mrs Deane of
+Gillingham; and to Mr Frederick Shum of Bath. And I am indebted to
+Mr Sidney Colvin, Keeper of the Department of Prints and Drawings
+in the British Museum, in regard to almost every one of the
+thirty-two rare prints and cartoons now reproduced.</p>
+
+<p>G. M. GODDEN.</p>
+
+<p><em>October</em> 26, 1909.</p>
+
+<h2>CONTENTS</h2>
+
+<p><a href="#chapter1">CHAPTER I</a><br>
+YOUTH</p>
+
+<p><a href="#chapter2">CHAPTER II</a><br>
+PLAY-HOUSE BARD</p>
+
+<p><a href="#chapter3">CHAPTER III</a><br>
+MARRIAGE</p>
+
+<p><a href="#chapter4">CHAPTER IV</a><br>
+POLITICAL PLAYS</p>
+
+<p><a href="#chapter5">CHAPTER V</a><br>
+HOMESPUN DRAMA</p>
+
+<p><a href="#chapter6">CHAPTER VI</a><br>
+BAR STUDENT--JOURNALIST</p>
+
+<p><a href="#chapter7">CHAPTER VII</a><br>
+COUNSELLOR FIELDING</p>
+
+<p><a href="#chapter8">CHAPTER VIII</a><br>
+<em>Joseph Andrews</em></p>
+
+<p><a href="#chapter9">CHAPTER IX</a><br>
+THE <em>Miscellanies</em> AND <em>Jonathan Wild</em></p>
+
+<p><a href="#chapter10">CHAPTER X</a><br>
+PATRIOTIC JOURNALISM</p>
+
+<p><a href="#chapter11">CHAPTER XI</a><br>
+<em>Tom Jones</em></p>
+
+<p><a href="#chapter12">CHAPTER XII</a><br>
+MR JUSTICE FIELDING</p>
+
+<p><a href="#chapter13">CHAPTER XIII</a><br>
+FIELDING AND LEGISLATION</p>
+
+<p><a href="#chapter14">CHAPTER XIV</a><br>
+<em>Amelia</em></p>
+
+<p><a href="#chapter15">CHAPTER XV</a><br>
+JOURNALIST AND MAGISTRATE</p>
+
+<p><a href="#chapter16">CHAPTER XVI</a><br>
+POOR LAW REFORM</p>
+
+<p><a href="#chapter17">CHAPTER XVII</a><br>
+VOYAGE TO LISBON--DEATH</p>
+
+<h2>LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS</h2>
+
+<p><em>From photographs by Marie Léon</em>.</p>
+
+<p><a href="#i336">Henry Fielding</a><br>
+<em>From a miniature now in the possession of Mr Ernest
+Fielding.</em></p>
+
+<p><a href="#i340">Sharpham House, showing the room in which
+Fielding was born</a><br>
+<em>from a print published in 1826</em>.</p>
+
+<p><a href="#i370">Sir Henry Gould</a><br>
+<em>From a mezzotint by J. Hardy</em>.</p>
+
+<p><a href="#i341">Eton--1742</a><br>
+<em>From an engraving of a drawing by Cozens</em>.</p>
+
+<p><a href="#i342">Anne Oldfield</a><br>
+<em>From a mezzotint of a painting by J. Richardson</em>.</p>
+
+<p><a href="#i337">Leyden--1727</a><br>
+<em>From an engraving of a drawing by C. Pronk</em>.</p>
+
+<p><a href="#i339">Kitty Clive as Philida</a><br>
+<em>From a mezzotint of a painting by Veter van Bleeck, junr.
+1735.</em></p>
+
+<p><a href="#i338">Frontispiece to Fielding's "Tom Thumb"</a><br>
+<em>By Hogarth</em>.</p>
+
+<p><a href="#i344">The Close, Salisbury--1798</a><br>
+<em>From an acquatint of a drawing by E. Dayes</em>.</p>
+
+<p><a href="#i343">Charlcombe Church, near Bath</a><br>
+<em>From an engraving of a drawing made in 1784</em>.</p>
+
+<p><a href="#i345">Fielding's house, East Stour,
+Dorsetshire</a><br>
+<em>From a print published in Hutchins' "History of Dorsetshire,"
+1813</em>.</p>
+
+<p><a href="#i346">Sir Robert Walpole--1740</a><br>
+<em>From a contemporary cartoon</em>.</p>
+
+<p><a href="#i347">"Pasquin"</a><br>
+<em>From a cartoon depicting a scene in "Pasquin" in which
+Harlequinades, etc., triumph aver legitimate drama. Pope is leaving
+a box. The Signature "W. Hogarth" is doubtful</em>.</p>
+
+<p><a href="#i348">Cartoon celebrating the success of
+"Pasquin"</a><br>
+<em>From a contemporary cartoon showing Fielding, supported by
+Shakespeare, receiving an ample reward, while to Harlequin and his
+other opponents is accorded a halter</em>.</p>
+
+<p><a href="#i349">The Little Theatre in the Haymarket</a><br>
+<em>From an engraving by Dale, showing the demolition of the Little
+Theatre in 1821</em>.</p>
+
+<p><a href="#i350">The Green Room, Drury Lane</a><br>
+<em>From the painting by Hogarth, in the possession of Sir Edward
+Tennant</em>.</p>
+
+<p><a href="#i351">The Temple--1738</a><br>
+<em>From an engraving of a drawing by J. Nicholas</em>.</p>
+
+<p><a href="#i352">Henry Fielding holding the Banner of the
+"Champion" newspaper</a><br>
+<em>From a contemporary cartoon showing Sir Robert Walpole laughing
+at the "Funeral" of an Opposition Motion in Parliament</em>.</p>
+
+<p><a href="#i353">Cartoon showing Fielding, in Wig and Gown, as a
+supporter of the Opposition</a><br>
+<em>From a print of 1741</em>.</p>
+
+<p><a href="#i354">Henry Fielding reading at the Bedford
+Arms</a><br>
+<em>From the frontispiece to Sir John Fielding's "Jests."</em></p>
+
+<p><a href="#i355">Assignment for "Joseph Andrews"</a><br>
+<em>From the autograph now in the South Kensington Museum</em>.</p>
+
+<p><a href="#i356">Beaufort Buildings, Strand, in 1725</a><br>
+<em>From a watercolour drawing by Paul Sandby, 1725</em>.</p>
+
+<p><a href="#i357">Prior Park, near Bath, the seat of Ralph Allen,
+1750</a><br>
+<em>From an engraving of a contemporary drawing</em>.</p>
+
+<p><a href="#i359">George, First Baron Lyttelton</a><br>
+<em>From a portrait by an unknown artist</em>.</p>
+
+<p><a href="#i369">Theatre Ticket for Fielding's "Mock
+Doctor"</a><br>
+<em>The signature "W. Hogarth" is doubtful</em>.</p>
+
+<p><a href="#i358">Lady Mary Wortley Montagu--1710</a><br>
+<em>From an engraving by Caroline Watson, from a miniature in the
+possession of the Marquis of Bute</em>.</p>
+
+<p><a href="#i360">The Bow Street Police Court, Sir John Fielding
+presiding</a><br>
+<em>From the "Newgate Calendar"</em>, 1795.</p>
+
+<p><a href="#i361">Edward Moore</a><br>
+<em>From a frontispiece in Chalmers' "British Essayists"</em>
+1817.</p>
+
+<p><a href="#i362">Sir John Fielding</a><br>
+<em>From a mezzotint of a painting by Nathaniel Hone, R.A.</em></p>
+
+<p><a href="#i363">Ralph Allen</a><br>
+<em>From a chalk drawing by W. Hoare, R.A.</em></p>
+
+<p><a href="#i364">Henry Fielding</a><br>
+<em>From an engraving of a pen and ink sketch, made by Hogarth
+after Fielding's death</em>.</p>
+
+<p><a href="#i365">Henry Fielding, defending Betty Canning from her
+accusers, the Lord Mayor, Dr Hill, and the Gipsy</a><br>
+<em>From a contemporary print, now first reproduced, and the only
+known sketch of Fielding made during his lifetime</em>.</p>
+
+<p><a href="#i366">Justice Saunders Welch</a><br>
+<em>From an engraving of a sketch by Hogarth</em>.</p>
+
+<p><a href="#i367">Ryde--1795</a><br>
+<em>From an engraving of a drawing by Charles Tomkins</em>.</p>
+
+<p><a href="#i368">Lisbon--1793</a><br>
+<em>From a mezzotint of a drawing by Noel</em>.</p>
+
+<p>The design on the cover is a copy, slightly enlarged, of an
+impression of Fielding's seal, attached to an autograph letter in
+the British Museum.</p>
+
+<h1>HENRY FIELDING</h1>
+
+<h2><a name="chapter1"></a>CHAPTER I<br>
+<br>
+YOUTH</h2>
+
+<p class="quoted">"I shall always be so great a pedant as to call a
+man of no learning a man of no education."<br>
+ &nbsp;&nbsp;--<em>Amelia</em>.</p>
+
+<p>Henry Fielding was born at Sharpham Park, near Glastonbury, on
+the 22nd of April 1707. His birth-room, a room known as the
+Harlequin Chamber, looked out over the roof of a building which
+once was the private chapel of the abbots of Glastonbury; for
+Sharpham Park possessed no mean history. Built in the sixteenth
+century by that distinguished prelate, scholar, and courtier Abbot
+Richard Beere, the house had boasted its chapel, hall, parlour,
+chambers, storehouses and offices; its fishponds and orchards; and
+a park in which might be kept some four hundred head of deer. It
+was in this fair demesne that the aged, pious, and benevolent Abbot
+Whiting, Abbot Richard's successor, was seized by the king's
+commissioners, and summarily hung, drawn, and quartered on the top
+of the neighbouring Tor Hill. Sharpham thereupon "devolved" upon
+the crown; but the old house remained, standing in peaceful
+seclusion where the pleasant slope of Polden Hill overlooks the
+Somersetshire moors, till the birth of the 'father of the English
+Novel' brought a lasting distinction to the domestic buildings of
+Abbot Beere. In the accompanying print, published in 1826, the
+little window of the Harlequin Chamber may be seen, above the low
+roofs of the abbots' chapel.</p>
+
+<p class="centered"><a name="i340"><img src="images/340.jpg" alt=
+"Sharpham House, showing the room in which Fielding was born"
+width="577" height="500"></a></p>
+
+<p>That Henry Fielding should have been born among buildings raised
+by Benedictine hands is not incongruous; for no man ever more
+heartily preached and practised the virtue of open-handed charity;
+none was more ready to scourge the vices of arrogance, cruelty and
+avarice; no English novelist has left us brighter pictures of
+innocence and goodness. And it was surely a happy stroke of that
+capricious Fortune to whom Fielding so often refers, to allot a
+Harlequin Chamber for the birth of the author of nineteen comedies;
+and yet more appropriate to the robust genius of the Comic Epic was
+the accident that placed on the wall, beneath the window of his
+birth-room, a jovial jest in stone. For here some sixteenth-century
+humorist had displayed the arms of Abbot Beere in the form of a
+convivial rebus or riddle--to wit, a cross and two beer
+flagons.</p>
+
+<p>Soon after the Civil Wars, Sharpham passed into the hands of the
+'respectable family' of Gould. By the Goulds the house was
+considerably enlarged; and, at the beginning of the eighteenth
+century, was in the possession of a distinguished member of the
+family, Sir Henry Gould, Knight, and Judge of the King's Bench. Sir
+Henry had but two children, a son Davidge Gould, and a daughter
+Sarah. This only daughter married a well-born young soldier, the
+Hon. Edmund Fielding; a marriage which, according to family
+assertions, was without the consent of her parents and "contrary to
+their good <a name="fnref1-1">likeing</a>." <a class="footnote"
+href="#fn1-1">1</a> And it was in the old home of the Somersetshire
+Goulds that the eldest son of this marriage, Henry Fielding, was
+born.</p>
+
+<p>Thus on the side of his mother, Sarah Gould, Fielding belonged
+to just that class of well-established country squires whom later
+he was to immortalise in the beautiful and benevolent figure of
+Squire Allworthy, and in the boisterous, brutal, honest Western.
+And the description of Squire Allworthy's "venerable" house, with
+its air of grandeur "that struck you with awe," its position on the
+sheltered slope of a hill enjoying "a most charming prospect of the
+valley beneath," its surroundings of a wild and beautiful park,
+well-watered meadows fed with sheep, the ivy-grown ruins of an old
+abbey, and far-off hills and sea, preserves, doubtless, the
+features of the ancient and stately domain owned by the novelist's
+grandfather.</p>
+
+<p>If it was to the 'respectable' Goulds that Fielding owed many of
+his rural and administrative characteristics, such as that
+practical zeal and ability which made him so excellent a
+magistrate, it is in the family of his father that we find
+indications of those especial qualities of vigour, of courage, of
+the generous and tolerant outlook of the well-born man of the
+world, that characterise Henry Fielding. And it is also in these
+Fielding ancestors that something of the reputed wildness of their
+brilliant kinsman may be detected.</p>
+
+<p>For in her wilful choice of Edmund Fielding for a husband, Sir
+Henry Gould's only daughter brought, assuredly, a disturbing
+element into the quiet Somersetshire home. The young man was of
+distinguished birth, even if he was not, as once asserted, of the
+blood royal of <a name="fnref1-2">the</a> Hapsburgs. <a class=
+"footnote" href="#fn1-2">2</a> His ancestor, Sir John Fielding, had
+received a knighthood for bravery in the French wars of the
+fourteenth century. A Sir Everard Fielding led a Lancastrian army
+during the Wars of the Roses. Sir William, created Earl of Denbigh,
+fell fighting for the king in the Civil Wars, where, says
+Clarendon, "he engaged with singular courage in all enterprises of
+danger"; a phrase which recalls the description of Henry Fielding
+"that difficulties only roused him to struggle through them with a
+peculiar spirit and magnanimity." Lord Denbigh fell, covered with
+wounds, when fighting as a volunteer in Prince Rupert's troop;
+while his eldest son, Basil, then a mere youth, fought as hotly for
+the Parliament. Lord Denbigh's second son, who like his father was
+a devoted loyalist, received a peerage, being created Earl of
+Desmond; and two of his sons figure in a wild and tragic story
+preserved by Pepys. "In our street," says the Diarist, writing in
+1667, "at the Three Tuns Tavern I find a great hubbub; and what was
+it but two brothers had fallen out and one killed the other. And
+who s'd. they be but the two Fieldings; one whereof, Bazill, was
+page to my Lady Sandwich; and he hath killed the other, himself
+being very drunk, and so is sent to Newgate." It was a brother of
+these unhappy youths, John Fielding, a royal chaplain and Canon of
+Salisbury, who by his marriage with a Somersetshire lady, became
+father of Edmund Fielding.</p>
+
+<p>Such was Henry Fielding's ancestry, and it cannot be too much
+insisted on that, throughout all the vicissitudes of his life, he
+was ever a man of breeding, no less than a man of wit. "His manners
+were so gentlemanly," said his friend Mrs Hussey, "that even with
+the lower classes with which he frequently condescended to chat,
+such as Sir Roger de Coverley's old friends, the Vauxhall watermen,
+they seldom outstepped the limits of propriety." And a similar
+recognition comes from the hand of a great, and not too friendly,
+critic. To "the very last days of his life," wrote Thackeray, "he
+retained a grandeur of air, and although worn down by disease his
+aspect and presence imposed respect on the people around him."</p>
+
+<p>This Denbigh ancestry recalls a pleasant example of Fielding's
+wit, preserved in a story told by his son, and recorded in the
+pages of that voluminous eighteenth-century anecdotist, John
+Nichols. "Henry Fielding," says Nichols, "being once in company
+with the Earl of Denbigh, and the conversation's turning on
+Fielding's being of the Denbigh family, the Earl asked the reason
+why they spelt their names differently; the Earl's family doing it
+with the E first (Feilding), and Mr Henry Fielding with the I first
+(Fielding). 'I cannot tell, my Lord,' answered Harry, 'except it be
+that my branch of the family were the first that knew how to
+spell.'"</p>
+
+<p>In accordance with the fighting traditions of his race, Edmund
+Fielding went into the army; his name appearing as an ensign in the
+1st Foot Guards. Also, as became a Fielding, he distinguished
+himself, we are told, in the "Wars against France with much Bravery
+and Reputation"; and it was probably owing to active service abroad
+that the birth of his eldest son took place in his wife's old
+Somersetshire home. The date fits in well enough with the campaigns
+of Ramilies, Oudennarde and Malplaquet. Soon after Henry's birth,
+however, his father had doubtless left the Low Countries, for,
+about 1709, he appears as purchasing the colonelcy of an Irish
+Regiment. This regiment was ordered, in 1710, to Spain; but before
+that year the colonel and his wife and son had a separate home
+provided for them, by the care of Sir Henry Gould. At what precise
+date is uncertain, but some time before 1710, Sir Henry had
+purchased an estate at East Stour in Dorsetshire, consisting of
+farms and lands of the value of £4750, intending to settle some or
+the whole of the same on his daughter and her children. And
+already, according to a statement by the colonel, the old judge had
+placed his son-in-law in possession of some or all of this
+purchase, sending him oxen to plough his ground, and promising him
+a "Dairye of Cows." Sir Henry moreover had, said his son-in-law,
+declared his intention "to spend the vacant Remainder of his life,"
+sometimes with his daughter, her husband, and children at Stour,
+and sometimes with his son Davidge, presumably at Sharpham. But in
+March, 1710, Sir Henry's death frustrated his planned retirement in
+the Vale of Stour; although three years later, in 1713, his
+intentions regarding a Dorsetshire home for his daughter were
+carried out by the <a name="fnref1-3">conveyance</a> to her <a
+class="footnote" href="#fn1-3">3</a> and her children of the Stour
+estate, for her sole enjoyment. The legal documents are careful to
+recite that the rents and profits should be paid to Mrs Fielding or
+her children, and her receipt given, and that the said Edmund
+"should have nothing to do nor intermeddle therewith."</p>
+
+<p>In this settlement of the East Stour farms, to the greater part
+of which Henry Fielding, then six years old, would be joint heir
+with his sisters, Colonel Fielding himself seems to have had to pay
+no less than £1750, receiving therefor "a portion of the said
+lands." So by 1713 both Edmund Fielding and his wife were settled,
+as no inconsiderable landowners, among the pleasant meadows of
+Stour; and there for the next five years Henry's early childhood
+was passed. Indeed, Mrs Fielding must have been at Stour when her
+eldest son was but three years old, for the baptism of a daughter,
+Sarah, appears in the Stour registers in November 1710. This entry
+is followed by the baptism of Anne in 1713, of Beatrice in 1714, of
+Edmund in 1716, and by the death of Anne in the last-named year,
+Henry being then nine years old.</p>
+
+<p>According to Arthur Murphy, Fielding's earliest and too often
+inaccurate biographer, the boy received "the first rudiments of his
+education at home, under the care of the Revd. Mr Oliver." Mr
+Oliver was the curate of Motcombe, a neighbouring village; and we
+have the authority of Murphy and of Hutchins, the historian of
+Dorset, for finding 'a very humorous and striking portrait' of this
+pedagogue in the Rev. Mr Trulliber, the pig-breeding parson of
+<em>Joseph Andrews</em>. If this be so, Harry Fielding's first
+tutor at Stour was of a figure eminently calculated to foster the
+comic genius of his pupil. "He" (Trulliber), wrote that pupil, some
+thirty years later, "was indeed one of the largest Men you should
+see, and could have acted the part of Sir <em>John Falstaff</em>
+without stuffing. Add to this, that the Rotundity of his Belly was
+considerably increased by the shortness of his Stature, his shadow
+ascending very near as far in height when he lay on his Back, as
+when he stood on his Legs. His Voice was loud and hoarse, and his
+Accents extremely broad; to complete the whole he had a Stateliness
+in his Gait when he walked, not unlike that of a Goose, only he
+stalked slower." It appears that the widow of the Motcombe curate
+denied the alleged portrait; but the house where Mr Oliver lived,
+"seemed to accord with Fielding's description ... and an old woman
+who remembered him observed that 'he dearly loved a bit of good
+victuals, and a drop of drink.'" Bearing in mind the great
+novelist's own earnest declaration that he painted "not men but
+manners," we may fairly assume that his Dorsetshire tutor belonged
+to that class of coarse farmer-parson so justly satirised in the
+person of Trulliber. According to another sketch of Fielding's
+life, his early education was also directed by the rector of Stour
+Provost, "his <a name="fnref1-4">Parson</a> Adams."<a class=
+"footnote" href="#fn1-4">4</a></p>
+
+<p>While Harry Fielding was thus learning his first rudiments, his
+father, the colonel, seems to have been engaged in less useful
+pursuits in London. The nature of these pursuits appears from a
+<em>Bill of Complaint</em>, which by a happy chance has been
+preserved, between "Edmund Fielding of East Stour, Dorsetshire,"
+and one Robert Midford, pretending to be a captain of the army. <a
+name="fnref1-5">In</a> this <em>Bill</em> <a class="footnote" href=
+"#fn1-5">5</a> the said Edmund declares that in 1716, being then
+resident in London, he often frequented Princes Coffee-house in the
+Parish of St James. At Princes he found his company sought by the
+reputed Captain Robert Midford, who "prevailed upon him to play a
+game called 'Faro' for a small matter of diversion, but by degrees
+drew him on to play for larger sums, and by secret and fraudulent
+means obtained very large sums, in particular notes and bonds for
+£500." Further, the colonel entered into a bond of £200 to one Mrs
+Barbara Midford, "sister or pretended sister of the said Robert";
+and so finally was threatened with outlawry by 'Captain' Midford
+for, presumably, payment of these debts. How Colonel Edmund finally
+escaped from the clutches of these rogues does not appear; but it
+is clear enough that his Dorsetshire meadows were a safer place
+than Princes Coffee-house for a gentleman who could lose £500 at
+faro to a masquerading army captain. Also Sir Henry Gould's wisdom
+becomes apparent, in bequeathing his daughter an inheritance with
+which her husband was to have "nothing to doe."</p>
+
+<p>In 1718, two years after Colonel Fielding's experience at
+Princes, Mrs Fielding died, leaving six young children to her
+husband's care, two sons and four daughters, Henry, the eldest
+being but eleven years old. Her death is recorded in the East Stour
+registers as follows:--"Sarah, Wife of the Hon. Edmund Fielding
+Esqre. and daughter of Sir Henry Gould Kt. April 18 1718."</p>
+
+<p>About this time (the dates vary between 1716 and 1719) Edmund
+Fielding was appointed Colonel of the Invalids, an appointment
+which he appears to have held until his death. And within two years
+of the death of his first wife, Colonel Fielding must have married
+again, for in 1720 we find him and his then wife, <em>Anne</em>,
+selling some 153 acres with messuages, barns and gardens, in East
+and West Stour, to one Awnsham Churchill, Esquire. What relation,
+if any, this land had to the property of the colonel's late wife
+and her children does not appear.</p>
+
+<p>Some time in 1719, the year after his mother's death, or early
+in 1720, Henry was sent to Eton, as appears from his father's
+statement, made in February 1721, that his eldest son "who is now
+upwards of thirteen yeares old is and for more than a yeare last
+past hath been maintained ... at Eaton schoole, the yearely expence
+whereof costs ... upwards of £60." And the boy must have been well
+away from the atmosphere of his home, in these first years after
+his mother's death, if the allegations of his grandmother, old Lady
+Gould, may be believed.</p>
+
+<p class="centered"><a name="i370"><img src="images/370.jpg" alt=
+"Sir Henry Gould" width="354" height="500"></a></p>
+
+<p>These hitherto unknown records of Henry Fielding's boyhood are
+to be found in the proceedings of a Chancery suit begun by Lady
+Gould, on behalf of her six grandchildren, <a name=
+"fnref1-6">Henry</a>, Edmund, <a class="footnote" href=
+"#fn1-6">6</a> Katherine, Ursula, Sarah and Beatrice, three years
+after the death of their mother--namely, on the 10th of February
+1721, and instituted in the name of Henry Fielding as complainant.
+Lady Gould opens her grandchildren's case with a comprehensive
+indictment of her son-in-law. After reciting that her daughter
+Sarah had married Edmund Fielding "without the consent of her
+Father or Mother and contrary to their good likeing," Lady Gould
+mentions her husband's bequest to their daughter, Sarah Fielding,
+of £3000 in trust to be laid out in the purchase of lands for the
+benefit of her and her children "with direction that the said
+Edmund Fielding should have nothing to do nor intermeddle
+therewith." And how Sir Henry did in his lifetime purchase
+"Eastover" estate for his daughter, but died before the trust was
+completed; and that in 1713 his trustees, Edmund Fielding
+consenting, settled the said estate upon trust for Sarah Fielding
+and her children after her, the rents and profits to be paid for
+her, and acknowledged by her receipt "without her Husband." And
+that if Sarah Fielding died intestate the estate be divided among
+her children. The bill then shows that Sarah Fielding did die
+intestate; and that then Henry and his sisters and brother "being
+all Infants of tender years and uncapable of managing their own
+affairs and to take Care thereof, well hoped that ... their
+Trustees would have taken Care to receive the Rents of the said
+premises," and have applied the same for their maintenance and
+education. One of these trustees, we may note, was Henry Fielding's
+uncle, Davidge Gould. This reasonable hope of the six "Infants" was
+however, according to their grandmother, wholly disappointed. For
+their uncle Davidge and his co-trustee, one William Day, allowed
+Edmund Fielding to receive the rents, nay "entered into a
+Combination and Confederacy to and with the said Edmund Fielding,"
+refusing to intermeddle with the said trust, whereby the children
+were in great danger of losing their means of maintenance and
+education. And this was by no means all. Lady Gould proceeds to
+point out that her son-in-law had, since his wife's death,
+"intermarried with one ... Rapha ... Widow an Italian a Person of
+the Roman Catholick Profession who has severall children of her own
+and one who kept an eating House in London, and not at all fitt to
+have the care of [the complainants'] Education and has now two
+daughters in a Monastery beyond Sea." It is not difficult to
+conceive the attitude of Lady Gould of Sharpham Park to an Italian
+widow who kept an eating-house; but worse yet, in the view of those
+'No Popery' days, was to follow. "Not only so," says her ladyship,
+"the said Edmund Fielding ... threatens to take your [complainants]
+from school into his own custody altho' [their] said Grandmother
+has taken a House in the City of New Sarum with an intent to have
+[her granddaughters] under her Inspection and where ... Katherine,
+Ursula and Sarah are now at school"; and "the said Mr Fielding doth
+give out in speeches that he will do with [the complainants] what
+he thinks fitt, and has openly commended the Manner of Education of
+young persons in Monasteryes."</p>
+
+<p>This comprehensive indictment against Colonel Fielding received
+a prompt counter, the "Severall Answere of Edmund Fielding Esqre
+... to the Bill of Complaint of Henry Fielding, Katherine Fielding,
+Ursula Fielding, Sarah Fielding, and Beatrice Fielding, Infants, by
+Dame Sarah Gould, their Grandmother and next Friend," being dated
+February 23 1721, but thirteen days after Lady Gould had opened her
+attack. Out of "a dutiful Regard to the said Lady Gould his
+Mother-in-Law," Colonel Fielding declares himself unwilling to
+"Controvert anything with her further than of necessity." But he
+submits that, in the matter of his marriage, he was "afterwards
+well approved of and received" by Sir Henry Gould and his family;
+that he was also so happy as to be in favour with Lady Gould "till
+he marryed with his now wife"; which he believes "has Occasioned
+some Jealosye and Displeasure in the Lady Gould, tho' without Just
+Grounds." Edmund Fielding then draws a pastoral picture of himself
+in occupation of the East Stour estate, placed there by his
+father-in-law; of his oxen and dairy; and of the judge's intention
+of spending half the remainder of his days with his son-in-law on
+this Dorsetshire farm. He admits his share in the trust settlement
+after Sir Henry's death; and points out that his brother-in-law,
+Davidge Gould, made him pay heavily on a portion of the estate. And
+he believes that, as his wife died intestate, all his children are
+"Intituled to the said Estate in Equall proportions."</p>
+
+<p>Then follows the colonel's main defence. His eldest son Henry
+not being yet fourteen years of age, he has, ever since the death
+of his wife, continued in possession of the premises, taking the
+rents and profits thereof, which amount to about £150; and he
+positively declares that he has expended more annually on the
+maintenance and education of the said complainants, ever since the
+death of their mother, than the clear income of the said estate
+amounts to, and that he shall continue to take "a Tender and
+affectionate care of all his said Children." Further, he professes
+himself a "protestant of the Communion of the Church of England,"
+and asserts that he shall and will breed his said children
+Protestants of that communion. He protests that his second wife is
+not an Italian; nor did she keep an eating-house. He suggests that
+Lady Gould took her house at Salisbury "as well with an Intent to
+convenience herselfe by liveing in a Towne" as for the inspection
+of his children. He "denyeth that he ever Comended the Manner of
+Education of young persons in monasterys if it be meant in Respect
+of Religion." Finally, he says that he has spent much money on
+improving the estate; that the income from the estate is hardly
+sufficient to maintain his children according to their station in
+the world since he is "nearly related to many Noble Familys"; and
+he "veryly believes in his conscience he can better provide for his
+said Children by reason of his relation to and Interest in the said
+noble Familys than their said Grandmother (who is now in an
+advanced age, being seventy yeares old or thereabouts)."</p>
+
+<p>Here, it is plain, was a very pretty family quarrel. No man
+likes his mother-in-law to say that he has married the keeper of an
+Italian eating-house, especially if the fact is correct; or that he
+is perverting his young children's trust money. Neither was Lady
+Gould likely to be pacified by her son-in-law's remark that she was
+now "in an advanced age"; while his suggestion that his "noble"
+family would be of far more advantage to his children than that of
+the respectable Goulds would have the added sting of undeniable
+truth.</p>
+
+<p>The next extant move in the fray bears date five months later,
+July 18 1721, and includes a petition by 'Dame Sarah Gould' that
+the children be not removed from the places where they then were
+until the case be heard; and Lady Gould adds that if the children's
+persons or estates be "under ye management or power of ye said Mr
+Fielding and his now wife ye Estate would not be managed to ye best
+advantage and their Education would not be taken care of and there
+would be a great hazard that ye children might be perverted to ye
+Romish Religion." Then follows an order in Chancery, under the same
+date, "that ye eldest son of ye Defend't. Fielding ... be continued
+at Eaton School where he now is and that ye rest of ye children be
+continued where they now are."</p>
+
+<p>The next document merely records the inclusion of Henry's
+five-year-old brother Edmund among the plaintiffs. And this is
+followed by a brief Chancery order of November 30 1721, that "ye,
+plaintiff Henry Fielding who is not [<em>sic</em>] at Eaton Schoole
+be at liberty to go to ye said Dame Sarah Gould, his Grandmother
+and next friend during ye usual time of recess from School at
+Xmas."</p>
+
+<p>After these Christmas holidays spent by Henry Fielding with Lady
+Gould, doubtless at her house in Salisbury, the Chancery records
+pass on to the April following, 1722, when the boy's uncle and
+trustee Davidge Gould makes a statement "sworn at Sharpham Park,"
+which concludes that the witness hears and believes that Edmund
+Fielding "has already three children by his present wife who is
+reputed to be of the Romish church." In this same month comes
+another order from the court that Henry be at liberty to leave Eton
+for the Whitsun holidays 1722, and to go to Lady Gould's house. In
+May Edmund Fielding appears as "of the Parish of Saint James, in
+the County of Middlesex," and also as his children's "next Friend
+and Guardian." But two days later the long suit is concluded by the
+decision of the court, and here Colonel Fielding is, as heretofore,
+defendant, Lady Gould being the children's "next friend."</p>
+
+<p>The case came before the Lord Chancellor on the 28th of May
+1722, and was "debated in the presence of learned Counsels." The
+trust was upheld, and Edmund Fielding was required to deliver
+possession of the estate, rendering account of the rents and
+profits thereof since the death of his first wife; but he was to
+have "any and what" allowance for improvements, and for the
+children's maintenance and education. And it was further ordered
+that the children then at school continue at such schools till
+further order, and that "upon any breaking up at ye usuall times
+they do go and reside with ye Lady Gould their Grandmother that
+they may not be under the influence of ye Defendant Fielding's
+Wife, who appeared to be a <a name="fnref1-7">papist</a>." <a
+class="footnote" href="#fn1-7">7</a></p>
+
+<p>So Lady Gould, for all her seventy years, won her case at every
+point. And Colonel Edmund Fielding did not only lose the
+guardianship of his six children, and the administration of their
+estate. For there was, we learn, in court, during the hearing, one
+Mrs Cottington, the plaintiffs aunt, "alleadging that there was a
+debt of £700 due from ye Defendant Fielding to her"; which debt she
+offered should be applied for the benefit of her nephews and
+nieces. Whereupon the court ordered that if Mrs Cottington proved
+the same, a Master in Chancery should purchase therewith lands to
+be settled for the "Infants" in like manner as the trust
+estate.</p>
+
+<p>It may be only a coincidence, but £700 is the sum specifically
+mentioned in the proceedings brought by Colonel Fielding in October
+1722, five months after the loss of his Chancery suit, against the
+cardsharper, Robert Midford, who was then apparently threatening
+him with outlawry for the recovery of the gambling debt begun, as
+we have seen, at Princes' Coffee-house six years before. Had the
+colonel borrowed the £700 from Mrs Cottington, with intent to
+discharge those debts; and, on being brought to law by her (on her
+nephews' and nieces' behalf) for that debt, did it occur to him to
+escape from the clutches of the psuedo "Captain" Midford by
+pleading, as he now does in this Bill of 1722, that he "was
+tricked," and also "that gaming is illegal"? The latter plea has
+something of unconscious humour in the mouth of a gentleman who had
+lately lost £500 at faro. With this last echo of the coffee-house
+of St James's, and of the colonel's financial difficulties, that
+brave soldier, if somewhat reckless gambler, the Hon. Edmund
+Fielding vanishes from sight, as far as the life of his eldest son
+is concerned.</p>
+
+<p>At the triumphant conclusion of his grandmother's suit Henry
+Fielding would be just fifteen years of age, and it is impossible
+not to wonder what side he took in these spirited family conflicts.
+No evidence, however, on such points appears in the dry legal
+documents; and all that we have for guide as to the effect in this
+impressionable time of his boyhood of the long months of contest,
+and of his strictly ordered holidays with his grandmother, is the
+declaration on the one hand that "filial piety ... his nearest
+relations agree was a shining part of his character," and on the
+other, the undeniably strong Protestant bias that appears in his
+writing. Of his aunt, Mrs Cottington, we get one later glimpse,
+when in 1723 she is made his trustee, in place of his uncle,
+Davidge Gould, Mrs Cottington being then resident in Salisbury. At
+the end of the following year, however, in December 1724, Davidge
+Gould resumes his trusteeship, and with the record of that fact the
+disclosures yielded by these ancient parchments as to Henry
+Fielding's stormy boyhood come to an end.</p>
+
+<p>From these records it becomes possible to gain some idea of the
+surroundings of the great novelist's early youth. Before his
+mother's death, indeed, when he was a boy of eleven, we already
+knew him as suffering the rough jurisdiction of his Trulliberian
+tutor, Parson Oliver of Motcombe village, and perhaps as under the
+wise and kindly guidance of the good scholar-parson, who was later
+to win the affection and respect of thousands of readers under the
+name of "Parson Adams." But now, for the first time, we learn of
+the disastrous second marriage by which Colonel Fielding, within
+two years of his first wife's death, placed a lady of at least
+disputable social standing at the head of his household, and one,
+moreover, whose Faith roused the bitter religious animosities of
+that day. What wonder that the old Lady Gould strove fiercely to
+remove Henry Fielding, and his sisters and young brother, from East
+Stour, when a Madame Rasa was installed in her daughter's place.
+And accordingly, as we have seen, even before the conclusion of the
+suit, Henry was provisionally ordered by the Court of Chancery to
+spend his holidays with his grandmother. Fielding would then be
+fourteen years old; and the judge's decision six months later that
+future holidays should be passed with Lady Gould, away from the
+influence of the second Mrs Fielding, doubtless severed the lad's
+connection with his dubious stepmother for the next six years. His
+home life, then, during the latter part of his Eton schooling would
+be under Lady Gould's care; and was probably spent at
+Salisbury.</p>
+
+<p class="centered"><a name="i341"><img src="images/341.jpg" alt=
+"Eton--1742" width="671" height="500"></a></p>
+
+<p>Of his Eton life, from his entrance at the school, when twelve
+years old, we know practically nothing. From the absence of his
+name on the college lists, it may be inferred that he was an
+Oppidan. It is said that he gave "distinguished proofs of strong
+and peculiar parts"; and that he left the school with a good
+reputation as a classical scholar. And it is not surprising to
+learn that here, as he himself tells us, his vigorous energies made
+acquaintance with that 'birchen altar' at which most of the best
+blood in England has been disciplined. "And thou," he cries, "O
+Learning (for without thy Assistance nothing pure, nothing correct,
+can Genius produce) do thou guide my Pen. Thee, in thy favourite
+Fields, where the limpid gently rolling <em>Thames</em> washes thy
+<em>Etonian</em> banks, in early Youth I have worshipped. To thee
+at thy birchen Altar, with true <em>Spartan</em> Devotion, I have
+sacrificed my <a name="fnref1-8">Blood</a>." <a class="footnote"
+href="#fn1-8">8</a> That the sacrifice was not made in vain appears
+from the reputation with which Fielding left Eton of being
+"uncommonly versed in the Greek authors and an early master of the
+Latin classics"; and also from the yet better evidence of his own
+pages. Long after these boyish days we find him, in the words of
+"The man of the Hill," thus eloquently acknowledging the debt of
+humanity, and doubtless his own, to those inestimable treasures
+bequeathed to the world by ancient Greece: "These Authors, though
+they instructed me in no Science by which Men may promise to
+themselves to acquire the least Riches, or worldly Power, taught
+me, however, the Art of despising the highest Acquisitions of both.
+They elevate the Mind, and steel and harden it against the
+capricious Invasions of Fortune. They not only instruct in the
+Knowledge of Wisdom, but confirm Men in her Habits, and demonstrate
+plainly, that this must be our Guide, if we propose ever to arrive
+at the greatest worldly Happiness; or to defend ourselves, with any
+tolerable Security, against the Misery which everywhere surrounds
+and <a name="fnref1-9">invests</a> us." <a class="footnote" href=
+"#fn1-9">9</a> And that this was no mere figure of speech appears
+from that touching picture which Murphy has left us of the
+brilliant wit, the 'wild' Harry Fielding, when under the pressure
+of sickness and poverty, quietly reading the <em>De
+Consolations</em> of Cicero. His Plato accompanied him on the last
+sad voyage to Lisbon; and his library, when catalogued for sale on
+behalf of his widow and children, contained over one hundred and
+forty volumes of the Greek and Latin classics.</p>
+
+<p>Thus, supreme student and master as he was of "the vast
+authentic book of nature," there is abundant proof that Fielding
+fulfilled his own axiom that a "good share of learning" is
+necessary to the equipment of a novelist. Let the romance writer's
+natural parts be what they may, learning, he declared, "must fit
+them for use, must direct them in it, lastly must contribute part
+at least of the <a name="fnref1-10">materials</a>." <a class=
+"footnote" href="#fn1-10">10</a> Looking back on such utterances by
+the 'father of the English Novel,' written at the full height of
+his power, it is but natural to wonder if the boy's eager
+application to Greek and Latin drudgery had in it something of
+half-conscious preparation for the great part he was destined to
+play in the history of English literature.</p>
+
+<p>It is clear that Henry Fielding flung his characteristic
+energies zealously into the acquirement of the classical learning
+proffered him at Eton; but a fine scholarship, great possession
+though it be, was not the only gain of his Eton years. Here, says
+Murphy in his formal eighteenth-century phrasing, young Fielding
+had "the advantage of being early known to many of the first people
+in the kingdom, namely Lord Lyttelton, Mr Fox, Mr Pitt, Sir Charles
+Hanbury Williams, and the late Mr Winnington, etc."</p>
+
+<p>Of these companions at Eton, George Lyttelton, afterwards known
+as the "good Lord Lyttelton," statesman and orator, stands foremost
+by virtue of the generous warmth of a friendship continued
+throughout the novelist's chequered life. To Lyttelton <em>Tom
+Jones</em> was dedicated; it was his generosity, as generously
+acknowledged, that supplied Fielding, for a time, with the very
+means of subsistence; and to him was due the appointment,
+subsequently discharged with so much zealous labour, of Magistrate
+for Westminster and Middlesex. It is recorded that George
+Lyttelton's school exercises "were recommended as models to his
+schoolfellows." Another Eton friend, Thomas Winnington, made some
+figure in the Whig political world of the day; he was accredited by
+Horace Walpole with having an inexhaustible good humour, and
+"infinitely more wit than any man I ever knew." Of the friendship
+with Sir Charles Hanbury Williams, of which we first hear at Eton,
+little is known, save the curious episode of the recovery, many
+years after its author's death, of Fielding's lost play <em>The
+Good-Natured Man</em>, which had apparently been submitted to Sir
+Charles, whose celebrity was great as a brilliant political
+lampoonist. Of the acquaintance with Henry Fox, first Baron
+Holland, we hear nothing in later life; but the name of the
+greatest of all these Eton contemporaries, that of the elder Pitt,
+recurs in after years as one of the party at Radway Grange, in
+Warwickshire, to whom Fielding, after dinner, read aloud the <a
+name="fnref1-11">manuscript</a> of <em>Tom Jones</em>. <a class=
+"footnote" href="#fn1-11">11</a> A reference to his fellow-Etonian
+may be found in one of the introductory chapters of that
+masterpiece, where Fielding, while again advocating the claims of
+learning, takes occasion to pay this sonorous tribute to Pitt's
+oratory: "Nor do I believe that all the imagination, fire, and
+judgment of Pitt, could have produced those orations that have made
+the senate of England in these our times a rival in eloquence to
+Greece and Rome, if he had not been so well read in the writings of
+Demosthenes and Cicero, as to have transferred their whole spirit
+into his speeches and, with their spirit, their knowledge too."</p>
+
+<p>However excellent a knowledge of the classics the youthful
+scholar took away with him from Eton, the rigours of his studies do
+not appear to have diminished that zest for life with which the
+very name of Henry Fielding is invested. For the obscurity of these
+early years is for a moment lifted to disclose the young genius as
+having already, before he was nineteen, fallen desperately in love
+with a beautiful heiress in Dorsetshire; and, moreover, as
+threatening bodily force to accomplish his suit. The story, as
+indicated in the surviving outlines, might be the draft for a
+chapter of <em>Tom Jones</em>. The scene is Lyme Regis. The chief
+actors are Harry Fielding, scarce more than a schoolboy; a
+beautiful heiress, Miss <a name="fnref1-12">Sarah</a> Andrew; <a
+class="footnote" href="#fn1-12">12</a> and her uncle, one Mr Andrew
+Tucker, a timorous and crafty member of the local corporation. The
+handsome Etonian, who had been for some time resident in the old
+town, fell madly in love, it seems, with the lady, who is stated to
+have been his cousin on his mother's side. The views of her
+guardian were, however, opposed to the young man's suit, Mr Andrew
+Tucker mercenarily designing to secure the heiress for his own son.
+Thereupon Harry Fielding is said to have made a desperate attempt
+to carry the lady off by force, and that, moreover, "on a Sunday,
+when she was on her way to Church." Further, the efforts of the
+impetuous youth would seem to have extended to threatened assaults
+on the person of his fair cousin's guardian, Mr Tucker; for we find
+that affrighted worthy flying for protection to the arm of the law,
+as recorded in the <em>Register Book</em> of Lyme Regis, under date
+of the 14th November 1725:--"... Andrew Tucker, Gent., one of the
+Corporation, caused Henry Fielding, Gent., and his servant or
+companion, Joseph Lewis --both now for some time past residing in
+the borough--to be bound over to keep the peace, as he was in fear
+of his life or some bodily hurt to be done or to be procured to be
+done to him by H. Fielding and his man. Mr A. Tucker feared that
+the man would beat, maim, or kill him." No words could more aptly
+sum up this delightful story than those of Mr Austin Dobson: "a
+charming girl, who is also an heiress; a pusillanimous guardian,
+with ulterior views of his own; a handsome and high-spirited young
+suitor; a faithful attendant ready to 'beat, maim or kill' on his
+master's behalf; a frustrated elopement and a compulsory visit to
+the mayor--all these with the picturesque old town of Lyme for a
+background, suggest a most appropriate first act to Harry
+Fielding's <a name="fnref1-13">biographical</a> tragi-comedy." <a
+class="footnote" href="#fn1-13">13</a> It is possible that
+Fielding's own pen supplied the conclusion to this first act. For
+he tells us, in the preface to the <em>Miscellanies</em>, that a
+version, in burlesque verse, of part of Juvenal's sixth satire was
+originally sketched out before he was twenty, and that it was "all
+the Revenge taken by an injured Lover." The story loses none of its
+zest, moreover, when we remember that Harry Fielding was at this
+time still a Ward of Chancery.</p>
+
+<h2><a name="chapter2">CHAPTER II</a><br>
+<br>
+PLAYHOUSE BARD</h2>
+
+<p class="quoted">"I could not help reflecting how often the
+greatest abilities lie wind-bound, as it were, in life; or if they
+venture out, and attempt to beat the seas, they struggle in vain
+against wind and tide."<br>
+ &nbsp;&nbsp;--<em>Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon</em>.</p>
+
+<p>It was but three years after the Lyme Regis episode that Henry
+Fielding, then a lad of one and twenty, won attention as a
+successful writer of comedy. Of this his first entry into the gay
+world there are little but generalities to record; but, inaccurate
+as Murphy is in some matters of fact, there seems no reason to
+doubt the truth of the engaging picture which he draws of the young
+man's <em>début</em> upon the Town. We read of the gaiety and
+quickness of his fancy; the wild flow of his spirits; the
+brilliancy of his wit; the activity of his mind, eager to know the
+world. To the possession of genius allied to the happiest temper, a
+temper "for the most part overflowing into wit, mirth, and
+good-humour," young Fielding added a handsome face, a magnificent
+physique (he stood over six feet high), and the fullest vigour of
+constitution. "No man," wrote his cousin, Lady Mary Wortley
+Montagu, "enjoyed life more than he did." What wonder that he was
+soon "in high request with the men of taste and literature," or
+that report affirms him to have been no less welcome in ranks of
+society not at all distinguished by a literary flavour.</p>
+
+<p>That a youth so gifted, so "formed and disposed for enjoyment,"
+should find himself his own master, in London, almost presupposes a
+too liberal indulgence in the follies that must have so easily
+beset him. When the great and cold Mr Secretary Addison, no less
+than that "very merry Spirit," Dick Steele, and the splendid
+Congreve, drank more than was good for them, what chance would
+there be for a brilliant, ardent lad of twenty, suddenly plunged
+into the robust society of that age? If Fielding, like his elders,
+indisputably loved good wine, let us remember that none of the
+heroes of his three great novels, neither that rural innocent
+Joseph Andrews, nor the exuberant youth Tom Jones, nor erring,
+repentant Captain Booth are immoderate drinkers. The degradation of
+drinking is, in Fielding's pages, accorded to brutalised if honest
+country squires, and cruel and corrupt magistrates; and there is
+little evidence throughout his life to indicate that the great
+novelist drank more freely than did the genial heroes of his pen.
+As regards Murphy's general assertion that, at this his entrance
+into life, young Fielding "launched wildly into a career of
+dissipation" no other reputable contemporary evidence is
+discoverable of the "wildness" popularly attributed to Fielding.
+That his youth was headlong and undisciplined is a plausible
+surmise; but justice demands that the charge be recognised as a
+surmise and nothing more. How keenly, twenty years later, he could
+appreciate the handicap that such early indulgences impose on a
+man's future life may be gathered from a passage in <em>Joseph
+Andrews</em> which is not without the ring of personal feeling. The
+speaker is a generous and estimable country gentleman, living in
+Arcadian retirement with his wife and children. Descended of a good
+family and born a gentleman, he narrates how his education was
+acquired at a public school, and extended to a mastery of the
+Latin, and a tolerable knowledge of the Greek, language. Becoming
+his own master at sixteen he soon left school, for, he tells his
+listeners, "being a forward Youth, I was extremely impatient to be
+in the World: For which I thought my Parts, Knowledge, and Manhood
+thoroughly qualified me. And to this early Introduction into Life,
+without a Guide, I impute all my future Misfortunes; for besides
+the obvious Mischiefs which attend this, there is one which hath
+not been so generally observed. The first Impression which Mankind
+receives of you, will be very difficult to eradicate. How unhappy,
+therefore, must it be to fix your Character in Life, before you can
+possibly know its Value, or weigh the Consequences of those Actions
+which are to establish your future <a name=
+"fnref2-1">Reputation</a>?" <a class="footnote" href="#fn2-1">1</a>
+That the wise and strenuous Fielding of later years, the energetic
+student at the Bar, the active and patriotic journalist, the
+merciless exponent of the hypocrite, the spendthrift, and the
+sensualist, the creator of the most perfect type of womanhood in
+English fiction (so said Dr Johnson and Thackeray) should look back
+sadly on his own years of hot-blooded youth is entirely natural;
+but even so this passage and the well-known confession placed in
+the mouth of the supposed writer of the <em>Journey from this World
+to the <a name="fnref2-2">Next</a></em>, <a class="footnote" href=
+"#fn2-2">2</a> no more constitute direct evidence than do Murphy's
+unattested phrases, or the anonymous scurrilities of
+eighteenth-century pamphleteers.</p>
+
+<p class="centered"><a name="i342"><img src="images/342.jpg" alt=
+"Anne Oldfield" width="352" height="500"></a></p>
+
+<p>By birth and education Fielding's natural place was in the
+costly society of those peers and men of wealth and fashion who
+courted the brilliant young wit; but fortune had decreed otherwise,
+and at this his first entrance on the world he found, as he himself
+said, no choice but to be a hackney writer or a hackney coachman.
+True, his father allowed him a nominal £200 a year; but this, to
+quote another of his son's observations, "anybody might pay that
+would." The fact was that Colonel Fielding's marriage with Madame
+Rasa had resulted in a large and rapidly increasing family; and
+this burden, together with "the necessary demands of his station
+for a genteel and suitable expence," made it impossible for him to
+spare much for the maintenance of his eldest son. Launched thus on
+the Town, with every capacity for spending an income the receipt of
+which was denied to him, the young man flattered himself that he
+should find resources in his wit and invention; and accordingly he
+commenced as writer for the stage. His first play, a comedy
+entitled <em>Love in Several Masks</em>, was performed at Drury
+Lane in February 1728, just before the youthful dramatist had
+attained his twenty-first year. In his preface to these 'light
+scenes' he alludes with some pride to this distinction--"I believe
+I may boast that none ever appeared so early on the stage";--and he
+proceeds to a generous acknowledgment of the aid received from
+those dramatic stars of the eighteenth-century, Colley Gibber, Mr
+Wilks and Mrs Oldfield, all of whom appeared in the cast. Of the
+two former he says, "I cannot sufficiently acknowledge their civil
+and kind behaviour previous to its representation"; from which we
+may conclude, as his biographer Laurence points out, that Harry
+Fielding was already familiar with the society of the green-room.
+To Mrs Oldfield,--that charming actress</p>
+
+<p class="quoted">"In publick Life, by all who saw Approv'd<br>
+ In private Life, by all who knew her Lov'd"--</p>
+
+<p>the young man expresses yet warmer acknowledgments. "Lastly," he
+declares, "I can never express my grateful sense of the good nature
+of Mrs Oldfield ... nor do I owe less to her excellent judgment,
+shown in some corrections which I shall for my own sake conceal."
+The comedy is dedicated, with the graceful diction and elaborate
+courtesies of the period, to Fielding's cousin, that notable
+eighteenth-century wit, the Lady Mary Wortley Montagu; and from the
+dedication we learn that to Lady Mary's approval, on her first
+perusal, the play owed its existence. What the approval of a great
+lady of those times meant for the young writer may be measured by
+the fact that Fielding concludes his dedication by solemnly
+'informing the world' that the representation of his comedy was
+twice honoured with Her Ladyship's presence.</p>
+
+<p>In view of the frequent accusation of coarseness brought against
+Fielding, we may quote a few lines of the prologue with which he
+made his literary entry into the world. Here his audience are
+promised</p>
+
+<p class="quoted">"Humour, still free from an indecent Flame,<br>
+ Which, should it raise your Mirth, must raise your Shame:<br>
+ Indecency's the Bane to Ridicule,<br>
+ And only charms the Libertine, or Fool:<br>
+ Nought shall offend the Fair One's Ears to-day,<br>
+ Which they might blush to hear, or blush to say.<br>
+ No private Character these Scenes expose,<br>
+ Our Bard, at Vice, not at the Vicious, throws."</p>
+
+<p>Thus it was with an honourable declaration of war against
+indecency and libel that the young wit and man of fashion, began
+his career as "hackney writer." If to modern taste the first
+promise lacks something of fulfilment, it is but just to remember
+that to other times belong other manners.</p>
+
+<p>In the play, rustic and philosophic virtue is prettily rewarded
+by the possession of a beautiful heiress, while certain mercenary
+fops withdraw in signal discomfiture; and that Fielding, at one and
+twenty, had already passed judgment on that glittering 'tinsel'
+tribe, is clear enough from his portrait of the "empty gaudy
+nameless thing," Lord Formal. Lord Formal appears on the stage with
+a complexion much agitated by a day of business spent with "three
+milleners, two perfumers, my bookseller's and a fanshop." In the
+course of these fatigues he has "rid down two brace of chairmen";
+and had raised his colour to "that exorbitancy of Vermeille" that
+it will hardly be reduced "under a fortnight's course of acids." It
+is the true spirit of comedy which introduces into this closely
+perfumed atmosphere the bluff country figure of Sir Positive Trap,
+with his exordiums on the rustic ladies, and on "the good old
+English art of clear-starching." Sir Positive hopes "to see the
+time when a man may carry his daughter to market with the same
+lawful authority as any other of his cattle"; and causes Lord
+Formal some moments' perplexity, his lordship being "not perfectly
+determinate what species of animal to assign him to, unless he be
+one of those barbarous insects the polite call country squires." In
+this production of a youth of twenty we may find a foretaste of
+that keen relish in watching the human comedy, that vigorous scorn
+of avarice, that infectious laughter at pretentious folly, which
+accompanied the novelist throughout his life.</p>
+
+<p>To this same year is attributed a poem called the
+<em>Masquerade</em>, which need only be noticed as again
+emphasising its author's lifelong war against the evils of his
+time. The <em>Masquerade</em> is a satire on the licentious
+gatherings organised by the notorious Count Heidegger, Master of
+the Revels to the Court of George II.</p>
+
+<p>Many years later <a name="fnref2-3">Fielding</a> reprinted <a
+class="footnote" href="#fn2-3">3</a> two other poetical effusions
+bearing the date of this his twenty-first year. Of these the first,
+entitled "A Description of U----n G---- (alias <em>New Hog's
+Norton</em>) in <em>Com-Hants</em>" identified by Mr Keightley as
+Upton Grey in Hampshire, is addressed to the fair
+<em>Rosalinda,</em> by her disconsolate <em>Alexis</em>. Alexis
+bewails his exile among</p>
+
+<p class="quoted">"Unpolish'd Nymphs and more unpolish'd
+Swains,"</p>
+
+<p>and describes himself as condemned to live in a dwelling half
+house, half shed, with a garden full of docks and nettles, the
+fruit-trees bearing only snails--</p>
+
+<p class="quoted">"Happy for us had Eve's this Garden been She'd
+found no Fruit, and therefore known no Sin,"--</p>
+
+<p>the dusty meadows innocent of grass, and the company as innocent
+of wit. This sketch of rural enjoyments recalls a later utterance
+in <em>Jonathan Wild</em>, concerning the votaries of a country
+life who, with their trees, "enjoy the air and the sun in common
+and both vegetate with very little difference between them." With
+one or two eloquent exceptions there is scarce a page in Fielding's
+books devoted to any interest other than that of human nature.</p>
+
+<p>The second fragment is a graceful little copy of verse addressed
+to <em>Euthalia</em>, in which we may note, by the way, that the
+fair Rosalinda's charms are ungallantly made use of as a foil to
+Euthalia's dazzling perfections. As Fielding found these verses not
+unworthy of a page in his later <em>Miscellanies</em> they are here
+recalled:</p>
+
+<p class="quoted">TO EUTHALIA.<br>
+ WRITTEN IN THE YEAR 1728.<br>
+<br>
+"Burning with Love, tormented with Despair,<br>
+ Unable to forget or ease his Care;<br>
+ In vain each practis'd art <em>Alexis</em> tries;<br>
+ In vain to Books, to Wine or Women flies;<br>
+ Each brings <em>Euthalia's</em> Image to his Eyes.<br>
+ In <em>Lock's</em> or <em>Newton's</em> Page her Learning
+glows;<br>
+ <em>Dryden</em> the Sweetness of her Numbers shews;<br>
+ In all their various Excellence I find<br>
+ The various Beauties of her perfect Mind.<br>
+ How vain in Wine a short Relief I boast!<br>
+ Each sparkling Glass recalls my charming Toast.<br>
+ To Women then successless I repair,<br>
+ Engage the Young, the Witty, and the Fair.<br>
+ When <em>Sappho's</em> Wit each envious Breast alarms,<br>
+ And <em>Rosalinda</em> looks ten thousand Charms;<br>
+ In vain to them my restless Thoughts would run;<br>
+ Like fairest Stars, they show the absent Sun."</p>
+
+<p><em>Love in Several Masks</em> was produced, as we have seen, in
+February, 1728; and it is a little surprising to find the young
+dramatist suddenly appearing, four weeks later, as a University
+student. He was entered at the University of Leyden, as "Litt.
+Stud," on the 16th of March 1728. The reason of this sudden change
+from the green-room of Drury Lane to the ancient Dutch university
+must be purely matter of conjecture, as is the nature of Fielding's
+undergraduate studies, Murphy having lately been proved to be
+notably erroneous as to this <a name="fnref2-4">episode</a>. <a
+class="footnote" href="#fn2-4">4</a> His name occurs as staying, on
+his entry at Leyden, at the "Casteel von Antwerpen"; and again, a
+year later, in the <em>recensiones</em> of the University for
+February 1729, as domiciled with one Jan Oson. As all students were
+annually registered, the omission of any later entry proves that he
+left Leyden before 1730; with which meagre facts and his own
+incidental remark that the comedy of <em>Don Quixote in
+England</em> was "begun at Leyden in the year 1728," our knowledge
+of the two years of Fielding's university career concludes. In
+February 1730 he was presumably back in London, that being the date
+of his next play, the <em>Temple Beau</em>, produced by Giffard,
+the actor, at the new theatre in Goodman's Fields.</p>
+
+<p class="centered"><a name="i337"><img src="images/337.jpg" alt=
+"Leyden--1727" width="637" height="448"></a></p>
+
+<p>The prologue to the <em>Temple Beau</em> was written by that man
+of many parts, James Ralph, the hack writer, party journalist and
+historian, who was in after years to collaborate with Fielding,
+both as a theatrical manager and as a journalist. Ralph's opening
+lines are of interest as bearing on Fielding's antagonism to the
+harlequinades and variety shows, then threatening the popularity of
+legitimate drama:</p>
+
+<p class="quoted">"Humour and Wit, in each politer Age, Triumphant,
+rear'd the Trophies of the Stage: But only Farce, and Shew, will
+now go down, And HARLEQUIN'S the Darling of the Town."</p>
+
+<p>Ralph bids his audience turn to the 'infant stage' of Goodman's
+Fields for matter more worthy their attention; and his promise that
+there</p>
+
+<p class="quoted">"The Comick Muse, in Smiles severely gay, Shall
+scoff at Vice, and laugh its Crimes away"</p>
+
+<p>must surely have been inspired by the young genius from whom
+twenty years later came the formal declaration of his endeavour, in
+<em>Tom Jones,</em> "to laugh mankind out of their favourite
+follies and vices."</p>
+
+<p>The special follies of the <em>Temple Beau</em> have, for
+background, of course, those precincts in which Fielding was later
+to labour so assiduously as a student, and as a member of the
+Middle Temple; but where, as the young Templar of the play
+observes, "dress and the ladies" might also very pleasantly employ
+a man's time. But except for an oblique hit at duelling, a custom
+which Fielding was later to attack with curious warmth, this second
+play seems to yield few passages of biographical interest. Of very
+different value for our purpose is the third play, which within
+only two months appeared from a pen stimulated, presumably, by
+empty pockets. This was the comedy entitled the <em>Author's
+Farce</em>, being the first portion of a medley which included the
+'<em>Puppet Show call'd the Pleasures of the Town</em>; the whole
+being acted in the Little Theatre in the Haymarket, long since
+demolished in favour of the present building.</p>
+
+<p>In the person of Harry Luckless, the hero of the <em>Author's
+Farce</em>, it is impossible not to surmise the figure of young
+Fielding himself; a figure gay and spirited as those of his first
+comedy, but, by now, well acquainted with the hungers and the
+straits of a 'hackney writer.' Mr Luckless wears a laced-coat and
+makes a handsome figure (we remember that Fielding had always the
+grand air), whereby his landlady, clamouring for her rent, upbraids
+him for deceiving her: "Cou'd I have guess'd that I had a Poet in
+my House! Cou'd I have look'd for a Poet under lac'd Clothes!" The
+poor author offers her the security of his (as yet unacted) play;
+whereupon Mrs Moneywood (lineal ancestress of Mrs Raddles)
+pertinently cries out: "I would no more depend on a Benefit-Night
+of an unacted Play, than I would on a Benefit-Ticket in an undrawn
+Lottery." Luckless next appeals to what should be his landlady's
+heart, assuring her that unless she be so kind as to invite him "I
+am afraid I shall scarce prevail on my Stomach to dine to-day." To
+which the enraged lady answers: "O never fear that: you will never
+want a Dinner till you have dined at all the Eating-houses
+round.--No one shuts their Doors against you the first time; and I
+scarce think you are so kind, seldom to trouble them a second." And
+that the good landlady had some grounds for her wrath is but too
+apparent when she announces: "Well, I'm resolv'd when you are gone
+away (which I heartily hope will be very soon) I'll hang over my
+Door in great red Letters, <em>No Lodging for Poets</em> ... My
+Floor is all spoil'd with Ink, my Windows with Verses, and my Door
+has been almost beat down with Duns.' While the landlady is still
+fuming, enters our author's man, Jack.</p>
+
+<p class="quoted">"<em>Jack</em>. An't please your Honour, I have
+been at my Lord's, and his Lordship thanks you for the Favour you
+have offer'd of reading your Play to him; but he has such a
+prodigious deal of Business he begs to be excus'd. I have been with
+Mr <em>Keyber</em> too: he made no Answer at all...."</p>
+
+<p class="quoted">"<em>Luckless</em>. Jack.</p>
+
+<p class="quoted">"<em>Jack</em>. Sir.</p>
+
+<p class="quoted">"<em>Luckless</em>. Fetch my other Hat hither.
+Carry it to the Pawnbroker's.</p>
+
+<p class="quoted">"<em>Jack</em>. To your Honour's own
+Pawnbroker.</p>
+
+<p class="quoted">"<em>Luckless</em>. Ay And in thy way home call
+at the Cook's Shop. So, one way or other I find, my Head must
+always provide for my Belly."</p>
+
+<p>At which moment enters the caustic, generous Witmore,
+belabouring the profanity, the scurrility, the immodesty, the
+stupidity of the age with one hand, the while he pays his friend's
+rent with the other; and who, incidentally, is requested by that
+irascible genius to kick a worthy publisher down the stairs, on the
+latter's refusal to give fifty shillings "no, nor fifty farthings"
+for his play. Once mollified by the settlement of her bill, we have
+the landlady playing advocate for her hapless lodger in words that
+sound very like the apologia of Mr Harry Fielding himself: "I have
+always thought, indeed, Mr <em>Luckless</em> had a great deal of
+Honesty in his Principles; any Man may be unfortunate: but I knew
+when he had Money I should have it...." And the good woman's
+reminiscence that while her lodger had money her doors were
+thundered at every morning between four and five by coachmen and
+chairmen; and her wish that that pleasant humour'd gentleman were
+"but a little soberer," finishes, we take it, the portrait of the
+Fielding of 1730. "Jack call a coach; and d'ye hear, get up behind
+it and attend me," cries the improvident poet, the moment his
+generous friend has left him; and so we are sure did young Mr
+Fielding put himself and his laced coat into a coach, and mount his
+man behind it, whenever the exigencies of duns and hunger were for
+a moment abated. And with as gallant a humour as that of his own
+Luckless did he walk afoot, when those "nine ragged jades the
+muses" failed to bring him a competency.</p>
+
+<p>Such failure on the part of the Muses was due to no want of
+wooing on his part. During the six years between Fielding's first
+appearance as dramatic author in 1728, and his marriage in 1734,
+there stand no fewer than thirteen plays to his name. Of these none
+have won any lasting reputation; and to this period of the great
+novelist's life may doubtless be applied Lady Mary Wortley
+Montagu's description, when lamenting that her kinsman should have
+been "forced by necessity to publish without correction, and throw
+many productions into the world he would have thrown into the fire,
+if meat could have been got without money, and money without
+scribbling." Lady Mary's account moreover is reinforced by Murphy's
+classical periods: "Mr Fielding's case was generally the same with
+that of the poet described by Juvenal; with a great genius, he must
+have starved if he had not sold his performance to a favourite
+actor. <em>Esurit, intactam Paridi, nisi vendit Agaven</em>." A
+complete list of all these ephemera will be found in the
+bibliography at the end of this volume; here we need but notice
+those to which a special interest attaches. Thus, that incomparable
+comic actress, Kitty Clive, was cast for a part in the
+<em>Lottery</em>, a farce produced in 1731; and three years later
+Fielding is adapting for her, especially, the <em>Intriguing
+Chambermaid</em>. It was in these two plays, and that of the
+<em>Virgin Unmasked</em>, that the town discovered the true comic
+genius of Kitty Clive "the best player I ever saw," in Dr Johnson's
+opinion. For this discovery Fielding takes credit to himself, in
+the dedication addressed to Mrs Clive, which he prefixed to the
+<em>Intriguing Chambermaid</em>; and in which he finds opportunity
+to pay a noble tribute to the private life of that inimitable
+hoyden of the stage. "I cannot help reflecting" he writes, "that
+the Town hath one great obligation to me, who made the first
+discovery of your great capacity, and brought you earlier forward
+on the theatre, than the ignorance of some and the envy of others
+would have otherwise permitted.... But as great a favorite as you
+at present are with the audience you would be much more so were
+they acquainted with your private character ... did they see you,
+who can charm them on the stage with personating the foolish and
+vicious characters of your sex, acting in real life the part of the
+best Wife, the best Daughter, the best Sister, and the best
+Friend." That this splendid praise was as sincere as it was
+generous need not be doubted. No breath of slander, even in that
+slanderous age, seems ever to have dulled the reputation of the
+queen of comedy, and "better romp than any I ever saw in
+nature"--to quote Dr Johnson again,--Kitty Clive.</p>
+
+<p class="centered"><a name="i339"><img src="images/339.jpg" alt=
+"Kitty Clive as Philida" width="344" height="500"></a></p>
+
+<p>So few of Fielding's letters have been, to our knowledge,
+preserved, that the following note addressed to Lady Mary Wortley
+Montagu, and concerning the <em>Modern Husband</em>, a comedy
+produced in 1731 or 1732, must here be given, though containing
+little beyond the fact that the dramatist of three years' standing
+seems still to have placed as high a value on his cousin's
+judgment, as when recording her approval of his first effort for
+the stage. The play was a piece of admittedly moral purpose, and
+was dedicated to Sir Robert Walpole. The first line of the
+autograph is, apparently, missing.</p>
+
+<p><br>
+</p>
+
+<p>"I hope your Ladyship will honour the Scenes, which I presume to
+lay before you, with your Perusal. As they are written on a Model I
+never yet attempted, I am exceedingly anxious least they should
+find least Mercy from you than my lighter Productions. It will be a
+slight compensation to the modern Husband, that your Ladyship's
+censure will defend him from the Possibility of any other Reproof,
+since your least Approbation will always give me a Pleasure,
+infinitely superior to the loudest Applauses of a Theatre. For
+whatever has past your judgment, may, I think without any
+Imputation of Immodesty, refer Want of Success to Want of Judgment
+in an Audience. I shall do myself the honour of waiting on your
+Ladyship at Twickenham next Monday to receive my Sentence, and am,
+Madam, with the most devoted Respect</p>
+
+<p>"Your Ladyship's<br>
+"most Obedient most humble Servant<br>
+"Henry <a name="fnref2-5">Ffielding</a>. <a class="footnote" href=
+"#fn2-5">5</a><br>
+"London 7'br 4."</p>
+
+<p class="centered"><a name="i338"><img src="images/338.jpg" alt=
+"Frontispiece to Fielding's 'Tom Thumb'" width="286" height="500">
+</a></p>
+
+<p>In 1731-32 the burlesque entitled the <em>Tragedy of Tragedies;
+or the Life and Death of Tom Thumb the Great</em>, took the Town.
+The <em>Tragedy</em> parodies the absurdities of tragedians; and so
+far won immortality that in 1855 it was described as still holding
+the stage. But its chief modern interest lies in the tradition that
+Swift once observed that he "had not laughed above twice" in his
+life,--once at the tricks of a merry-andrew, and again when
+Fielding's Tom Thumb killed the ghost. The design for the
+frontispiece of the edition of 1731, here reproduced, is from the
+pencil of Hogarth; and is the first trace of a connexion between
+Fielding and the painter who was to be honoured so frequently in
+his pages. An adaptation from Molière, produced in 1733, under the
+title of the <em>Miser</em>, won from Voltaire the praise of having
+added to the original "quelques beautes de dialogue particulières a
+sa [Fielding's] nation." The leading character in the
+<em>Miser</em>, Lovegold, became a stock part, and survived to our
+own days, having been a favourite with Phelps. In <em>Don Quixote
+in England</em>, produced in 1733 or <a name="fnref2-6">34</a>, <a
+class="footnote" href="#fn2-6">6</a> Fielding reappears in the
+character of patriotic censor with the design, as appears from the
+dedication to Lord Chesterfield, of representing "the Calamities
+brought on a Country by general Corruption." No less than fifteen
+songs are interspersed in the play, and it is matter for curious
+conjecture why none of them was chosen for a reprint among the
+collected verses published ten years later in the
+<em>Miscellanies</em>. Time has almost failed to preserve even the
+hunting-song beginning finely--</p>
+
+<p class="quoted">"The dusky Night rides down the Sky,<br>
+ &nbsp;&nbsp;And ushers in the Morn;<br>
+ The Hounds all join in glorious Cry,<br>
+ &nbsp;&nbsp;The Huntsman winds his Horn:"</p>
+
+<p>But a happier fate has befallen the fifth song, now familiar as
+the first verse of the <em>Roast Beef of Old England</em>. It is
+eminently appropriate that the most distinctly national of English
+novelists should have written:</p>
+
+<p class="quoted">"<em>When mighty Rost Beef was the</em>
+Englishman's <em>food,<br>
+ It ennobled our Hearts, and enriched our Blood;<br>
+ Our Soldiers were brave and our Courtiers were good.<br>
+ &nbsp;&nbsp;Oh, the Rost Beef of old England,<br>
+ &nbsp;&nbsp;And old</em> England's <em>Rost Beef!</em></p>
+
+<p class="quoted">"<em>Then</em>, Britons, <em>from all nice
+Dainties refrain,<br>
+ Which effeminate</em> Italy, France, <em>and</em> Spain;<br>
+ <em>And mighty Rost Beef shall command on the Main.<br>
+ &nbsp;&nbsp;Oh, the Rost Beef</em>, etc."</p>
+
+<p>To this truly prolific period of the young 'hackney writer's'
+pen belongs an <em>Epilogue</em>, hitherto overlooked, written for
+Charles Johnson's five-act play <em>Caelia or the Perjur'd
+Lover</em>, and spoken by Kitty Clive. The lines, which are hardly
+worth reprinting, consist of an ironic attack on the laxity of town
+morals, where "Miss may take great liberties upon her," and each
+woman is virtuous till she be found out.</p>
+
+<p>An average of two plays a year is a record scarcely conducive to
+literary excellence; any more than is the empty cupboard, and the
+frequent recourse to 'your honour's own pawnbroker,' so often and
+so honourably familiar to struggling genius. "The farces written by
+Mr Fielding," says Murphy"... were generally the production of two
+or three mornings, so great was his facility in writing"; and we
+have seen Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's assertion that much of his
+work would have been thrown into the fire had not his dinner gone
+with it. Of the struggles of these <a name="fnref2-7">early</a>
+years <a class="footnote" href="#fn2-7">7</a> (struggles never
+wholly remitted, for, to quote Lady Mary again, Fielding would have
+wanted money had his hereditary lands been as extensive as his
+imagination) we get further suggestions in the <em>Poetical
+Epistle</em> addressed to Sir Robert Walpole when the young poet
+was but twenty-three. The lines go with a gallant spirit, but it is
+not difficult to detect a savour of grim hardship behind the
+jests:</p>
+
+<p class="quoted">"While at the Helm of State you ride,<br>
+ Our Nation's Envy and its Pride;<br>
+ While foreign Courts with Wonder gaze,<br>
+ And curse those Councils which they praise;<br>
+ Would you not wonder, Sir, to view<br>
+ Your Bard a greater Man than you?<br>
+ Which that he, is you cannot doubt,<br>
+ When you have heard the Sequel out.<br>
+ . . . . . "The Family that dines the latest,<br>
+ Is in our Street esteem'd the greatest;<br>
+ But latest Hours must surely fall<br>
+ Before him who ne'er dines at all.<br>
+<br>
+ Your Taste in Architect, you know,<br>
+ Hath been admir'd by Friend and Foe;<br>
+ But can your earthly Domes compare<br>
+ With all my Castles--in the Air?<br>
+<br>
+ "We're often taught it doth behove us<br>
+ To think those greater who're above us;<br>
+ Another Instance of my Glory,<br>
+ Who live above you, twice two Story,<br>
+ And from my Garret can look down<br>
+ On the whole Street of <a name="fnref2-8">Arlington</a>." <a
+class="footnote" href="#fn2-8">8</a></p>
+
+<p>Not to depend too greatly on Mr Luckless for our picture of
+Fielding as a playwright, we will conclude it with the well-known
+passage from Murphy: "When he had contracted to bring on a play, or
+a farce, it is well known, by many of his friends now living, that
+he would go home rather late from a tavern, and would the next
+morning deliver a scene to the players, written upon the papers
+which had wrapped the tobacco in which he so much delighted." Would
+that some of those friends had recorded for our delight the wit
+that, alas! has vanished like the smoke through which it was
+engendered. What would we not give for the table-talk of Henry
+Fielding.</p>
+
+<h2><a name="chapter3">CHAPTER III</a><br>
+<br>
+MARRIAGE</h2>
+
+<p class="quoted">"What happiness the world affords equal to the
+possession of such a woman as Sophia I sincerely own I have never
+yet discovered." --<em>Tom Jones</em>.</p>
+
+<p>Out of the paint and powder of the green-room, the tobacco
+clouds of the tavern, the crowded streets where hungry genius went
+afoot one day, and rode in a coach the next--in a word, out of the
+Town as Harry Fielding knew it--we step, in the year 1734, into the
+idyll of his life, his marriage with Charlotte Cradock. For to
+Fielding the supreme gift was accorded of passionate devotion to a
+woman of whose charm and virtue he himself has raised an enduring
+memorial in the lovely portrait of Sophia Western. It is this
+portrait, explicitly <a name="fnref3-1">admitted</a>, <a class=
+"footnote" href="#fn3-1">1</a> that affords almost our only
+authentic knowledge of Charlotte Cradock, beyond the meagre facts
+that her home was in Salisbury, and that there she and her sisters
+reigned as country belles. For it was not in the gay world of
+'Riddoto's, Opera's, and Plays,' nor among the humbler scenes of
+the great city in which he delighted to watch the humours of simple
+folk (the highest life being in his opinion 'much the dullest'),
+that Fielding found his wife. Doubtless his six years about town,
+as hackney author, with his good birth, his brilliant wit, and his
+scanty means, had made him well acquainted with every phase of
+society, "from the Minister at his Levee, to the Bailiff at his
+spunging-house; from the Duchess at her drum, to the Landlady
+behind her bar"; but it was in the rural seclusion of an old
+cathedral town that he wooed and won the beautiful Miss Cradock.
+Indeed it is impossible to conceive of Sophia as for ever domiciled
+in streets. The very apostrophe which heralds her first appearance
+in <em>Tom Jones</em> is fragrant with flower-enamelled meadows,
+fresh breezes, and the songs of birds "whose sweetest notes not
+even Handel can excel"; and it is thus, with his reader's mind
+attuned to the appropriate key, that Fielding ushers in his
+heroine: "... lo! adorned with all the Charms in which Nature can
+array her; bedecked with Beauty, Youth, Sprightliness, Innocence,
+Modesty, and Tenderness, breathing Sweetness from her rosy Lips,
+and darting Brightness from her sparkling Eyes, the lovely
+<em>Sophia</em> comes." Of middle size, but rather inclining to
+tall, with dark hair "curled so gracefully on her neck that few
+could believe it to be her own," a forehead rather low, arched
+eyebrows, and lustrous black eyes, a mouth that "exactly answered
+Sir John Suckling's description in those lines</p>
+
+<p class="quoted">'Her lips were red and one was thin,<br>
+ Compar'd to that was next her chin.<br>
+ &nbsp;&nbsp;Some bee had stung it newly,'"</p>
+
+<p>with a dimple in the right cheek, and a complexion rather more
+of the lily than the rose unless increased by exercise or modesty
+when no vermilion could equal it--such was the appearance of
+Sophia, who, most of all "resembled one whose image never can
+depart from my breast."</p>
+
+<p class="centered"><a name="i344"><img src="images/344.jpg" alt=
+"The Close, Salisbury--1798" width="630" height="500"></a></p>
+
+<p>Nor was the beautiful frame, Fielding hastens to add, disgraced
+by an unworthy inhabitant. He lingers on the sweetness of temper
+which "diffused a glory over her countenance which no regularity of
+features can give"; on her perfect breeding, "though wanting
+perhaps a little of that ease in her behaviour which is to be
+acquired only by habit, and living within what is called the polite
+circle"; on the "noble, elevated qualities" which outshone even her
+beauty.</p>
+
+<p>The only facts recorded concerning Miss Cradock are that her
+home was in Salisbury, or New Sarum as the city was then called,
+and that she possessed a small fortune. It is said, but on what
+authority is not stated, that she was one of three beautiful
+sisters, the belles of the country town; and it is in accordance
+with this tradition that Fielding should celebrate in some verses
+"writ when the Author was very young," the beauty and intellectual
+charm of the Miss Cradocks. When printing these verses many years
+afterwards, in his <em>Miscellanies</em> he describes the poem as
+originally partly filled in with the 'Names of several young
+Ladies,' which part he now omits, "the rather, as some Freedoms,
+tho' gentle ones, were taken with little Foibles in the amiable
+Sex, whom to affront in Print, is, we conceive, mean in any Man,
+and scandalous in a Gentleman." Certainly the Miss Cradocks
+suffered no affront in the lines retained, wherein the young poet
+affirms that of all the famed nymphs of Sarum, that favoured
+city,</p>
+
+<p class="quoted">"Whose Nymphs excel all Beauty's Flowers,<br>
+ As thy high Steeple doth all Towers"</p>
+
+<p>the 'C----cks' were the best and fairest. Nay, has not great
+Jove himself apportioned a 'celestial Dower' to these most favoured
+of maidens,</p>
+
+<p class="quoted">"To form whose lovely Minds and Faces<br>
+ I stript half Heaven of its Graces."</p>
+
+<p>From this charming sisterhood Harry Fielding won his bride, but
+not until four years of waiting had been accomplished. So much may
+be assumed from the early date of the verses entitled "Advice to
+the Nymphs of <em>New S---m</em>. Written in the Year 1730." Here
+the newly returned student from Leyden, the successful dramatist
+from Drury Lane, bids the Salisbury beauties cease their vain
+endeavours to contend with the matchless charms of his Celia. And
+here, in a pretty compliment introduced to the great Mr Pope, then
+at the height of his fame, we are reminded that Celia's lover is
+already a man of letters, for all his mere three and twenty years.
+When Celia meets her equal, then, he declares, farthing candles
+shall eclipse the moon, and "sweet <em>Pope</em> be dull."</p>
+
+<p>It is these youthful love-verses, verses as he himself was the
+first to admit, that were 'indeed Productions of the Heart rather
+than the Head,' that afford our only record of Fielding's wooing.
+Thus, he sings his passion for <em>Celia</em> in the
+declaration</p>
+
+<p class="quoted">"I hate the Town, and all its Ways;<br>
+ Ridotto's, Opera's, and Plays;<br>
+ The Ball, the Ring, the Mall, the Court;<br>
+ Where ever the Beau-Monde resort....<br>
+ All Coffee-houses, and their Praters;<br>
+ All Courts of Justice, and Debaters;<br>
+ All Taverns, and the Sots within 'em;<br>
+ All Bubbles, and the Rogues that skin 'em,"</p>
+
+<p>in short, the whole world 'cram'd all together,' because all his
+heart is engrossed for Celia. Again, Cupid is called to account, in
+that the careless urchin had left Celia's house unguarded from
+thieves, save for an old fellow "who sat up all Night, with a Gun
+without any Ammunition." Celia, it seems, had apprehended robbery,
+and her poet's rest is troubled:</p>
+
+<p class="quoted">"For how should I Repose enjoy,<br>
+ While any fears your Breast annoy?<br>
+ Forbid it Heav'n, that I should be<br>
+ From any of your Troubles free."</p>
+
+<p>Cupid explains his desertion by ingeniously declaring that a
+sigh from Celia had blown him away</p>
+
+<p class="quoted">"<em>to Harry Fielding's breast</em>,"</p>
+
+<p>in which lodging the 'wicked Child' wrought unconscionable
+havoc. Again, Celia wishes to have a "Lilliputian to play with," so
+she is promptly told that her lover would doff five feet of his
+tall stature, to meet her pleasure, and</p>
+
+<p class="quoted">"Then when my Celia walks abroad<br>
+ I'd be her pocket's little Load:<br>
+ Or sit astride, to frighten People,<br>
+ Upon her Hat's new fashion'd Steeple."</p>
+
+<p>Nay, to be prized by Celia, who would not even take the form of
+her faithful dog Quadrille.</p>
+
+<p>Jove, we may remember, had dowered the lovely Miss Cradocks with
+minds as fair as their persons; and the excellence of Celia's
+understanding is again celebrated in a neatly turned verse upon her
+'having blamed Mr Gay for his Severity on her Sex.' Had other women
+known a tenderness like hers, cries the poet, Gay's darts had
+returned into his own bosom; and last of all should such blame come
+from her</p>
+
+<p class="quoted">"in whose accomplish'd Mind<br>
+ The strongest Satire on thy Sex we find."</p>
+
+<p>The love story that first ran to such pleasant rhymes, in the
+old cathedral town, was destined to know many a harsh chapter of
+poverty and sickness; but throughout it all the affection of the
+lovers remained true; and there is no reason to doubt that, had it
+been in Harry Fielding's power to achieve it, the promise of
+perhaps the most charming of his love verses would have been
+fulfilled:</p>
+
+<p class="quoted">"Can there on Earth, my <em>Celia</em>, be,<br>
+ A Price I would not pay for thee?<br>
+ Yes, one dear precious Tear of thine<br>
+ Should not be shed to make thee mine."</p>
+
+<p>To read Swift's <em>Journal to Stella</em> is almost a
+sacrilege; the little notes that Dick Steele would write to his
+'dearest Prue' at all hours of day and night, from tavern and
+printing office, are scarce less private; no such seals have been
+broken, no such records preserved, of the love story of Harry
+Fielding. But to neither Swift nor Steele was it given to raise so
+perfect and imperishable a memorial of the women loved by them, as
+that reared by the passionate affection and grief of Fielding for
+Charlotte Cradock. To this day the beautiful young figure of Sophia
+Western, all charm and goodness, is alive in his immortal pages.
+And if, as her friend Lady Bute asserts, Amelia also is Mrs
+Fielding's portrait, then we know her no less intimately as wife
+and mother. We watch her brave spirit never failing under the most
+cruel distresses and conflicts; we play with her children in their
+little nursery; we hear her pleasant wit with the good parson; we
+feel her fresh beauty, undimmed in the poor remnants of a wardrobe
+that has gone, with her trinkets, to the pawnbroker; we see a
+hundred examples of her courage and tenderness and generosity.
+There is nothing in Fielding's life that is more to his honour than
+the brief words in which so competent an observer as Lady Bute
+summed up his marriage with Charlotte Cradock, "he loved her
+passionately and she returned his affection."</p>
+
+<p class="centered"><a name="i343"><img src="images/343.jpg" alt=
+"Charlcombe Church, near Bath" width="626" height="500"></a></p>
+
+<p>It was in the little country church of St Mary Charlcombe, a
+remote village some two miles from Bath, that "Henry Fielding, of
+ye Parish of St James in Bath, Esq., and Charlotte Cradock of ye
+same Parish, spinster" were married, on the 28th of November <a
+name="fnref3-2">1734</a>. <a class="footnote" href="#fn3-2">2</a>
+Fifty years later the village was described as containing only nine
+houses, the church, well fitted for the flock, being but eighteen
+feet wide. The old Somerset historian, Collinson, tells us how the
+hamlet stood on rising ground, in a deep retired valley, surrounded
+by noble hills, and with a little stream winding through the
+vale.</p>
+
+<p>In the January following Fielding and his wife were presumably
+back in town; for in this month he produced, at Drury Lane, the
+brisk little farce called <em>An Old Man taught Wisdom</em>, a
+title afterwards changed to the <em>Virgin Unmasked</em>. It is
+probable that this farce was especially written to suit Kitty Clive
+in her excelling character of hoyden; and to it, as we have seen,
+together with two of its predecessors, is assigned the credit of
+having first given that superb comic actress an opportunity of
+revealing her powers. Mrs Clive here played the part of Miss Lucy,
+a forward young lady who after skittishly interviewing a number of
+suitors proposed by her father, finally runs away with Thomas the
+footman. The little piece is said to have achieved success; but
+scarce had it been staged when "the prolific Mr Fielding," as a
+newspaper of the day styles him, brought out a five-act comedy,
+named the <em>Universal Gallant: or The different Husbands</em>,
+which wholly failed to please the audience, and indeed ran but for
+three nights.</p>
+
+<p>The dedication of this play is dated from "Buckingham Street,
+Feb. 12," and assuming Buckingham Street, Strand, to be the
+district meant, it is probable that the newly married 'poet' and
+his wife were then living with Mrs Fielding's relatives; for
+although the rate-books for Buckingham Street fail to show the name
+of Fielding, they do show that a Mr Thomas Cradock was then a
+householder in the street. In an <em>Advertisement</em>, prefixed
+to the published copies of this ill-fated comedy, the disappointed
+author deprecates the hasty voice of the pit in words that suggest
+the anxiety of a man now responsible for a happiness dearer than
+his own. "I have heard," he writes, "that there are some young
+Gentlemen about this Town who make a Jest of damning Plays--but did
+they seriously consider the Cruelty they are guilty of by such a
+Practice, I believe it would prevent them"; the more, that if the
+author be "so unfortunate to depend on the success of his Labours
+for his Bread, he must be an inhuman Creature indeed, who would out
+of sport and wantonness prevent a Man from getting a Livelihood in
+an honest and inoffensive Way, and make a jest of starving him and
+his Family." There is other evidence that young men about town were
+wont to amuse themselves by damning plays 'when George was King.'
+In the <em>Prologue</em> to this same condemned play, spoken by the
+actor Quin, and said to have been written after the disastrous
+first night's performance, a more elaborate indictment is laid
+against the audiences of the day. The <em>Critick</em>, it seems,
+is grown so captious that if a poet seeks new characters he is
+denounced for dealing in monsters; if they are known and common,
+then he is a plagiarist; if his scenes are serious they are voted
+dull; if humorous they are 'low' (a true Fielding touch). And not
+only the critic but also the brainless beau stands, as we have
+seen, ready to make sport of the poor author. For such as these</p>
+
+<p class="quoted"><em>"'Tis not the Poet's wit affords the
+Jest,<br>
+ But who can Cat-call, Hiss, or Whistle best."</em></p>
+
+<p>In previous years the brilliant Leyden student might have merely
+derided his enemies; to the Fielding of February 1735, struggling
+to support himself and his beautiful country bride, this 'cruel
+usage' of his 'poor Play' assumed a graver aspect:</p>
+
+<p class="quoted"><em>"Can then another's Anguish give you Joy?<br>
+ Or is it such a Triumph to destroy?<br>
+ We, like the fabled Frogs, consider thus,<br>
+ This may be Sport to you, but it is Death to us."</em></p>
+
+<p>This note of personal protest recalls an indisputably
+reminiscent observation in <em>Amelia</em>, to the effect that
+although the kindness of a faithful and beloved wife compensates
+most of the evils of life, it "rather serves to aggravate the
+misfortune of distressed circumstances, from the consideration of
+the share which she is to bear in them." We all know how bravely
+Amelia bore that share; how cheerfully she would cook the supper;
+how firmly she confronted disaster. To realise how deeply Fielding
+felt the pain of such struggles when falling upon "the best, the
+worthiest and the noblest of women" we need but turn again to his
+own pages. If, cries Amelia's husband, when his distresses
+overwhelm him, "if I was to suffer alone, I think I could bear them
+with some philosophy"; and again "this was the first time I had
+ever felt that distress which arises from the want of money; a
+distress very dreadful indeed in the married state for what can be
+more miserable than to see anything necessary to the preservation
+of the beloved creature and not be able to supply it?"</p>
+
+<p>To supply for his Celia much less than the necessities of life
+Harry Fielding would undoubtedly have stripped his coat, and his
+shirt with it, off his back; but, at the end of this same month of
+February, fortune made the young couple sudden amends for the
+anxieties that seem to have surrounded them. This turn of the wheel
+is reflected with curious accuracy by an anonymous satirist of
+1735:</p>
+
+<p class="quoted">"F---g, who <em>Yesterday</em> appear'd so
+rough,<br>
+ Clad in coarse Frize, and plaister'd down with <em>Snuff</em>,<br>
+ See how his <em>Instant</em> gaudy <em>Trappings</em> shine;<br>
+ What <em>Play-house</em> Bard was ever seen so fine!<br>
+ But this, not from his <em>Humour</em> glows, you'll say<br>
+ But mere <em>Necessity</em>;--for last Night lay<br>
+ In pawn the Velvet which he wears to <a name="fnref3-3">Day</a>."
+<a class="footnote" href="#fn3-3">3</a></p>
+
+<p>This relief, for a time at least, from the pressing anxieties of
+a 'play-house bard,' befell by the death of Charlotte Fielding's
+mother, Mrs Elizabeth Cradock of Salisbury, who died in February,
+but a week or two after the execution of a will wholly in favour of
+that 'dearly beloved' daughter. As the details of Mrs Fielding's
+inheritance have not hitherto been known, some portions of her
+mother's will may be quoted. "... I Elizabeth Cradock of Salisbury
+in the County of Wilts ... do make this my last will and testament
+... Item I give to my daughter Catherine one shilling and all the
+rest and residue of my ready money plate jewels and estate
+whatsoever and wheresoever after my debts and funeral charges are
+fully paid and satisfied I give devize and bequeath the same unto
+my dearly beloved daughter Charlott Ffeilding wife of Henry
+Ffeilding of East Stour in the County of Dorset Esqre." Mrs Cradock
+proceeds to revoke all former wills; and appoints her said daughter
+"Charlott Ffeilding" as her sole executrix. The will is dated
+February 8 1734, old style, viz. 1735; and was proved in London on
+the 25th of the same month, 'Charlott Ffeilding,' as sole
+executrix, being duly sworn to administer. The provision of one
+shilling for another, and apparently <em>not</em> dearly beloved,
+daughter, Catherine, recalls the wicked sister in <em>Amelia</em>
+who "had some way or other disobliged her mother, a little before
+the old lady died," and who consequently was deprived of that
+inheritance which relieved Amelia and her husband from the direst
+straits.</p>
+
+<p class="centered"><a name="i345"><img src="images/345.jpg" alt=
+"Fielding's house, East Stour, Dorsetshire" width="663" height=
+"500"></a></p>
+
+<p>As no plays are credited to Fielding's name for the ensuing
+months of 1735, it is a reasonable inference that the young
+Salisbury heiress, whose experience of London had, doubtless,
+included a pretty close acquaintance with the hardships of
+struggling genius, employed some of her inheritance to enable her
+husband to return to the home of his boyhood, on the "pleasant
+Banks of sweetly-winding Stour." There is no record of how the
+Stour estate, settled on Henry Fielding and his brother and
+sisters, was apportioned; but an engraving published in 1813 shows
+the old stone "farmhouse," which Fielding occupied, the kitchen of
+which then still remained as it was in the novelist's time, when it
+served as a parlour. Behind the house stood a famous locust tree;
+and close by was the village church served at this time, as the
+parish registers show, by the Rev. William Young, the original of
+the immortal Parson Adams of <em>Joseph <a name=
+"fnref3-4">Andrews</a></em>. <a class="footnote" href=
+"#fn3-4">4</a> From a subsequent deed of sale we know that the
+estate consisted of at least three gardens, three orchards, eighty
+acres of meadow, one hundred and forty acres of pasture, ten acres
+of wood, two dove-houses, and "common of pasture for all manner of
+cattle." To the stone farmhouse, and to these orchards and meadows,
+commons and pastures, Fielding brought his wife, probably in this
+year of 1735; and memories of their sojourn at Stour surely
+inspired those references in <em>Amelia</em> to the country life of
+'love, health, and tranquillity,' a life resembling a calm sea
+which "must appear dull in description; for who can describe the
+pleasures which the morning air gives to one in perfect health; the
+flow of spirits which springs up from exercise; the delights which
+parents feel from the prattle and innocent follies of their
+children; the joy with which the tender smile of a wife inspires a
+husband; or lastly the cheerful solid comfort which a fond couple
+enjoy in each others' conversation.--All these pleasures, and every
+other of which our situation was capable we tasted in the highest
+degree."</p>
+
+<p>That a man endowed with Fielding's intense joy in living--he was
+"so formed for happiness," wrote his cousin Lady Mary, "it is a
+pity he was not immortal"--should eagerly taste all the pleasures
+of life as a country gentleman, and that in 'the highest degree,'
+is entirely consonant with his character. At the very end of his
+life, when dying of a complication of diseases, his happy social
+spirit was still unbroken; for we find him even then writing of his
+inability to enjoy an agreeable hour "without the assistance of a
+companion which has always appeared to me necessary to such <a
+name="fnref3-5">enjoyment</a>." <a class="footnote" href=
+"#fn3-5">5</a> Nor would the generous temper, which was ever ready
+to share his most needed guinea with a friend scarce poorer than
+himself, be infected with niggardliness by the happy enjoyment of
+that position to which he was by birth entitled. The well-known
+account therefore, given by Murphy, of the East Stour episode is
+exactly what we might have expected of Harry Fielding in the part
+of country gentleman: "To that place [<em>i.e.</em> his estate of
+East Stour]," says Murphy, "he retired with his wife, on whom he
+doated, with a resolution to bid adieu to all the follies and
+intemperances to which he had addicted himself in the career of a
+town life. But unfortunately a kind of family pride here gained an
+ascendant over him, and he began immediately to vie in splendour
+with the neighbouring country 'squires. With an estate not much
+above two hundred pounds a year, and his wife's fortune, which did
+not exceed fifteen hundred pounds, he encumbered himself with a
+large retinue of servants, all clad in costly yellow liveries. For
+their master's honour, these people could not descend so low as to
+be careful of their apparel, but in a month or two were unfit to be
+seen; the 'squire's dignity required that they should be
+new-equipped; and his chief pleasure consisting in society and
+convivial mirth, hospitality threw open his doors, and, in less
+than three years, entertainments, hounds, and horses, entirely
+devoured a little patrimony...." This account is prefaced by gross
+inaccuracies of fact, inexplicable in a biographer writing but ten
+years after the death of his subject; but, as Mr Austin Dobson
+says, "there can be little doubt that the rafters of the old farm
+by the Stour, with the great locust tree at the back, which is
+figured in Hutchins's <em>History of Dorset</em>, rang often to
+hunting choruses, and that not seldom the 'dusky Night rode down
+the Sky' over the prostrate forms of Harry Fielding's guests."
+Petty-minded moralists like Murphy have gravely admonished the
+great novelist's memory for not having safely bestowed his estate
+in the consols of the period; they forget that a spirit of small
+economy is generally the compensation awarded to the poor average
+of humanity. The genius of Fielding knew how to enjoy splendidly,
+and to give lavishly.</p>
+
+<h2><a name="chapter4">CHAPTER IV</a><br>
+<br>
+POLITICAL PLAYS</h2>
+
+<p class="quoted">"Whoever attempteth to introduce corruption into
+any community, doth much the same thing, and ought to be treated in
+much the same manner with him who poisoneth a
+fountain."--Dedication of the <em>Historical Register</em>.</p>
+
+<p>A prolonged retirement into Dorsetshire, however pleasant were
+the banks of Stour with a beautiful young wife, and a sufficient
+estate, could scarce be expected of Fielding's restless genius. He
+was now thirty-five; his splendid physique was as yet unimpaired by
+the gout that was so soon to attack him; his powers were still
+hardly revealed; and, as far as we can discover, he was, at the
+moment, under no pressure for money. Still, the hunting choruses of
+the Squire Westerns of Dorsetshire can hardly have long sufficed
+for one whom Lyttelton declared to have had "more wit than any man
+I ever knew"; and the social and political conditions of the
+country were increasingly calculated to inflame into practical
+activity that "enthusiasm for righteousness," which Mr Gosse has so
+well detected in <a name="fnref4-1">Fielding</a>. <a class=
+"footnote" href="#fn4-1">1</a> The distracted state of the London
+stage, divided by the factions of players and managers, afforded
+moreover an excellent opportunity for a dramatist of some means to
+essay an independent venture. And accordingly, at the beginning of
+1736, we find the Harry Fielding of the green-room and the poet's
+garret, the Henry Fielding Esqre of East Stour, suddenly throwing
+the full force of his energies into political life, as the manager
+of, and writer for, a theatre with indisputable political aims. For
+the next eight years of his short life Fielding was largely
+occupied in the lively turmoil of eighteenth-century politics; and
+here, first by means of the stage, and later as journalist, he
+played a part which has perhaps been somewhat unduly overshadowed
+by the surpassing achievements of his genius as father of the
+English novel. But if we would perceive the full figure of the man
+this time of boisterous political warfare is of no mean account. In
+the dedication of his first party play, the amazingly successful
+<em>Pasquin</em>, Fielding subscribes himself as "the most devoted
+Servant of the public"; and no more appropriate keyword could be
+found for the energies which he threw into those envenomed
+political struggles of 1736-41.</p>
+
+<p class="centered"><a name="i346"><img src="images/346.jpg" alt=
+"Sir Robert Walpole--1740" width="316" height="500"></a></p>
+
+<p>At the date of his first plunge into these struggles England
+stood sorely in need of a pen as biting, as witty and as fearless,
+as that of Henry Fielding. For over ten years the country had been
+ruled by one of those "peace at any price" Ministers who have at
+times so successfully inflamed the baser commercial instincts of
+Englishmen. Sir Robert Walpole, the reputed organiser of an
+unrivalled system of bribery and corruption, the Minister of whom a
+recent apologist frankly declares that to young members of
+Parliament who spoke of public virtue and patriotism he would reply
+"you will soon come off that and grow wiser," the autocrat
+enamoured of power who could brook no colleague within measurable
+distance, the man of coarse habits and illiterate tastes, above all
+the man who induced his countrymen to place money before honour,
+and whose administration even an admirer describes as one of
+unparalleled stagnation--such a man must have roused intense
+antagonism in Fielding's generous and ardent nature. For, from the
+days of his first boyish satires to the last energetic acts of his
+life as a London magistrate, for Fielding to see an abuse was to
+set about reforming it. To his just sense of the true worth of
+money, the wholesale corruption of English political life
+accredited to Walpole, the poisoning, to adopt his own simile, of
+the body politic, must have seemed the vilest national crime. There
+could never have been the least sympathy between the mercenary and
+apathetic methods of Walpole and the open-hearted genius of
+Fielding. And, added to such fundamental opposition of character,
+the influence of Fielding's old school friend, George Lyttelton,
+would, at this juncture especially, draw him into the active ranks
+of the Opposition.</p>
+
+<p>Lyttelton was then rising into celebrity as a ready
+parliamentary speaker; a celebrity as yet not wholly eclipsed by
+the youthful oratory of William Pitt, the young cornet of the
+horse, who also had lately taken his seat on the Opposition
+benches. It was the burning patriotism, the lofty character and the
+towering genius of Pitt, the fluency and personal integrity of
+Lyttelton, that led the younger members of the Opposition in the
+House of Commons; while in the Lords another friend from whom
+Fielding was to receive "princely benefactions," the young Duke of
+Bedford, a man of "inflexible honesty and goodwill to his country,"
+attacked Walpole's alleged corrupt practices in the election of
+Scottish peers. With leaders such as William Pitt and Lyttelton on
+the one hand, and the corrupt figure of Walpole on the other, there
+is no wonder that Fielding flung all his generous force into the
+effort to free England from so degrading a domination. Accordingly,
+in 1736, when the young Pitt's impassioned eloquence was soon to
+alarm the <em>Great Man</em>--"we must muzzle that terrible Cornet
+of the Horse," Sir Robert said--and when fierce and riotous
+hostility to the government had broken out in the country over an
+attempted Excise Bill, Fielding appears as a frankly political
+manager of the "New Theatre" in the Haymarket. This small theatre
+stood precisely adjoining the present Palladian structure, as may
+be seen from a print of 1820, showing the demolition of the old
+building and the adjacent façade of the modern "Haymarket."
+According to Tom Davies, who, as an actor in Fielding's company and
+as an author of some pretensions should be reliable, Fielding was a
+managing partner of this "New Theatre," in company with James
+Ralph, "about the year <a name="fnref4-2">1735</a>." <a class=
+"footnote" href="#fn4-2">2</a> And apparently early in <a name=
+"fnref4-3">1736</a> <a class="footnote" href="#fn4-3">3</a> his
+political, theatrical, and social satire of <em>Pasquin</em>
+appeared on the little stage, and immediately captured the
+town.</p>
+
+<p class="centered"><a name="i347"><img src="images/347.jpg" alt="Pasquin"
+width="517" height="500"></a></p>
+
+<p>In <em>Pasquin</em> a perfectly outspoken attack on Walpole's
+corrupt methods is united with a comprehensive onslaught on abuses
+in the stage, law, divinity, physic, society, and on the odes of
+Colley Cibber, sufficient one might suppose to satisfy even
+Fielding's zeal. In an exuberant newspaper advertisement of the 5th
+of March Mr Pasquin is announced as intending to "lay about him
+with great impartiality," and throughout the play Fielding's
+splendid figure may be felt, swinging his satiric club with a
+boisterous enjoyment. The immediate success achieved by the piece
+was certainly not due to any great dramatic excellence; and that so
+loosely knit a medley as <em>PASQUIN, a Dramatic Satire on the
+Times: Being the Rehearsal of Two Plays, viz. A Comedy call'd THE
+ELECTION and a Tragedy, call'd The Life and Death of
+COMMON-SENSE</em> should have achieved almost as long a run as the
+<em>Beggars Opera</em>, shows that the public heartily sympathised
+with the satirist. <em>Pasquin</em> begins with the rehearsal of a
+comedy, called <em>The Election</em>, consisting of a series of
+broadly humorous scenes in which the open and diverse bribery at
+elections, the equally open immorality of fashionable town life,
+the connivance of country dames, and the inanity of the beau monde,
+are satirised. The country Mayor, the Ministerial candidates and
+the Opposition squire drink, bribe and are bribed with complete
+impartiality. A scene devoted to the political young lady of the
+day affords opportunity for a hit at the sickly and effeminate Lord
+'Fanny' Hervey, that politician whom Pope described as a "mere
+white curd of Asse's milk," and of whom Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
+observed that "the world consisted of men, women, and Herveys."
+Pope had stigmatised Hervey as <em>Lord Fanny</em>, and Fielding
+obviously plays on the nickname by references to the value attached
+by certain young ladies to their fans. "Faith," says his comic
+author, "this incident of the fan struck me so strongly that I was
+once going to call this comedy by the name of the Fan." The comedy
+ends with the successful cooking of the election returns by Mr
+Mayor in favour of the Ministerial candidates, for which "return"
+he is promised a "very good turn very soon"; and by the precipitate
+marriage of one of the said candidates to the Mayor's daughter "to
+strengthen his interest with the returning officer."</p>
+
+<p>Having settled the business of the corrupt and corrupting
+Ministry in his comedy, Mr Pasquin proceeds to exhibit the
+rehearsal of his tragedy, <em>The Life and Death of Common
+Sense</em>. Here the satirist, leaving politics, applies his cudgel
+mainly to the prevailing taste for pantomime, a form of
+entertainment introduced it was said some thirty years previously
+by one Weaver, a country dancing master, and already lashed by Sir
+Richard Steele in his couplet:</p>
+
+<p class="quoted">"Weaver, corrupter of the present age,<br>
+ Who first taught silent sins upon the stage."</p>
+
+<p>That the Covent Garden manager, John <a name=
+"fnref4-4">Rich</a>, <a class="footnote" href="#fn4-4">4</a> could
+engage four French dancers, and a German with two dogs, taught to
+dance the <em>Louvre</em> and the <em>Minuet</em>, at ten pounds a
+night, and clear thereby "above 20 good houses," while the Othello
+of Booth and the Wildair of Wilkes were neglected, was sufficient
+to rouse the indignation alike of moralists, dramatists and
+playgoers. Fielding in turn took the matter up with all his natural
+warmth; and in <em>Pasquin</em> he represents the kingdom of the
+Queen of Common Sense as invaded by a vast army of "singers,
+fidlers, tumblers, and ropedancers," who moreover fix their
+standard in Covent Garden, the headquarters of Rich.</p>
+
+<p>Not content with assailing this public folly, the 'Tragedy' of
+<em>Pasquin</em> strikes a higher note by ranging among the foes of
+Common Sense three unworthy professors of Law, Medicine, and
+Religion; callings, as Fielding is careful to point out,</p>
+
+<p class="quoted">"in themselves designed<br>
+ To shower the greatest blessings on Mankind."</p>
+
+<p>Queen Common Sense seemingly receives her deathblow; but her
+ghost finally rises victorious, and so justifies the author's
+contention that his "is almost the only play where she has got the
+better lately." The vigour with which Mr Pasquin here 'laid about
+him,' in such matters as the legal abuses relating to imprisonment
+for debt, may be inferred from the following passage. Queen Common
+Sense is speaking to the representative of <em>bad</em> Law, and
+tells him she has heard that men</p>
+
+<p class="quoted">"unable to discharge their debts<br>
+ At a short warning, being sued for them,<br>
+ Have, with both power and will their debts to pay,<br>
+ Lain all their lives in prison, for their costs.</p>
+
+<p class="quoted"><em>Law</em>. That may perhaps be some poor
+person's case<br>
+ Too mean to entertain your royal ear.</p>
+
+<p class="quoted"><em>Q.C.S</em>. My Lord, while I am Queen I shall
+not think<br>
+ One man too mean, or poor, to be redress'd."</p>
+
+<p>So too, the great genius of Fielding, when in long after years
+harnessed to the drudgery of a London magistrate, held no porter's
+brawl or beggar's quarrel too mean "to be redress'd."</p>
+
+<p>The immediate success of <em>Pasquin</em> attests, as we have
+said, the readiness of London audiences in 1736 to applaud an
+honest and humorous presentation of wicked Ministers, corrupt
+clergy, lawyers, and doctors, inane Laureates, and degrading public
+entertainments. Mrs Delany, gathering London news for Dean Swift,
+writes on April 22, "When I went out of Town last Autumn, the
+reigning madness was Farinelli; I find it now turned on
+<em>Pasquin</em>, a dramatic satire on the times. It has had almost
+as long a run as the Beggar's Opera; but in my opinion not with
+equal merit, though it has <a name="fnref4-5">humour</a>." <a
+class="footnote" href="#fn4-5">5</a> We are told how the piece drew
+numerous enthusiastic audiences "from <em>Grosvenor</em>,
+<em>Cavendish</em>, <em>Hanover</em>, and all the other fashionable
+Squares, as also from <em>Pall Mall</em> and the <em>Inns of
+Court</em>" And on the 26th of May a benefit performance for the
+author was announced as the "60th. Day." The vogue of the satire
+even demanded a key, as may be seen in an advertisement in the
+<em>London Daily Post</em> for May 17: <em>This Day is published,
+Price Four-Pence. A Key to Pasquin, address'd to Henry Fielding
+Esqre.</em></p>
+
+<p>Mr Pasquin's own advertisements for his little theatre are not
+without the zest with which our beef-eating ancestors attacked
+politics, social abuses and one another. The announcement for March
+5, ran as follows:--</p>
+
+<p>"<em>By the</em> Great Mogul's <em>Company of</em> English
+<em>Comedians, Newly Imported</em>. At the New Theatre in the
+Haymarket, this Day, March 5, will be presented</p>
+
+<p class="quoted">PASQUIN,<br>
+A Dramatick SATYR on the times.<br>
+<br>
+Being a Rehearsal of two PLAYS, viz. a Comedy call'd The ELECTION;
+and a Tragedy, call'd The Life and Death of COMMON SENSE....<br>
+<br>
+N.B.--Mr Pasquin intending to lay about him with great
+Impartiality, hopes the Town will all attend, and very civilly give
+their Neighbours what the find belongs to 'em.<br>
+<br>
+N.B.--The Cloaths are old, but the Jokes entirely new...."</p>
+
+<p>In the following month the Opposition was busy over the marriage
+of their chief supporter, the Prince of Wales; and Mr Pasquin duly
+chronicles the event in his advertisements of the 28th of April,
+observing that his company "by reason of the Royal Wedding
+expecting no Company but themselves, are obliged to defer Playing
+till tomorrow." A few days later, on the 12th of May, Sir Robert
+Walpole celebrated the royal marriage by a grand evening
+entertainment given at his house in St James Park; and on the same
+night 'Pasquin' had the audacity to advertise a special
+performance, in the following terms (the "country party," it should
+be understood, was a usual name for Walpole's opponents):--</p>
+
+<p>"For the Benefit of Miss Burgess, who has so zealously espoused
+the Country Interest.... Miss Burgess hopes all Patriots and Lovers
+of their Country will appear in her favour and give all
+encouragement to one who has so early distinguished herself on the
+side of Liberty." In Pasquin's <em>Election</em> scenes, this lady
+played the part of Miss Stitch, a political damsel, opposed to
+Walpole's candidate. Next day appeared an ironic
+counter-advertisement of a performance for "the Benefit of Miss
+Jones (the Mayor's daughter who hath so furiously espoused the
+Court [<em>i.e.</em> Walpole's] Interest....) <em>N.B.</em>--Miss
+Jones does not doubt that all true loyal People will give her all
+Encouragement in their Power, as she has engaged in so unpopular a
+Side and even given away her FAN (which very few young ladies
+would) for the service of the Country: she hopes the Courtiers will
+not let her be out of pocket by the Bargain." Here, again, is
+doubtless a hit at Lord 'Fanny' Hervey; as well as a plain hint
+that those who espoused Walpole's cause might expect ample payment
+for their trouble.</p>
+
+<p>Is there any wonder that a wrathful and uneasy Minister, not yet
+overthrown, shortly took stringent measures against the 'liberty'
+of the stage; measures by which a political stage censorship was
+formally established, and the topical gaiety of our theatre, and
+the pungency of our theatrical announcements, henceforth
+immeasurably dulled.</p>
+
+<p>A few further points of minor interest remain to be noted
+concerning that popular and scathing personage Mr Pasquin. By May
+the company styled themselves "Pasquin's Company of Comedians"; a
+fresh indication of the credit attaching to the performance. In the
+previous month a contributor to <em>The Grub Street Journal</em>
+tells "Dear Grub" that he has seen Pope applauding the piece; and,
+although the statement was promptly denied, a rare print by Hogarth
+lends some colour to a very likely story; for the great Mr Pope,
+the terror of his enemies, the autocrat of literature, was warmly
+on the side of the Opposition. Hogarth depicts the stage of
+Fielding's theatre, and thereon a scene in the fifth act of
+<em>Pasquin</em>, in which the foes of Queen Common Sense are for
+the moment triumphant. The side boxes are well filled; and in one
+of them Mr Pope's deformed figure, apparently, turns away,
+declaring: "There is no whitewashing this stuff." The curious may
+find another plate by Hogarth in which Pope <em>is</em> busy
+whitewashing Lord Burlington; but the drift of the remark for the
+Opposition drama of <em>Pasquin</em> seems obscure. The gains that
+accrued to Fielding from the success of <em>Pasquin</em> are
+indicated by another rare print, that entitled the <em>Judgement of
+the Queen o' Common Sense. Addressed to Henry Fielding Esqre.</em>
+Here, again, it is <em>Pasquin's</em> satire on the prevailing
+furore for pantomime that is chiefly illustrated; as Common Sense
+gives to Rich, the harlequin, a halter, while to Fielding she
+accords an overflowing purse. Supporting Fielding are a long lean
+Shakespeare, and two figures, possibly the distinguished players
+Kitty Clive and Quin; on the opposite side, behind Harlequin, are
+figures representing the bad clergy, lawyers, and doctors satirised
+in the <em>Tragedy</em>; and the whole is balanced by the emergence
+of the ghost in Hamlet, from a trap door in the foreground.
+Doggerel verses, at the foot of the print, celebrate the arrival of
+a bard, "from ye Great Mogul," bringing with him <em>Wit, Humour,
+and Satyr</em>, and receiving the Queen's "honest favour," in
+"show'rs of gold."</p>
+
+<p>Under those golden showers, and with the applause of 'all the
+fashionable Squares' ringing in his ears, we may leave Mr Pasquin.
+Fielding's first venture as political dramatist and theatrical
+manager had proved brilliantly successful; his little theatre, like
+his own Tom Thumb, had assailed a dozen giant abuses, an
+all-powerful Minister among them, and the town had applauded the
+courage and wit of the performance. In the following season, those
+same boards were to witness the author of <em>Pasquin</em> "laying
+about him" with an even greater political audacity.</p>
+
+<p><br>
+<br>
+</p>
+
+<p class="centered"><a name="i348"><img src="images/348.jpg" alt=
+"Cartoon celebrating the success of 'Pasquin'" width="573" height=
+"500"></a></p>
+
+<p>Content, doubtless, with the success of <em>Pasquin</em>,
+Fielding does not seem to have launched any further political
+attacks during the remaining months of 1736. A newspaper
+advertisement of June announces the intention of the 'Great Mogul's
+Company of Comedians' to continue "playing twice a week during the
+summer season," and <em>Pasquin</em> remained occasionally in the
+bills as late as the 2nd of July. The public were advised that
+"This is much the coolest House in Town"; and audiences must have
+been drawn even in August, for in that month one small and
+presumably party play was performed, the <em>New Comi-Tragical
+Interlude call'd the Deposing and Death of Queen Gin</em>. This
+little piece consisted of only two scenes, and was probably a skit
+on a Bill "against spirituous liquors" which Walpole had supported
+earlier in the year. The measure met with violent opposition,
+including petitions from the Liverpool and Bristol merchants; and
+in view of Sir Robert's own notorious excesses with the bottle a
+temperance Bill from his hands may well have roused Fielding's
+ironic laughter. The authorship of the satire is unknown; but the
+moral appears to have been unexceptionable, as <em>Queen Gin</em>,
+in the final scene, "drinks a great quantity of liquor and at last
+dies." Fielding clearly began his second year at the 'little
+theatre' with some social or political exhortation, as the
+following bill appears for January:--"By a Company of Comedians, At
+the New Theatre in the Haymarket, this Day, January 26, will be
+presented a Dramatick Satire on the Times (never performed before)
+call'd The Mirrour." By February "the Original Company who
+perform'd <em>Pasquin</em>" are notified on the bills; and on the
+2nd of March a performance is announced of a <em>Dramatick Tale of
+the King and the Miller of Mansfield</em>, presumably the same
+<em>Miller of Mansfield</em> openly declared by one of Walpole's
+"hired scribblers" to be aimed at the overthrow of the <a name=
+"fnref4-6">Ministry</a>. <a class="footnote" href="#fn4-6">6</a>
+All such preliminary skirmishes, however, served but to introduce
+the grand attack of the <em>Historical Register for the Tear
+1736</em>, the first performance of which may be assigned to the
+end of March <a name="fnref4-7">1737</a>. <a class="footnote" href=
+"#fn4-7">7</a></p>
+
+<p>In the <em>Register</em> we have the most complete display of
+Fielding's vigour as a fighting politician. Here, to recur to Mr
+Pasquin's characteristic phrase, he "lays about him" with a gusto
+and honest frankness quite lost among our own tepid conventions.
+But however hard the hitting, however boisterous the broad humour,
+however biting the irony, it is noteworthy that in this his chief
+political satire, written moreover for a yet unregulated stage,
+Fielding never stoops to the shameless personalities of his day.
+The fashion of the eighteenth-century permitted even the great and
+classical genius of Pope to hurl lines at the persons of his
+opponents that, to modern ears, scarcely bear quotation. Fielding,
+as we know, constantly asserted his intention of throwing not at
+the vicious but at vice; and accordingly, even in this party play,
+flung openly in the face of the Minister, there is but one
+reference (and that only a fling at his "lack of any the least
+taste in polite literature") to the notorious personal failings of
+Sir Robert. It is against the Minister, and not the man, that the
+hot-blooded Opposition dramatist directs his humour and his irony.
+Fielding's manly and generous nature here permitted no virulent
+personalities to blacken his <a name="fnref4-8">pages</a>. <a
+class="footnote" href="#fn4-8">8</a></p>
+
+<p>The irony of the <em>Register</em> is chiefly reserved for the
+<em>Dedication to the Public</em>, designed for the reader at
+leisure; though here Walpole is indicated broadly enough, first in
+the figure of an ass hung out on a signpost, and again as "Old
+Nick," for "who but the devil could act such a part." Here the
+attacks of the Ministerial papers are parried by ironic
+explanations that "The Register is a ministerial pamphlet
+calculated to infuse into the minds of the people a great opinion
+of their ministry," explanations full of admirable fencing and
+excellent hits. And in these dedicatory pages Fielding utters a
+sonorous warning to his countrymen concerning the insidious policy
+that was undermining their very constitution: "... Here is the
+danger, here is the rock on which our constitution must, if it ever
+does split. The liberties of a people have been subdued by
+conquests of valour and force, and have been betrayed by the subtle
+and dexterous arts of refined policy, but these are rare instances;
+for geniuses of this kind are not the growth of every age, whereas
+if a general corruption be once introduced, and those, who should
+be the guardians and bulwarks of our liberty, once find or think
+they find an interest in giving it up, no great capacity will be
+required to destroy it. On the contrary the meanest, lowest,
+dirtiest fellow, if such an one should ever have the assurance in
+future ages to mimick power, and browbeat his betters, will be as
+able as Machiavel himself could have been, to root out the
+liberties of the bravest people." From the solemnities of the
+<em>Dedication</em> we come to the "humming deal of satire," and
+the boisterous action, of the play itself. As in the case of
+<em>Pasquin</em> the form of the drama is that of a rehearsal, a
+form which affords excellent opportunities for such explanatory
+asides as that addressed to the critic who complains of the attempt
+to review a year's events in a single play: "Sir," says the author,
+"if I comprise the whole actions of a year in half an hour, will
+you blame me, or those who have done so little in that time?" The
+long years of Walpole's power were admittedly "years without
+parallel in our history, for political stagnation." Scene one
+discovers five 'blundering blockheads' of politicians, in counsel
+with one silent "little gentleman yonder in the chair;" who knows
+all and says nothing, and whose politics lie so deep that "nothing
+but an inspir'd understanding can come at 'em." The blockheads,
+however, have capacity enough to snatch hastily at the money lying
+on their council table. Walpole's jealousy of power, it may be
+remembered, had driven almost every man of ability out of his
+ministry. Then comes a vivacious parody on the fashionable auctions
+of the day. Lots comprising "a most curious remnant of Political
+Honesty," a "delicate piece of Patriotism," and a "very clear
+Conscience which has been worn by a judge and a bishop" and on
+which no dirt will stick, go for little or nothing, while Lot 8, "a
+very considerable quantity of Interest at Court," excites brisk
+bidding, and is finally knocked down for one thousand pounds. From
+the excellent fooling of the auction, the action suddenly changes
+to combined satire on the Ministry and on the two Cibbers, father
+and son. The Ministry are ingeniously implied to have been damn'd
+by the public; to give places with no attention to the capacity of
+the recipient; and to laugh at the dupes by whose money they live.
+A like weakness for putting blockheads in office and for giving
+places to rogues, and a like contempt of the public, is
+allegorically conveyed in the third act, in which 'Apollo' casts
+the parts for a performance among sundry unworthy actors, and
+declares that the people may grumble 'as much as they please, as
+long as we get their money.' "There sir," cries the author to the
+critic of the rehearsal, "is the sentiment of a great man." The
+<em>Great Man</em> was a phrase, to use Pope's words, "by common
+use appropriated to the first minister"--that is, to Walpole. In
+the next scene the effrontery of the piece culminates in a ballet
+where the Prime Minister appears, leading a chorus of false
+patriots, who, to use Fielding's own words, are set in the 'odious
+and contemptible light' of a set of "cunning self-interested
+fellows who for a little paltry bribe would give up the liberties
+and properties of their country." These worthy patriots are of four
+types, the noisy, the cautious, the self-interested (he whose shop
+is his country) and the indolent ("who acts as I have seen a
+prudent man in company, fall asleep at the beginning of a fray and
+never wake 'till the end o't"). To them enters Quidam, unblushingly
+announced in the play bill as "Quidam, Anglice a Certain Person,"
+in other words Walpole himself. Quidam pours gold into the pockets
+of the four patriots, drinks with them, and then, when the 'bottle
+is out' (a too frequent occurrence at Sir Robert's table) takes up
+his fiddle, strikes up a tune and dances off, the patriots dancing
+after him. But even this is not all. "Sir," says the author, "every
+one of these patriots have a hole in their pockets as Mr Quidam the
+fiddler there knows; so that he intends to make them dance 'till
+all the money is fall'n through, which he will pick up again and so
+not lose one halfpenny by his generosity...." We may suppose that
+the final scene lost nothing in breadth by the acting of Quidam;
+and it is not surprising that the immediate result was the
+subjugation not, alas! of the Ministry, but of the liberty of the
+stage. Walpole's fall was delayed for three years; the destruction
+of the political stage was accomplished in three months.</p>
+
+<p>It is difficult to imagine that any party, in those days of
+comparatively arbitrary power, would venture a public satire so
+unveiled and so menacing as that of the <em>Register</em>, unless
+supported by some confidence in the immediate fall of their
+opponents. Without such confidence the political tactics of such an
+onslaught would be simple foolhardiness. Signs of these false hopes
+are not wanting in the slight, but equally bold, satire on the
+sycophants represented as composing Walpole's <em>levée</em>, which
+was shortly added to the <em>Register</em>. This little sketch, in
+which a protest concerning the damning, early in the year, of
+Fielding's ballad farce <em>Eurydice</em> is combined with the
+political satire, was advertised as follows:--</p>
+
+<p>"EURYDICE HISS'D: or, a Word to the Wise, giving an Account of
+the Rise, Progress, Greatness, and Downfal of Mr Pillage, ... with
+the dreadful Consequence and Catastrophe of the <a name=
+"fnref4-9">whole</a>." <a class="footnote" href="#fn4-9">9</a></p>
+
+<p>We have the authority of Tom Davies, at this time a member of
+Fielding's company, for the statement that "Fielding in his
+<em>Eurydice Hiss'd</em> had brought on the Minister [Walpole] in a
+<em>levée</em> <a name="fnref4-10">scene</a>" <a class="footnote"
+href="#fn4-10">10</a>; and as Pillage is the "very great man" who
+holds the <em>levée</em> in the fragment, the above allusion to an
+expected downfall of Walpole's Ministry seems obvious. Passages of
+similar import to the advertisement occur in the piece itself. Thus
+the play is declared to convey a "beautiful image of the
+instability of human greatness"; and the spectacle is promised of
+the 'author of a mighty farce' at the pinnacle of human greatness
+and adored by a crowd of dependants, become by a sudden turn of
+fortune, scorned, "deserted and abandon'd."</p>
+
+<p>The single scene of the play opens when Pillage is at the zenith
+of his power; a stage direction orders that "The Lèvee enters, and
+range themselves to a ridiculous tune"; a partition of places
+ensues under the allegory of the business arrangements of a
+theatrical manager; and the author explains that by this
+<em>levée</em> scene he hopes that persons greater than
+author-managers may learn to despise sycophants. Close on the heels
+of the <em>levée</em> comes the catastrophe. Not one honest man,
+Pillage sadly admits, is on his side; as his 'shallow plot' opens
+out the first applause changes to hisses; his farce is damn'd; and
+he himself is left consoling the solitude of his downfall by
+getting exceedingly drunk on a third bottle.</p>
+
+<p>The figure of a fallen Minister boozing away his own intolerable
+reflections, was not calculated to pacify that notoriously hard
+drinker, Sir Robert, already soundly pilloried in the
+<em>Register</em>, and severely indited by <em>Pasquin</em>. By the
+end of April the <em>Register</em> had reached its thirty-first
+performance, a good run at that date; and according to an
+advertisement in the <em>Craftsman</em> the satire was still being
+played on the 7th of May. In little more than four weeks, and after
+the alleged perpetration of a treasonable and profane farce called
+<em>The Golden Rump</em>, a Bill for stifling the liberty of the
+stage under a censorship was introduced, had passed through both
+Houses, and received the royal assent. Well might Lord Chesterfield
+exclaim in the brilliant speech which, in Smollet's words, "will
+ever endear his character to all the friends of genius and
+literature, to all those who are warmed with zeal for the liberties
+of their country," that the Bill was not only "of a very
+extraordinary nature, but has been brought in at a very
+extraordinary season and pushed with very extraordinary despatch."
+Concerning the nature of the measure Chesterfield had no doubt. He
+saw its tendency towards restraining the "liberty of the Press
+which will be a long stride towards the destruction of Liberty
+itself"; he pointed out that a Minister who has merited the esteem
+of the people will neither fear the wit nor feel the satire of the
+theatre; he denounced the subjugation of the stage under "an
+arbitrary Court license" which would convert it into a canal for
+conveying the vices and follies of "great men and Courtiers"
+through the whole kingdom; he protested against the Bill as an
+encroachment not only on liberty but also on property, for "Wit, my
+Lords, is a sort of property; it is the property of those that have
+it, and too often the only property that they have to depend
+on."</p>
+
+<p>As a manager of the intrepid little theatre in the Haymarket, as
+well as the author of the most successful of the offending plays,
+the Licensing Act fell with double weight on Fielding. "When I
+speak against the Bill," cried Chesterfield, "I must think I plead
+the cause of Wit, I plead the cause of Humour, I plead the cause of
+the British Stage, and of every gentleman of taste in the Kingdom."
+Looking back over two centuries, we honour Chesterfield in that,
+unknown to himself, he also pleaded the cause of the greatest of
+English humourists. But appeals on behalf of genius and freedom
+were thrown away upon Walpole; the Act received the royal assent on
+June 21 1737; and, in the honourable company of Wit, Humour, and
+Taste, Fielding was forced to retire from the theatre, on the
+boards of which he had for two years so vigorously assailed
+Ministerial corruption and autocracy.</p>
+
+<h2><a name="chapter5">CHAPTER V</a><br>
+<br>
+HOMESPUN DRAMA</h2>
+
+<p class="quoted">"Virtue distrest in humble state support."<br>
+ &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Prologue to <em>Fatal Curiosity</em>.</p>
+
+<p>The Licensing Act of June 1737 thus brought Henry Fielding's
+career as political dramatist to a hasty conclusion; a conclusion
+quite unforeseen by the luckless author, as appears from his
+<em>Dedication</em> to the <em>Historical Register</em>, published
+almost at the moment when the Act became law: "The very great
+indulgence you have shown my performances at the little theatre
+these two last years," he says, addressing his public, "have
+encouraged me to the proposal of a subscription for carrying on
+that theatre, for beautifying and enlarging it, and procuring a
+better company of actors."</p>
+
+<p class="centered"><a name="i349"><img src="images/349.jpg" alt=
+"The Little Theatre in the Haymarket" width="604" height="500">
+</a></p>
+
+<p>Before finally losing sight of the stage on which
+<em>Pasquin</em> and the <em>Register</em> had scored such signal
+success, we may notice some minor incidents of these two years of
+Fielding's administration. His company does not seem to have
+included either Macklin, Quin, or Kitty Clive; but that
+distinguished actress Mrs Pritchard, the central figure of
+Hogarth's charming group called "The Green Room, Drury Lane," is
+said to have made her first appearance on his <a name=
+"fnref5-1">boards</a>, <a class="footnote" href="#fn5-1">1</a> and
+his players also included that man of many parts Tom Davies. Davies
+was a student of Edinburgh University; an actor at Drury Lane and
+elsewhere; a bookseller of whom the elder D'Israeli said 'all his
+publications were of the best kind'; the writer of various works
+including a <em>Life of Garrick</em>; and a particular friend of Dr
+Johnson. In the first year of Fielding's management in the
+Haymarket, Davies was cast for a principal part in George Lillo's
+tragedy <em>Fatal Curiosity</em>; and it is to his pen that we owe
+the only known contemporary reference to the active part taken by
+Fielding himself in the affairs of his theatre.</p>
+
+<p class="centered"><a name="i350"><img src="images/350.jpg" alt=
+"The Green Room, Drury Lane" width="553" height="500"></a></p>
+
+<p>Lillo, a jeweller of Moorfields, had captured the town, a few
+years previously, by his tragedy of common life, <em>George
+Barnwell</em>; and among the dramatists selected by Fielding for
+representation on his stage the most interesting is undoubtedly
+this pioneer of the coming revolution in English literature. For,
+incredible as it may seem, until that first performance of
+<em>Barnwell</em>, no writer, to quote Tom Davies' own words "had
+ventured to descend so low as to introduce the character of a
+merchant or his apprentice into a tragedy." Certain "witty and
+facetious persons who call themselves the town," continues Davies,
+brought to the first night copies of the old ballad on which the
+jeweller's play was based, meaning to mock the new tragedy with the
+old song; but so forcible and pathetic were Lillo's scenes that
+these merry gentlemen were obliged "to throw away their ballads,
+and take out their handkerchiefs." More tears, we learn, were shed
+over this 'homespun drama' than at all the imitations of ancient
+fables by learned moderns. To Fielding this revolution, from the
+buskin'd heroics of the Alexanders and Clelias to the living and
+natural pathos of the tragedy of a poor London apprentice, must
+have appealed with extraordinary force; for it is the especial
+glory of his own genius that, throwing aside all the traditions of
+his age, and 'adventuring on one of the most original expeditions
+that ever a writer <a name="fnref5-2">undertook</a>,' <a class=
+"footnote" href="#fn5-2">2</a> he was to discover a new world for
+English fiction, the world of simple human nature. That expedition
+must have been already forming in his mind when, night after night,
+in the hottest part of the year, <em>George Barnwell</em> was
+playing to crowded houses, and convincing the astonished audiences
+of 1731 that even so low a creature as a London apprentice was
+possessed of passions extremely like their own. Some ten years
+later, when Fielding revealed the first true sign of his own
+surpassing genius in the <em>History of the Adventures of Joseph
+Andrews</em>, he chose for his hero a country footman. The worthy
+City jeweller was, in his own limited measure, the forerunner, on
+the stage, of that new era in English literature created by honest
+Andrews and Parson Adams, Partridge and Mrs Slipslop, Fanny and
+Sergeant Atkinson, Tow-wouse and Mrs Miller, to name but a few of
+Fielding's immortal portraits, drawn from the 'vast authentic book
+of Nature.'</p>
+
+<p>It is no wonder then, to return to Tom Davies, that a play by
+Lillo was announced on the bills of Fielding's theatre within a few
+months of the opening of his management. On May 27, 1736, the
+following advertisement appeared:</p>
+
+<p class="quoted">"Guilt its Own Punishment. Never Acted before. By
+Pasquin's Company of Comedians. Being a True Story in Common Life
+and the Incidents extremely affecting." By the Author of George
+Barnwell.</p>
+
+<p>Davies' part in the play was a chief one, that of young Wilmot,
+and the story of the performance may be given in his own words. "Mr
+Fielding, who had a just sense of our author's merit, and who had
+often in his humourous pieces laughed at those ridiculous and
+absurd criticks who could not possibly understand the merit of
+Barnwell, because the subject was low, treated Lillo with great
+politeness and friendship. He took upon himself the management of
+the play and the instruction of the actors. It was during the
+rehearsal of the <em>Fatal Curiosity</em> that I had an opportunity
+to see and to converse with Mr Lillo. Plain and simple as he was in
+his address, his manner of conversing was modest affable and
+engaging. When invited to give his opinion how a particular
+sentiment should be uttered by the actor he expresst himself in the
+gentlest and most obliging terms, and conveyed instruction and
+conviction with good nature and good manners.... Fielding was not
+content merely to revise the 'Fatal Curiosity,' and to instruct the
+actors how to do justice to their parts. He warmly recommended the
+play to his friends and to the public. Besides all this he
+presented the author with a well written prologue."</p>
+
+<p>This <em>Prologue</em>, which has apparently hitherto escaped
+the collectors of Fielding's <em>Works</em>, seems worthy of a
+reprint here, if only for its characteristic sympathy with virtue
+and distress 'in humble state,' and for the opening tribute to
+'Shakespeare's nature' and to 'Fletcher's ease.'</p>
+
+<p class="quoted">PROLOGUE TO THE FATAL CURIOSITY<br>
+<br>
+ "The Tragic Muse has long forgot to please<br>
+ With Shakespeare's nature or with Fletcher's ease:<br>
+ No passion mov'd, thro' five long acts you sit,<br>
+ Charm'd with the poet's language or his wit.<br>
+ Fine things are said, no matter whence they fall;<br>
+ Each single character must speak them all.<br>
+<br>
+"But from this modern fashionable way<br>
+ To-night our author begs your leave to stray.<br>
+ No fustian hero rages here to-night,<br>
+ No armies fall to fix a tyrant's right:<br>
+ From lower life we draw our scenes' distress:<br>
+ --Let not your equals move your pity less!<br>
+ Virtue distrest in humble state support;<br>
+ Nor think she never lives without the court.<br>
+<br>
+"Tho' to our scenes no royal robes belong<br>
+ And tho' our little stage as yet be young<br>
+ Throw both your scorn and prejudice aside;<br>
+ Let us with favour not contempt be try'd,<br>
+ Thro' the first act a kind attention lend<br>
+ The growing scene shall force you to attend:<br>
+ Shall catch the eyes of every tender fair,<br>
+ And make them charm their lovers with a tear.<br>
+ The lover too by pity shall impart<br>
+ His tender passion to his fair one's heart:<br>
+ The breast which others' anguish cannot move<br>
+ Was ne'er the seat of friendship or of love."</p>
+
+<p>Notwithstanding all the manager's friendly efforts, the play met
+at first with very little success, a failure in Davies' opinion
+"owing in all probability to its being brought on in the latter
+part of the season, when the public had been satiated with a long
+run of <em>Pasquin</em>," but, he adds, "it is with pleasure I
+observe that Fielding generously persisted to serve the man whom he
+had once espoused; he tacked the 'Fatal Curiosity' to his
+Historical Register which was played with great success in the
+ensuing <a name="fnref5-3">winter</a>." <a class="footnote" href=
+"#fn5-3">3</a> We owe no inconsiderable debt to Tom Davies in that
+he has preserved for us this picture of Fielding, actively engaged
+in the stage-management of his little theatre; a picture, moreover,
+that does equal honour to the brilliant wit, the successful
+political satirist, and to that modest, gentle Nonconformist poet,
+the man of whom it was said that he "had the spirit of an old Roman
+joined to the innocence of a Primitive Christian," George
+Lillo.</p>
+
+<p>A few weeks before the production of Lillo's tragedy, and while
+<em>Pasquin</em> was still in the full tide of political success,
+an event occurred of closer import to Fielding's affectionate
+nature than all the applause of the Opposition and the town. This
+was the birth, in April, 1736, of his daughter Charlotte. No
+English writer has left more charming pictures of mother and child
+than those we owe to the tenderness and simplicity of Fielding's
+pen. When we find Squire Western turning, in his latter days, to
+Sophia's nursery, and hear him declaring that the prattling of his
+granddaughter is "sweeter Music than the finest Cry of Dogs in
+<em>England</em>" when we see Captain Booth stretched at full
+length on the floor of his poor lodgings, with his "little
+innocents" jumping over him, we are almost inclined to forgive
+alike the brutalities of the old foxhunter, and the weaknesses of
+the young soldier. Fielding's affection for his children, his
+apprehensions for their ultimate provision, his anxiety in their
+sickness, his grief at the loss of a little daughter, are manifest
+in his pages. If anything could exceed the satisfaction which the
+brilliant success of <em>Pasquin</em> must have given to his
+buoyant nature, it would be the birth of this, the first child
+apparently, of his marriage with the beautiful Charlotte Cradock.
+The entry in the registers of St Martin's in the Fields runs as
+follows: Baptized May 19th, 1736 Charlotte Fielding, of Henry and
+Charlotte, Born April 27th.</p>
+
+<p>The dates of <em>Pasquin</em>, of Lillo's tragedy, and of the
+<em>Historical Register</em>, cover a considerable portion of the
+years 1736, 1737, and their production in a theatre under
+Fielding's own management practically presupposes his presence in
+London at that time. This by no means fits in with Murphy's
+implication that Fielding retired to Stour on his marriage, and
+that, remaining there, he ran through his "little patrimony," in
+"less than three years." A complete country retirement cannot be
+assigned to those busy years in the Haymarket; and in 1736 the
+journey from London to Dorsetshire was no trifling undertaking. But
+it seems quite possible that Fielding and his wife went down to
+their small estate in Dorsetshire for part or all of the summer,
+autumn and winter of both 1736 and 1737. This would cover the
+hunting months, and "hounds and horses," according to Murphy,
+filled a large part in Fielding's country life at Stour; the time
+would be that of the comparatively dull season for the theatre in
+the Haymarket; and, with the year immediately preceding
+<em>Pasquin</em>, we should thus, perhaps, account sufficiently for
+Murphy's "three years". Certain passages in the
+<em>Miscellanies</em>, published long after the pleasant meadows
+and the modest house at Stour--no less than the turmoil of the
+green-room and the crowded political audiences in the
+Haymarket--were things of the past, have a personal ring,
+reminiscent perhaps of such months of "sweet Retirement" in
+Dorsetshire. Thus one of the characters in the <em>Journey from
+this World to the next</em> recalls the change, from a life of
+"restless Anxieties," to a "little pleasant Country House, where
+there was nothing grand or superfluous, but everything neat and
+agreeable"; and how, after a little time, "I began to share the
+Tranquillity that visibly appeared in everything round me. I set
+myself to do Works of Fancy and to raise little Flower-Gardens,
+with many such innocent rural Amusements; which altho' they are not
+capable of affording any great Pleasure, yet they give that serene
+Turn of the Mind, which I think much preferable to anything else
+Human Nature is made susceptible of." To this pleasant picture of
+"rural Amusements," and tranquillity, it is surely not impertinent
+to add this further passage, as a possible echo of Charlotte
+Fielding's thought, well acquainted as she must have been both with
+the "sweetly winding banks of Stour" and with the clamorous
+successes of political drama: "in all these various Changes I never
+enjoyed any real Satisfaction, unless in the little time I lived
+retired in the Country free from all Noise and Hurry."</p>
+
+<p>In the summer or autumn of 1737 the curtain was finally rung
+down on all the 'noise and hurry,' the achievements and audacities
+of Fielding's "little stage"; a few months later, and the country
+retirement at Stour had also become but a memory of that short life
+into which he managed to compress "more variety of Scenes than many
+People who live to be very old."</p>
+
+<h2><a name="chapter6">CHAPTER VI</a><br>
+<br>
+BAR STUDENT. JOURNALIST</h2>
+
+<p class="quoted">"the ... Covetous, the Prodigal, the Ambitious,
+the Voluptuous, the Bully, the Vain, the Hypocrite, the Flatterer,
+the Slanderer, call aloud for the <em>Champion's</em>
+Vengeance."--The <em>Champion</em>, Dec. 22, 1739.</p>
+
+<p>There is no record of when or how Fielding disposed of his share
+in the management of the New Theatre in the Haymarket. But on June
+21 1737, Walpole's Bill for regulating the stage received, as we
+have seen, the royal assent; and there can be no doubt that Sir
+Robert would at once apply his newly acquired powers to removing
+the dances of the fiddler, Mr Quiddam, and the drunken consolations
+of Mr Pillage, from the Haymarket boards, if indeed these gentlemen
+had not anticipated events by already removing themselves. We may
+safely assume that Henry Fielding's career as political dramatist
+came to an abrupt conclusion some time in the summer of <a name=
+"fnref6-1">1737</a>. <a class="footnote" href="#fn6-1">1</a></p>
+
+<p>It remains a matter for speculation why, after seven years spent
+in producing a stream of not unsuccessful social comedies and
+farces, leading up to a final and brilliant success in the field of
+political satiric drama, Fielding should have thrown up the stage
+as a whole, when suddenly debarred from those party onslaughts
+which had occupied but a fraction of his dramatic energies. The
+cause was not any lack of popularity. "The farces written by Mr
+Fielding," wrote Murphy in 1762, "were almost all of them very
+successful, and many of them are still acted every winter, with a
+continuance of approbation." And it is obvious that the fashionable
+vices and follies of the time afforded ample inducement to a
+satiric dramatist to continue 'laying about him,' even when
+Ministerial offences had been rendered inviolate by Act of
+Parliament. Neither was Fielding's sanguine temperament likely to
+be daunted by the single failure of his farce <em>Eurydice</em>,
+which had been damned at Drury Lane on February 19 of this same
+year: "disagreeable impressions," Murphy tells us, "never continued
+long upon his mind." The most satisfactory solution of the matter
+seems to be that now, in the approaching maturity of his powers,
+the 'Father of the English Novel' was becoming conscious that the
+true field for his genius lay in a hitherto unattempted form of
+imaginative narration, and not within the five acts of comedy or
+farce. The entirely original conceptions of a <em>Joseph
+Andrews</em> and a <em>Jonathan Wild</em> may already have begun to
+captivate the vigorous energies of his mind. We have his own word
+for assigning "some years" to the writing of <em>Tom Jones</em>; it
+is therefore not unreasonable to suppose that the conception of the
+first English "Comic Epic Poem in Prose" may date as far back as
+the summer of 1737.</p>
+
+<p>Leaving surmise for fact, it is certain that this year marks the
+dividing line in Fielding's life.</p>
+
+<p>Henceforth he ceases to be the witty, facile, popular dramatist;
+and he enters slowly on his birthright as the first in time, if not
+in genius, of English novelists. To this complete severance from
+the theatre belongs his own remark that "he left off writing for
+the stage when he ought to have begun." Arrived at a late maturity,
+and with accumulated stores of observation and insight,--"he saw
+the latent sources of human action," says Murphy--his genius
+happily turned into a channel carved, with splendid originality,
+for itself alone. After nine years of servitude to the limitations
+of dramatic construction, limitations he was wont to relieve, as
+his friend James Harris tells us, by "pleasantly though perhaps
+rather freely" <em>damning the man who invented fifth acts</em>,
+Fielding was now soon to discover his freedom in the spacious,
+hitherto unadventured, regions of prose fiction. But genius,
+especially genius with wife and child to support, cannot maintain
+life on inspiration alone; and, accordingly, the ex-dramatist now
+flung himself, with characteristic impetuosity and courage, into a
+struggle for independence at the Bar, perhaps the most arduous
+profession, under all the circumstances, that he could have chosen.
+For a reputation as the writer of eighteen comedies, and as the
+reckless political dramatist whose boisterous energies had set the
+town ringing with <em>Pasquin</em> and the <em>Register</em>, the
+fame in short of being the successful manager of <em>The Great
+Mogul's Company of Comedians</em>, was surely the last reputation
+in the world to bring a man briefs from cautious attorneys. And,
+with whatever hopes of political patronage, any temperament less
+buoyant might well have hesitated to embark on reading for the Bar
+at the age of thirty. But "by dificulties," says his earliest
+biographer, "his resolution was never subdued; on the contrary they
+only roused him to struggle through them with a peculiar spirit and
+magnanimity." So, within six months of the closing down of his
+little theatre under Walpole's irate hand, Fielding had formally
+entered himself as a student at the Middle Temple.</p>
+
+<p>The entry in the books of that society runs as follows:--</p>
+
+<p class="quoted">[574 G] 1 Nov'ris. 1737.<br>
+<br>
+<em>Henricus Fielding, de East Stour in Com Dorset Ar, filius et
+haeres apparens Brig: Gen'lis: Edmundi Fielding admissus est in
+Societatem Medii Templi Lond specialiter at obligatur una cum
+&amp;c.<br>
+<br>
+Et dat pro fine</em> 4. 0. 0.</p>
+
+<p>Of the ensuing two and a half years of student life in the
+Temple we know practically nothing, beyond one vivacious picture of
+Harry Fielding's attack upon the law. "His application while a
+student in the Temple," writes Murphy, "was remarkably intense; and
+though it happened that the early taste he had taken of pleasure
+would occasionally return upon him, and conspire with his spirits
+and vivacity to carry him into the wild enjoyments of the town, yet
+it was particular in him that amidst all his dispositions nothing
+could suppress the thirst he had for knowledge, and the delight he
+felt in reading; and this prevailed in him to such a degree, that
+he has been frequently known by his intimates, to retire late at
+night from a tavern to his chambers, and there read and make
+extracts from the most abstruse authors, for several hours before
+he went to bed; so powerful were the vigour of his constitution and
+the activity of his mind."</p>
+
+<p>One of the few pages of Fielding's autograph that have come down
+to us is presumably a relic of these student days. In the catalogue
+of the <em>Morrison Manuscripts</em> occurs this description of two
+undated pages in his hand: "List of offences against the King and
+his state immediately, which the Law terms High Treason. Offences
+against him in a general light as touching the Commonwealth at
+large, as Trade etc. Offences against him as supreme Magistrate
+etc." Were ever genius and wit more straitly or more honourably
+shackled than that of Henry Fielding, gallantly accepting such toil
+as this, toil moreover that must have weighed with double weight on
+a man who had spent nine years in the company of those charming if
+'fickle jades' the Muses.</p>
+
+<p>All efforts have failed to trace where Fielding and his wife and
+child (or children--the date of the birth of his daughter Harriet
+is not known) lived during these laborious months; but that money
+was needed in the summer following his entry at the Middle Temple
+may be inferred from the sale of the property at Stour. According
+to the legal note of this <a name="fnref6-2">transaction</a>, <a
+class="footnote" href="#fn6-2">2</a> "Henry ffeilding and Charlotte
+his wife" conveyed, in the Trinity Term of 1738, to one Thomas
+Hayter, for the sum of £260, "two messuages, two dove-houses, three
+gardens, three orchards, fifty acres of Land, eighty acres of
+meadow, one hundred and forty acres of pasture, ten acres of wood
+and common and pasture for all manner of cattle with the
+appurtenances in East Stour." It does not need a very active
+imagination to realise the keen regret with which Fielding must
+have parted with his gardens and orchards, his pastures, woods and
+commons. Sixty years ago the barn and one of the "dove-houses" had
+been but recently pulled down; and to this day the estate is still
+known as "Fielding's <a name="fnref6-3">Farm</a>." <a class=
+"footnote" href="#fn6-3">3</a></p>
+
+<p>It has been stated, on what authority does not appear, that,
+after leaving Stour, Fielding went to Salisbury, and there bought a
+house, his solicitor being a Mr John Perm Tinney. Whatever be the
+fact as to the Salisbury residence, it is certain that a full year
+after the sale of the Dorsetshire property the Temple student was
+by no means at the end of his resources. For in the following <a
+name="fnref6-4">letter</a> <a class="footnote" href="#fn6-4">4</a>
+to Mr Nourse, the bookseller, dated July 1739, we find him
+requiring a London house at a rent of forty pounds and with a large
+"eating Parlour."</p>
+
+<p><br>
+</p>
+
+<p>"Mr Nourse,</p>
+
+<p>Disappointments have hitherto prevented my paying y'r Bill,
+which, I shall certainly do on my coming to Town which will be next
+Month. I desire the favour of y'u to look for a House for me near
+the Temple. I must have one large eating Parlour in it for the rest
+shall not be very nice.</p>
+
+<p>Rent not upwards of £40 p. an: and as much cheaper as may be. I
+will take a Lease for Seven years. Yr Answer to this within a
+fortnight will much oblige.</p>
+
+<p>Y'r Humble Serv't<br>
+Henry Ffielding.<br>
+I have got Cro: <a name="fnref6-5">Eliz</a>. <a class="footnote"
+href="#fn6-5">5</a><br>
+"July 9th 1739."</p>
+
+<p>This note, written a year before Fielding's call to the Bar,
+suggests that his early married life was by no means spent in the
+"wretched garrett" of Lady Louisa Stuart's celebrated
+reminiscence.</p>
+
+<p>In the September following the sale of his Dorsetshire estate
+Fielding had to regret the death of George Lillo, to whose success
+he had devoted so much personal care and energy, when staging
+Lillo's tragedy <em>Fatal Curiosity</em> on the boards of the
+little theatre in the Haymarket. The close relationship in
+intellectual sympathy between Lillo's talent and the genius of
+Fielding has already been noticed. But apart from this intellectual
+sympathy, the personal worth and charm of the good tradesman is
+noteworthy, as affording striking proof of the quality of man
+chosen by the 'wild Harry Fielding' for regard and friendship. And
+it should be remembered that in those days to bridge the social
+gulf between the kinsman of the Earl of Denbigh and a working
+jeweller, required courage as well as insight. Some time after
+Lillo's death a generous memorial notice of him appeared in
+Fielding's paper the <em>Champion</em>. The writer detects in his
+work "an Heart capable of exquisitely Feeling and Painting human
+Distresses, but of causing none"; and declares that his title to be
+called the best tragic poet of his age, "was the least of his
+Praise, he had the gentlest and honestest Manners, and, at the same
+Time, the most friendly and obliging. He had a perfect Knowledge of
+Human Nature, though his Contempt of all base Means of Application,
+which are the necessary Steps to great Acquaintance, restrained his
+Conversation within very narrow Bounds: He had the Spirit of an old
+<em>Roman</em>, joined to the Innocence of a primitive Christian;
+he was content with his little State of Life, in which his
+excellent Temper of Mind gave him an Happiness, beyond the Power of
+Riches, and it was necessary for his Friends to have a sharp
+Insight into his Want of their Services, as well as good
+Inclinations or Abilities to serve him. In short he was one of the
+best of Men, and those who knew him best will most regret his <a
+name="fnref6-6">Loss</a>." <a class="footnote" href="#fn6-6">6</a>
+In the excellent company of Henry Fielding's friends George Lillo
+may surely take his stand beside the 'good Lord Lyttelton,' the
+munificent and pious Allen, and not far from 'Parson Adams'
+himself.</p>
+
+<p>No record has survived of Fielding's share in the political
+struggles of his party, during his first two years of "intense
+application" to the law. Walpole's power had been sensibly lessened
+by the death of the Queen, and he was losing the support of the
+country and even of the trading classes. The Prince of Wales, now
+openly hostile to the "great man," was the titular head of an
+Opposition numbering almost all the men of wit and genius in the
+kingdom. Lyttelton, Fielding's warmest friend, had become secretary
+to the Prince, and was recognised as a fluent leader of the
+Opposition in the House of Commons. Another friend, John Duke of
+Argyll, had joined the ranks of the Opposition in the Lords. On the
+whole the author of <em>Pasquin</em>, may well have hoped for a
+speedy fall of the "Colossos," with "its Brains of Lead, its Face
+of Brass, its Hands of Iron, its Heart of Adamant," and the
+accession to power of a party not without obligations to the
+fearless manager of the little theatre in the Haymarket. During
+these years the Opposition, even though supported by Pope and
+Chesterfield, Thomson and Bolingbroke, could scarcely fail to
+utilise the trenchant scorn, the whole-hearted vigour, the
+boisterous humour, of Fielding's genius; and Murphy, speaking
+vaguely of Fielding's legal years, says that a "large number of
+fugitive political tracts, which had their value when the incidents
+were actually passing on the great scene of business, came from his
+pen." It is not however till November 1739, two years and a half
+after the pillorying of Walpole on the Haymarket boards, that
+Fielding is again clearly seen, 'laying about' him, in those
+clamourous eighteenth-century politics.</p>
+
+<p>His choice of a new weapon of attack is foreshadowed in the
+noble concluding words of the <em>Introduction</em> to the
+<em>Historical Register</em>; words written on the very eve of the
+Ministerial Bill gagging that and all other political plays: "If
+nature hath given me any talents at ridiculing vice and imposture,
+I shall not be indolent, nor afraid of exerting them, while the
+liberty of the press and stage subsists, that is to say while we
+have any liberty left among us." A few weeks after these words were
+published the liberty of the stage was triumphantly stifled by
+Walpole's Licensing Bill. But even "old Bob" himself dared not lay
+his hand on the liberty of the British Press; and so we find Mr
+Pasquin reappearing under the guise, or in the company, of the
+<em>Champion and Censor of Great Britain</em>, otherwise one
+<em>Captain Hercules Vinegar</em>, a truculent avenger of wrong and
+exponent of virtue, in whose fictitious name a political, literary,
+and didactic newspaper entered the field of party politics on
+November 15, 1739. The paper, under the title of the
+<em>Champion</em>, was issued three times a week, and consisted of
+one leading article, an anti-Ministerial summary of news, and
+literary notices of new books. The first number announced that the
+author and owner was the said Captain Hercules Vinegar, and that
+the Captain would be aided in various departments by members of his
+family. Thus the Captain's wife, Mrs Joan Vinegar, a matron of a
+very loquacious temper, was to undertake the ladies' column, and
+his son Jack was to have "an Eye over the gay Part of the Town."
+The criticism was to be conducted by Mr Nol Vinegar who was
+reported to have spent one whole year in examining the use of a
+single word in Horace. And the politics were to be dealt forth by
+the Captain's father, a gentleman intimately versed in kingdoms,
+potentates and Ministers, and of so close a disposition that he
+"seldom opens his Mouth, unless it be to take in his Food, or puff
+out the Smoke of his Tobacco."</p>
+
+<p>The paper bore no signed articles; but judging from an attack
+levelled against it in a pamphlet of the following <a name=
+"fnref6-7">year</a>, <a class="footnote" href="#fn6-7">7</a>
+Fielding and his former not very worshipful partner in the
+Haymarket management, James Ralph, were the reputed "authors,"
+Ralph being in a subordinate position. Thus, it is stated that
+Ralph, "is now say'd to be the 'Squire of the <em>British</em>
+CHAMPION"; the writer identifies <em>Captain Vinegar</em> and the
+author of <em>Pasquin</em> as one and the same person; he describes
+Pasquin and Ralph as the "Authors of the Champion"; he asserts that
+the old Roman statues of Pasquin and Marfario, "are now dignified
+and distinguished (by The CHAMPION and his doughty Squire RALPH),
+under the Names [<em>sic</em>] of Captain Hercules Vinegar."; he
+prints an address to the "<em>Self-dubb'd Captain</em> Hercules
+Vinegar," and his "Man <em>Ralph</em>"; and appends some doggerel
+verse entitled "Vinegar and his gang." But from all this nothing
+definite emerges as to the precise part taken by Fielding in the
+authorship of the <em>Champion</em>. The pamphleteer accredits a
+fragment of a paper signed C. to the <em>Captain</em>, and
+attributes two <a name="fnref6-8">papers</a>, <a class="footnote"
+href="#fn6-8">8</a> signed C. and L., to "Mr
+Pasquin"--<em>i.e.</em> Fielding; and as the reprint of the
+<em>Champion</em>, which appeared in 1741, announces that all
+papers so signed are the "Work of one Hand," there is so much
+external proof that all such pages in these volumes (numbering some
+sixty essays) are by Fielding. Dr Nathan Drake, writing in 1809,
+more than sixty years after the appearance of the paper, asserts,
+without stating his reasons, that the numbers marked "C." and "L."
+"were the work of Fielding." This view is further supported by the
+opinion of Mr Austin Dobson, that many of the papers signed
+<em>C.</em> "are unmistakably Fielding's."</p>
+
+<p>On the other hand Murphy, writing only twenty-two years after
+the appearance of the paper, but often with gross inaccuracy,
+states that the <em>Champion</em> "owed its chief support to his
+[Fielding's] abilities," but that "his essays in that collection
+cannot now be so ascertained as to perpetuate them in this edition
+of his works." Boswell refers to Fielding as possessing a "share"
+in the paper. A manuscript copy of some of the Minutes of meetings
+of the <em>Champion</em> partners, written out in an
+eighteenth-century handwriting, and now in the possession of the
+present writer, confirms Boswell's note, in as far as an entry
+therein records that "Henry Fielding Esq. did originally possess
+Two Sixteenth Shares of the Champion as a Writer in the said
+paper." One of the lists of the partners of the <em>Champion</em>
+which occur in the same manuscript, is headed by the name of "Mr
+Fielding." Finally, a contemporary satirical print shows Fielding
+with his "length of nose and chin" and his tall figure, acting as
+standard-bearer of the <em>Champion</em>; the paper being
+represented in its political capacity of a leading Opposition
+organ. There is, moreover, the internal evidence of style and
+sentiment. Thus the matter rests; and although it is exceedingly
+tempting to use the <em>Champion</em> for inferences as to the
+manner in which Fielding approached his new craft of journalism,
+and as to his attitude on the many subjects, theological, social,
+political and personal, handled in these essays, the evidence seems
+hardly sufficient to warrant such deductions. It does, however,
+seem clear, taking as evidence the shilling pamphlet already <a
+name="fnref6-9">mentioned</a>, <a class="footnote" href=
+"#fn6-9">9</a> that Harry Fielding, the intrepid and audacious Mr
+Pasquin of 1736-7 reappeared, laying about him with his ever ready
+cudgel now raised to the dignity of a miraculous Hercules club, as
+the <em>Champion</em> of 1739-41. To all lovers of good cudgelling,
+whether laid on the shoulders of the incorrigible old cynic Sir
+Robert, or on those of the egregious Colley Cibber, or falling on
+the follies and abuses of the day, the "Pasquinades and
+Vinegarades" of <em>Captain Hercules Vinegar</em>, and his "doughty
+Squire Ralph," may be commended. And no fault can be found with the
+<em>Captain's</em> declaration, when establishing a Court of
+Judicature for the trial and punishment of sundry offenders in his
+pages, that "whatever is wicked, hateful, absurd, or ridiculous,
+must be exposed and punished, before this Nation is brought to that
+Height of Purity and good Manners to which I wish to see it <a
+name="fnref6-10">exalted</a>." <a class="footnote" href=
+"#fn6-10">10</a></p>
+
+<p>One personal sketch of Fielding himself deserves quotation,
+whether drawn by his own hand or that of another. The
+<em>Champion</em> for May 24, 1740, contains a vision of the
+Infernal Regions, where Charon, the ghostly boatman, is busy
+ferrying souls across the River Styx. The ferryman bids his
+attendant Mercury see that all his passengers embark carrying
+nothing with them; and the narrator describes how, after various
+Shades had qualified for their passage, "A tall Man came next, who
+stripp'd off an old Grey Coat with great Readiness, but as he was
+stepping into the Boat, <em>Mercury</em> demanded half his Chin,
+which he utterly refused to comply with, insisting on it that it
+was all his own." Fielding's length of chin and nose was well
+known; and not less familiar, doubtless, was the 'old Grey Coat,'
+among the purlieus of the Temple. The beginning of the year 1740,
+when the lusty <em>Champion</em> and his cudgel were well
+established, and <em>Captain Hercules'</em> private legal studies
+were drawing to a close, was marked by a fresh outburst of the old
+feud with Colley Cibber. Cibber, already notorious as actor,
+dramatist, manager, the Poet Laureat of "preposterous Odes," and
+the 'poetical Tailor' who would even cut down Shakespeare himself,
+now appeared in the character of historian and biographer,
+publishing early in 1740 the famous <em>Apology for the Life of Mr
+Colley Cibber, Comedian, and late Patentee of the Theatre Royal.
+With an Historical View of the Stage during his Own Time.</em></p>
+
+<p>Cibber, soon to be scornfully chosen by Pope as dunce-hero of
+the <em>Dunciad</em>, had, for the past six years, been pilloried
+by Fielding; and, not unmindful of these onslaughts, he inserted in
+his new work a virulent attack on the late manager of the New
+Theatre in the Haymarket. The tenor of <em>Pasquin</em> was here
+grossly misrepresented. Fielding was described as being, at the
+time of entering on his management, "a Broken Wit"; he was accused
+of using the basest dramatic means of profit, since "he was in
+haste to get money"; and the final insult was added by Cibber's
+stroke of referring to his enemy anonymously, as one whom "I do not
+chuse to name."</p>
+
+<p>Looking back across two centuries on to the supreme figures of
+Pope and Fielding, it is matter for some wonder that these giants
+of the intellect should have greatly troubled to annihilate a
+Colley Cibber. A finer villain, it seems to us, might have been
+chosen by Pope for the six hundred lines of his <em>Dunciad</em> a
+worthier target might have drawn the arrows of Fielding's
+<em>Champion</em>. But Cibber possessed at least the art of
+arousing notable enmities; and the four slashing papers in which
+the <em><a name="fnref6-11">Champion</a></em> <a class="footnote"
+href="#fn6-11">11</a> promptly parried the scurrilities of the
+<em>Apology</em> still make pretty reading for those who are
+curious in the annals of literary warfare. It is noteworthy that
+these <em>Champion</em> retorts are honourably free from the
+personalities of an age incredibly gross in the use of personal
+invective. Fielding's journal, even under the stinging provocation
+of the insults of the <em>Apology</em>, was still true to the
+standard set in the <em>Prologue</em> of his first boyish play</p>
+
+<p class="quoted">'No private character these scenes expose.'</p>
+
+<p>It is Cibber's ignorance of grammar, his murder of the English
+tongue, his inflated literary conceit, rather than his 'private
+character' that are here exposed.</p>
+
+<p>Some time during the latter half of 1740 the whole feud between
+Cibber, Pope, Fielding and Ralph was reprinted in the shilling
+pamphlet, already referred to, entitled <em>The Tryal of Colley
+Cibber</em>. The collection concludes as follows:</p>
+
+<p class="quoted">"ADVERTISEMENT<br>
+"If the Ingenious <em>Henry Fielding</em> Esq.; (Son of the Hon.
+Lieut. General <em>Fielding</em>, who upon his Return from his
+Travels entered Himself of the <em>Temple</em> in order to study
+the Law, and married one of the pretty Miss <em>Cradocks</em> of
+<em>Salisbury</em>) will <em>own</em> himself the AUTHOR of 18
+strange Things called Tragical <em>Comedies</em> and Comical
+<em>Tragedies</em>, lately advertised by <em>J. Watts</em>, of
+<em>Wild-Court</em>, Printer, he shall be <em>mentioned</em> in
+Capitals in the <em>Third</em> edition of Mr CIBBER'S
+<em>Life</em>, and likewise be placed <em>among</em> the <em>Poetae
+minores Dramatici</em> of the Present Age; then will both his
+<em>Name and Writings be remembered on Record</em> in the immortal
+<em>Poetical Register</em> written by Mr Giles Jacob."</p>
+
+<p>The whole production affords a lively example of the
+full-blooded pamphleteering of 1740; and throws valuable light on
+Fielding's repute as the <em>Champion</em>.</p>
+
+<p class="centered"><a name="i369"><img src="images/369.jpg" alt=
+"Theatre Ticket for Fielding's 'Mock Doctor'" width="449" height=
+"500"></a></p>
+
+<p>As regards Ralph's collaboration with Fielding at this period (a
+collaboration further affirmed by Dr Nathan Drake's assertion,
+written in 1809, that James Ralph was Fielding's chief coadjutor in
+that paper) it may be recalled that ten years previously this not
+very reputable American had provided a prologue for Fielding's
+early play, the <em>Temple Beau</em>; and that he appears again as
+Fielding's partner in the management of the Little Theatre in the
+Haymarket. Gradually relinquishing his theatrical ambitions, Ralph
+appears to have turned his talents to political journalism, and
+according to Tom Davies was becoming formidable as a party writer
+for the Opposition in these last years of Walpole's administration.
+Boswell tells us that Ralph ultimately succeeded Fielding in his
+share of the <em><a name="fnref6-12">Champion</a></em>; <a class=
+"footnote" href="#fn6-12">12</a> but we have no definite knowledge
+of what precise part was taken by him in the earlier numbers. No
+continued trace occurs of his collaboration with Fielding; and
+indeed it is difficult to conceive any permanent alliance between
+Fielding's manly, independent, and generous nature, and the sordid
+and selfish character, and mediocre talents of James Ralph.</p>
+
+<h2><a name="chapter7">CHAPTER VII</a><br>
+<br>
+"COUNSELLOR FIELDING"</h2>
+
+<p class="quoted">"Wit is generally observed to love to reside in
+empty pockets."<br>
+ &nbsp;&nbsp;<em>Joseph Andrews</em>.</p>
+
+<p>The last retort on Colley Cibber had scarcely been launched from
+the columns of the <em>Champion</em>, when that intrepid 'Censor of
+Great Britain' and indefatigable law student, <em>Captain Hercules
+Vinegar</em>, attained the full dignities of a barrister of the
+Middle Temple. On June 20, 1740, Fielding was called to the Bar;
+and on the same day the Benchers of his Inn assigned to him
+chambers at No. 4 Pump Court, "up three pair of stairs." This
+assignment, according to the wording of the Temple records, was
+"for the term of his natural life." These chambers may still be
+seen, with their low ceilings and panelled walls, very much to all
+appearance as when tenanted by Harry Fielding. The windows of the
+sitting-room and bedroom look out on to the beautiful old buildings
+of Brick Court, and from the head of the staircase one looks across
+to the stately gilded sundial of Pump Court, old even in Fielding's
+day, with its warning motto:</p>
+
+<p class="quoted">"Shadows we are and like shadows depart."</p>
+
+<p>Here, in these lofty chambers, up their "three pair" of worn and
+narrow stairs, Fielding donned his barrister's gown, and waited for
+briefs; and, possessing as he did an imagination "fond of seizing
+every gay prospect," and natural spirits that gave him, as his
+cousin Lady Mary tells us, cheerfulness in a garret, this summer of
+1740 must have been full of sanguine hopes. He was now
+thirty-three, and his splendid physique had not yet become
+shattered by gout. He had gained, Murphy observes, no
+inconsiderable reputation by the <em>Champion</em>; his position as
+a brilliant political playwright had been long ago assured by
+<em>Pasquin</em>; the party to whose patriotic interests he had
+devoted so much energy and wit was now rapidly approaching power;
+and two years of eager application had equipped him with 'no
+incompetent share of learning' for a profession in which, we are
+told, he aspired to eminence. The swift disappointment of these
+brave hopes, the fast coming years of sickness, distress, and grief
+endow the old chambers with something of tragedy; but in June,
+1740, the shadows were still but a sententious word on the
+dial.</p>
+
+<p class="centered"><a name="i351"><img src="images/351.jpg" alt=
+"The Temple--1738" width="600" height="500"></a></p>
+
+<p>There is practically no surviving record of Fielding's activity
+as a barrister. From Murphy we learn that his pursuit of the law
+was hampered by want of means; and that, moreover, even his
+indomitable energies were soon often forced to yield to disabling
+attacks of illness. So long as his health permitted him he
+"attended with punctual assiduity" on the Western circuit, and in
+term time at Westminster Hall. But gout rapidly "began to make such
+assaults upon him as rendered it impossible for him to be as
+constant at the bar as the laboriousness of his profession
+required," and he could only follow the law in intervals of health.
+Under such "severities of pain and want" he yet made efforts for
+success; and the tribute rendered by his first biographer to the
+courage of those efforts deserves quotation in full: "It will serve
+to give us an idea of the great force of his mind, if we consider
+him pursuing so arduous a study under the exigencies of family
+distress, with a wife and children, whom he tenderly loved, looking
+up to him for subsistence, with a body lacerated by the acutest
+pains, and with a mind distracted by a thousand avocations and
+obliged for immediate supply to produce almost extempore a farce, a
+pamphlet, or a newspaper." Murphy's careless pen seems here to
+confuse the student years with those of assiduous effort at the
+Bar; and the extempore farces are, judging by the dates of
+Fielding's collected plays, no more than a rhetorical flourish: but
+there seems no reason to doubt the essential truth of this picture
+of the vigorous struggles of the sanguine, witty, and not unlearned
+barrister, ambitious of distinction, and always sensitively anxious
+as to the maintenance of his wife and children. We may see him
+attending the Western circuit in March and again in August, riding
+from Winchester to Salisbury, thence to Dorchester and Exeter, and
+on to Launceston, Taunton, Bodmin, Wells or Bristol as the case
+might be; constant in his appearance at Westminster; and
+supplementing his briefs by political pamphlets written in the
+service of an Opposition supported by the intellect and integrity
+of the day.</p>
+
+<p>It is inexplicable that no records, in the letters or diaries of
+his brother lawyers, should have come down to us of circuits,
+enlivened by the wit of Harry Fielding; that practically all traces
+of his professional work should be lost; and that concerning the
+many friendships which he is recorded to have made at the Bar we
+should know practically nothing beyond his own cordial
+acknowledgment of the lawyers' response, three years after his
+call, to the subscription for the <em>Miscellanies</em>. In the
+preface to those volumes he writes: "I cannot however forbear
+mentioning my sense of the Friendship shown me by a Profession of
+which I am a late and unworthy Member, and from whose Assistance I
+derive more than half the Names which appear to this subscription."
+All that we have to add to this, is the unconscious humour of
+Murphy's observation that the friendships Fielding met with "in the
+course of his studies, and indeed through the remainder of his life
+from the gentlemen of the legal profession in general, and
+particularly from some who have since risen to be the first
+ornaments of the law, will ever do honour to his memory." Had the
+names of these worthy 'ornaments' been preserved, posterity could
+now give them due recognition as having been honoured by the
+friendship of Henry <a name="fnref7-1">Fielding</a>.<a class=
+"footnote" href="#fn7-1">1</a></p>
+
+<p>Fielding in his habit, as he lived, is for ever eluding us. His
+tall figure vanishes behind the prolific playwright, the exuberant
+politician, the truculent journalist, the indefatigable magistrate,
+the great creative genius. But at no point does the wittiest man of
+his day, and a lawyer of some repute--'Mr Fielding is allowed to
+have acquired a respectable share of jurisprudence'--escape us so
+completely as during these years of 'punctual assiduity' at the
+Bar. His very domicile is unknown, after the surrender of those
+pleasant chambers in Pump Court, on November 28 1740.</p>
+
+<p class="centered"><a name="i352"><img src="images/352.jpg" alt=
+"Henry Fielding holding the Banner of the 'Champion' newspaper"
+width="719" height="500"></a></p>
+
+<p>The political activities of "Counsellor Fielding" stand out far
+more clearly than do the legal labours of these years of struggle
+at the Bar. The year of his call, 1740, was one of constant
+embarrassment for Sir Robert Walpole, whose long enjoyment of
+single power was now at last drawing to a miserable close. The
+conduct of the Spanish War was arraigned, and suggestions were made
+that the Government were in secret alliance with the enemy. When
+the news came, in March, that Walpole's parliamentary opponent, the
+bluff Admiral Vernon, had captured Porto Bello from Spain, with six
+ships only, the public rejoicing and votes of congratulation were
+so many attacks on the peace-at-any-price Minister. A powerful
+fleet, designed against Spain, lay inactive in Torbay the greater
+part of the summer, through (alleged) contrary winds. And when
+Parliament met in November 1740, an onslaught by the Duke of Argyll
+in the Lords paved the way for the celebrated attack on Sir Robert
+in the Commons, known as "The Motion" of February 13, 1741. A fine
+political cartoon published in the following month, and here
+reproduced, in which Walpole appears as mocking at the death and
+burial of this same "Motion" of censure (which the House had
+rejected), places Fielding in the forefront of the Opposition
+procession. The dead "Motion" is being carried to the "Opposition"
+family vault, already occupied by Jack Cade and other "reformers";
+and the bier is preceded by five standard-bearers, sadly carrying
+the insignia of the party's papers. Among these, and second only to
+the famous <em>Craftsman</em>, comes Fielding's tall figure,
+bearing aloft a standard inscribed <em>The Champion</em>, and
+emblazoned with that terrible club of <em>Captain Hercules
+Vinegar</em>, which, we may recall, was always ready to "fall on
+any knave in company." Behind the bier hobbles, clearly, the old
+Duchess of Marlborough; and Walpole's fat figure stands in the
+foreground, laughing uproariously at this "Funeral of Faction." In
+the doggerel verses beneath this cartoon, it is very plainly hinted
+that "old Sarah," and the Opposition, were in league with the
+Stewarts. In this historic debate, for which members secured seats
+at six o'clock in the morning, the vote of censure on "the <em>one
+person</em>" arraigned was defeated, Sir Robert once again securing
+a majority, and so "the Motion" as the cartoonist depicts, died "of
+a Disappointment." Another cartoon commemorating this ill-fated
+effort is instructive as showing, again in the foreground of the
+fight, a figure wearing a barrister's wig, gown, and bands, and
+inscribed with the words <em>Pasquin</em> and <em>The
+Champion</em>. The Opposition Leader, Pulteney, leads both the
+<em>Pasquin</em> figure, and another representing the paper
+<em>Common Sense</em>, literally by the nose with the one hand,
+while with the other he neatly catches, on his drawn sword,
+Walpole's organ the <em>Gazetteer</em>. In doggerel verses attached
+to the print Fielding is complimented with the following entire
+verse to himself:--</p>
+
+<p class="quoted">"Then the Champion of the Age,<br>
+ Being Witty, wise, and Sage,<br>
+ Comes with Libells on the Stage."</p>
+
+<p>This <em>Pasquin</em> figure has none of the personal
+characteristics of Fielding, neither his "length of nose" nor his
+stately stature, so well suggested in the former print; but, lay
+figure though it be, it symbolises no less clearly the prominent
+part he played in these final political struggles of 1741. Also the
+lawyer's dress with which Fielding is here signified is noteworthy;
+and similar acknowledgment of his new dignities may be seen in the
+reference (in a copy of Walpole's <em>Gazetteer</em> for 1740) to
+the attacks levelled on Sir Robert by "Captain
+Vinegar--<em>i.e.</em> Counsellor F---d--g."</p>
+
+<p>These popular indications of Fielding's activity in the fighting
+ranks of the Opposition, during this last year of Walpole's
+domination, are supplemented by the evidence of his own pen. As
+early as January 1741, and while the grand Parliamentary attack of
+the 13th of February was but brewing, he published an eighteenpenny
+pamphlet, in verse, satirising Sir Robert's lukewarm conduct of the
+war with Spain. To the title of <em>The Vernoniad</em>, there was
+added a lengthy mock-title in Greek, the whole being presented as a
+lost fragment by Homer, describing, in epic style, the mission of
+one "Mammon" sent by Satan to baffle the fleets of a nation engaged
+in war with <em>Iberia</em>. "Mammon" is a perfectly obvious
+satirical sketch of Walpole himself, in the execution of which the
+hand that had drawn the corrupt fiddler "Mr Quidam" and the tipsy
+"Mr Pillage" for the Haymarket stage, has in no wise lost its
+cunning. "Mammon" (Walpole was reputed to have amassed much wealth)
+hides his palace walls by heaps of "ill-got Pictures." The pictures
+collected at Houghton, the Minister's pretentious Norfolk seat,
+were famous; and the notes to the "Text" are careful to depict, in
+illustration, "some rich Man without the least Taste having
+purchased a Picture at an immense Price, lifting up his eyes to it
+with Wonder and Astonishment, without being able to discover
+wherein its true Merit lies." "Mammon" declares virtue to be but a
+name, and his wonted eloquence is bribery. Sir Robert asserted that
+every man has his price. "Mammon" preserves dulness and ignorance,
+"while Wit and Learning starve." Walpole's illiterate tastes were
+notorious. At the close of the poem, "Mammon" accomplishes the
+behest of his master, Satan, by bribing contrary winds to drive
+back the English ships (a satire on Walpole's conduct of the war);
+and he finally returns to hell, and "in his Palace keeps a
+<em>three Weeks'</em> Feast." Sir Robert it may be noted usually
+entertained for three weeks, in the spring, at Houghton. The whole
+is a slashing example of the robust eighteenth-century political
+warfare, polished by constant classical allusions and quotations;
+and doubtless it was read with delight in the coffee houses of the
+Town in that critical winter of 1740-1741. Two characteristic
+allusions must not be omitted. Even in the heat of party hard
+hitting Fielding finds time for a thrust at Colley Cibber, whose
+prose it seems was in several places by no means to be comprehended
+till "explained by the <em>Herculean</em> Labours of Captain
+<em>Vinegar</em>" And there is a pleasant reference to "my friend
+Hogarth the exactest Copier of Nature."</p>
+
+<p>In this first month of 1741, Fielding published yet another
+poetical pamphlet for his party, but of a less truculent energy.
+<em>True Greatness</em> is a poem inscribed to a recruit in the
+Opposition ranks, the celebrated George Bubb Dodington; and when
+the eulogiums offered by the poet to his political leaders, Argyll,
+Carteret, Chesterfield, and Lyttelton, to all of whom are ascribed
+that "True Greatness" which "lives but in the Noble Mind," are
+completed by a description of Dodington as irradiating a blaze of
+virtues, this particular pamphlet becomes somewhat rueful reading.
+For Dodington was, if report speaks true, a pliant politician as
+well as an ineffable coxcomb, although it must be admitted that he
+won eulogies and compliments alike from the perfect integrity of
+Lyttelton, and the honourable pen of James Thomson. Even Fielding's
+glowing lines do not outstrip Thomson's panegyric in <em>The
+Seasons</em>.</p>
+
+<p>A more enduring interest however than the merits or demerits of
+a Dodington, lies in this shilling pamphlet. In it is clearly
+foreshadowed Fielding's great ironic outburst on false greatness,
+given to the world a few years later in the form of the history of
+that Napoleon in villany, the "great" Mr Jonathan Wild. In the
+medium of stiff couplets (verse being "a branch of Writing" which
+Fielding admits "I very little pretend to") the subject-matter of
+the magnificent irony of <em>Jonathan Wild</em> is already
+sketched. Here the spurious "greatness" of inhuman conquerors, of
+droning pedants, of paltry beaus, of hermits proud of their
+humility, is mercilessly laid bare; and something is disclosed of
+the "piercing discernment" of that genius which, Murphy tell us,
+"saw the latent sources of human actions."</p>
+
+<p>We have seen indications in Murphy's careless pages that these
+few years of Fielding's assiduous efforts at the Bar were years
+burdened by "severities of want and pain." It is difficult not to
+admit a reference to some such personal experiences in a passage in
+this same poem. The lines in question describe the Poet going
+hungry and thirsty</p>
+
+<p class="quoted">"As down Cheapside he meditates the Song"....</p>
+
+<p>a "great tatter'd Bard," treading cautiously through the streets
+lest he meet a bailiff, oppressed with "want and with contempt,"
+his very liberty to "wholesome Air" taken from him, yet possessing
+the greatness of mind that no circumstances can touch, and the
+power to bestow a fame that shall outlive the gifts of kings. This
+latter claim foreshadows the magnificent apostrophe in <em>Tom
+Jones</em> on that unconquerable force of genius, able to confer
+immortality both on the poet, and the poet's theme. Was the 'great
+tatter'd Bard,' cautiously treading the streets, little esteemed,
+and yet the conscious possessor of true greatness (did not the
+author of <em>Tom Jones</em> rely with confidence on receiving
+honour from generations yet unborn), none other than the tall
+figure of Fielding himself? At least we know that soon after this
+year he writes of having lately suffered accidents and waded
+through distresses, sufficient to move the pity of his readers,
+were he "fond enough of Tragedy" to make himself "the Hero of
+one."</p>
+
+<p>One of the rare fragments of Fielding's <a name=
+"fnref7-2">autograph</a>, <a class="footnote" href="#fn7-2">2</a>
+refers both to this pamphlet, and to the <em>Vernoniad</em>:</p>
+
+<p><br>
+</p>
+
+<p>"Mr Nourse,</p>
+
+<p>"Please to deliver Mr Chappell 50 of <s>my</s> [<em>sic</em>]
+True Greatness and 50 of the Vernoniad.</p>
+
+<p>Y'rs<br>
+"Hen. Ffielding.<br>
+"<em>April</em> 20 1741."</p>
+
+<p>In June of this year occurred the death of General Edmund
+Fielding, briefly noticed in the <em>London Magazine</em> as that
+of an officer who "had served in the late Wars against
+<em>France</em> with much Bravery and Reputation." The General's
+own struggles to support his large family probably prevented his
+death affecting the circumstances of his eldest son. In the same
+month Fielding appears as attending a "Meeting of the Partners in
+the Champion," held at the Feathers Tavern, on June 29. The list of
+the partners present at the Feathers is given as <a name=
+"fnref7-3">follows</a>:--<a class="footnote" href=
+"#fn7-3">3</a></p>
+
+<p class="quoted">Present</p>
+
+<p class="quoted">Mr Fielding<br>
+ Mr Nourse<br>
+ Mr Hodges<br>
+ Mr Chappelle</p>
+
+<p class="quoted">Mr Cogan<br>
+ Mr Gilliver<br>
+ Mr Chandler</p>
+
+<p>The business recorded was the sale of the "Impressions of the
+Champion in two Vollumes, 12'o, No. 1000." The impression was put
+up to the Company by auction, and was knocked down to Mr Henry
+Chappelle for £110, to be paid to the partners. The majority of the
+partners are declared by the Minutes to have confirmed the bargain;
+the minority, as appears from the list of signatures, being
+strictly that of one, Henry Fielding. After this dissension
+Fielding's name ceases to appear at the <em>Champion</em> meetings;
+and as he himself states that he left off writing for the paper
+from this very month the evidence certainly points to a withdrawal
+on his part in June 1741 from both the literary and the business
+management of the paper. The edition referred to in the Minutes is
+doubtless that advertised in the <em>London Daily Post</em> a few
+days before the meeting of the partners, as a publication of the
+<em>Champion</em> "in two neat Pocket <a name=
+"fnref7-4">Volumes</a>." <a class="footnote" href=
+"#fn7-4">4</a></p>
+
+<p class="centered"><a name="i353"><img src="images/353.jpg" alt=
+"Cartoon showing Fielding, in Wig and Gown, as a supporter of the Opposition"
+ width="719" height="500"></a></p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile the whole force of the Opposition was thrown into the
+battle of a General Election; and it is interesting to note that
+Pitt stood for the seat for Fielding's boyish home, and the home of
+his wife, that of Old Sarum. The elections went largely against
+Walpole, and by the end of June defeat was prophesied for a
+Minister who would only be supported by a majority of sixteen.</p>
+
+<p>It is somewhat inexplicable that at this, the very moment of the
+approaching victory of his party Fielding appears to have withdrawn
+from all journalistic work. "I take this Opportunity to declare in
+the most solemn Manner," he writes, in after years, "I have long
+since (as long as from <em>June</em> 1741) desisted from writing
+one Syllable in the <em>Champion</em>, or any other public Paper."
+And yet more unexpected is the fact that six months later, during
+the last weeks of Walpole's failing power, a rumour should be
+abroad that Fielding was assisting his old enemy. In one of his
+rare references to his private life, that in the Preface to the
+<em>Miscellanies</em>, he seeks to clear himself from unjust
+censures "as well on account of what I have not writ, as for what I
+have"; and, as an instance of such baseless aspersions, he relates
+that, in this winter of 1741, "I received a letter from a Friend,
+desiring me to vindicate myself from two very opposite Reflections,
+which two opposite Parties thought fit to cast on me, <em>viz</em>.
+the one of writing in the <em>Champion</em> (tho' I had not then
+writ in it for upwards of half a year) the other, of writing in the
+Gazetteer, in which I never had the honour of inserting a single
+Word." What can have occurred, in the bewildering turmoil of that
+eighteenth-century party strife, that the author of
+<em>Pasquin</em>, the possessor of "Captain Vinegar's" Herculean
+Club, should have to vindicate himself from a charge of writing in
+the columns of Walpole's <em>Gazetteer</em>. During these last
+months of Sir Robert's power his Cabinet was much divided, and two
+of his Ministers were in active revolt; possibly rumour assigned
+the services of the witty pen of Counsellor Fielding to these
+Opposition Ministerialists. But that some change did indeed take
+place in Fielding's political activities, in these last six months
+of 1741 is obvious from his withdrawal from writing in any "Public"
+paper; and from passages in the last political pamphlet known to
+have come from his pen. This pamphlet, entitled <em>The Opposition.
+A Vision</em>, was published in the winter of 1741, a winter of
+severe illness, and of "other circumstances" which, as he tells us,
+"served as very proper Decorations" to the sickbeds of himself, his
+wife, and child. It is a lively attack on the divided councils and
+leaders of the Opposition, thrown into the form of a dream, caused
+by the author's falling asleep over "a large quarto Book intituled
+'An apology for the Life of Mr Colley Gibber, Comedian.'" In his
+dream Fielding meets the Opposition, in the form of a waggon, drawn
+by very ill-matched asses, the several drivers of which have lost
+their way. The luggage includes the Motion for 1741, and a trunk
+containing the <em>Champion</em> newspaper. One passenger protests
+that he has been hugely spattered by the "Dirt" of the "last
+Motion," and that he will get out, rather than drive through more
+dirt. A gentleman of "a meagre aspect" (is he the lean Lyttelton?)
+leaves the waggon; and another observes that the asses "appear to
+me to be the worst fed Asses I ever beheld ... that long sided Ass
+they call <em>Vinegar</em>, which the Drivers call upon so often to
+<em>gee up</em>, and <em>pull lustily</em>, I never saw an Ass with
+a worse Mane, or a more shagged Coat; and that grave Ass yoked to
+him, which they name <em>Ralph</em>, and who pulls and brays like
+the Devil, Sir, he does not seem to have eat since the hard <a
+name="fnref7-5">Frost</a>. <a class="footnote" href="#fn7-5">5</a>
+Surely, considering the wretched Work they are employed in, they
+deserve better Meat."</p>
+
+<p>The longsided ass, Vinegar, with the worst of manes and the most
+shagged coat, short even of provender, recalls the picture, drawn
+twelve months previously, of the great hungry tatter'd Bard; and
+the inference seems fair enough that for Fielding politics were no
+lucrative trade. A more creditable inference, in those days of
+universal corruption, it may be added, would be hard to find. The
+honour of a successful party writer who yet remained poor in the
+year 1741, must have been kept scrupulously clean. The
+<em>Vision</em> proceeds to show the waggon, with two new sets of
+asses from Cornwall and Scotland (the elections had gone heavily
+against Walpole in both these districts), suddenly turning aside
+from the "Great Country Road" (the Opposition was known as the
+Country Party); and the protesting passengers are told that the end
+of their journey is "St James." Some of the asses, flinching, are
+"well whipt"; but the waggon leaves the dreamer and many of its
+followers far behind. Suddenly a Fat Gentleman's coach stops the
+way. The drivers threaten to drive over the coach, when one of the
+asses protests that the waggon is leaving the service of the
+country, and going aside on its own ends, and that "the Honesty of
+even an Ass would start" at being used for some purposes. The
+waggon is all in revolt and confusion, when the Fat Gentleman, who
+appeared to have "one of the pleasantest and best natured
+Countenances I ever beheld," at last had the asses unharness'd, and
+turned into a delicious meadow, where they fell to feeding, as
+after "long Abstinence." Finally, the pleasant-faced fat
+gentleman's coach proceeds on the way from which the waggon had
+deviated, carrying with it some of the former drivers of the same;
+the mob burn the derelict obstructing vehicle; and their noise, and
+the stink and smoke of the conflagration wake the dreamer.</p>
+
+<p>In this last word of Fielding's active political career (for his
+later anti-Jacobite papers are concerned rather with Constitutional
+and Protestant, than with party strife), a retirement from
+political collar-work is certainly signified. His reasons for such
+a step escape us in the mist of those confused and heated
+conflicts. His detestation of Walpole's characteristic methods may
+very well have roused his ever ready fighting instincts, whereas,
+once Walpole's fall was practically assured the weak forces of the
+Opposition (William Pitt being yet many years from power) could
+have availed but little to enlist his penetrating intellect. And he
+may by now have found that politics afforded, in those days, but
+scanty support to an honourable pen.</p>
+
+<p>But supposition, in lack of further evidence, is fruitless; all
+that we can clearly perceive is that this winter of sickness and
+distress marks a final severance from party politics. The hungry
+'hackney writer' of the lean sides and shagged coat, if not,
+indeed, turned to graze in the fat meadow of his dream, was at last
+freed from an occupation that could but shackle the genius now
+ready to break forth in the publication of <em>Joseph
+Andrews</em>.</p>
+
+<h2><a name="chapter8">CHAPTER VIII</a><br>
+<br>
+JOSEPH ANDREWS</h2>
+
+<p class="quoted">"This kind of writing I do not remember to have
+seen hitherto attempted in our language." &nbsp;&nbsp;Preface to
+<em>Joseph Andrews</em>.</p>
+
+<p>On the 2nd of February 1742 Sir Robert Walpole, the 'Colossos'
+of popular broadsides, under whose feet England had lain for
+exactly thirty years, received his final defeat; and the intrepid
+wit, who for the past eight years had heartily lashed the tyrannies
+and corruptions of that 'Great Man,' enjoyed at last the
+satisfaction of witnessing the downfall of the <em>Mr Quiddam</em>
+and <em>Mr Pillage</em> of his plays, of the <em>Plunderer</em> and
+<em>Mammon</em> of his pamphlets, of the <em>Brass</em> on whom
+many a stinging blow had fallen in the columns of his
+<em>Champion</em>.</p>
+
+<p>With the retirement of Walpole, Fielding's vigorous figure
+vanishes from active political service. No more caustic Greek
+epics, translated from the original "by Homer," no more boisterous
+interludes with three-bottle Prime Ministers appearing in the part
+of principal boy, come from his pen. But scarcely is the ink dry on
+the page of his last known political pamphlet, when Fielding
+reappears, in this Spring of 1742, not as the ephemeral politician,
+but as the triumphant discoverer of a new continent for English
+literature; as the leader of a revolution in imaginative writing
+which has outlived the Ministries and parties, the reforms, the
+broils, and warfares of two centuries. For, to-day, the fierce old
+contests of Whig and Tory, the far-off horrors of
+eighteenth-century gibbets, jails, and streets, the succession of
+this and that Minister, the French Wars and Pragmatic Sanctions of
+1740 are all dead as Queen Anne. But the novel based on character,
+on human life, in a word on 'the vast authentic Book of Nature' is
+a living power; and it was by the publication, in February 1742, of
+<em>The Adventures of Mr Joseph Andrews and his Friend Mr Abraham
+Adams</em>, that Fielding reveals himself as the father of the
+English novel. Henceforth we can almost forget the hard-hitting
+political <em>Champion</em>; we may quite forget the facile
+'hackney writer' of popular farces, and the impetuous studies of
+the would-be barrister. With the appearance of these two small
+volumes Henry Fielding reaches the full stature of his genius as
+the first, and perhaps the greatest, of English novelists.</p>
+
+<p>It is difficult, at the present day, to realise the greatness of
+his achievement. Fielding found, posturing as heroines of romance,
+the <em>Clelias, Cleopatras, Astraeas</em>; he left the living
+women, Fanny Andrews, Sophia Western, Amelia Booth. "Amelia,"
+writes his great follower Thackeray, "... the most charming
+character in English fiction,--Fiction! Why fiction? Why not
+history? I know Amelia just as well as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu."
+Again, Fielding found a world of polite letters, turning a stiff
+back on all "low" naturalness of life. He taught that world (as his
+friend Lillo had already essayed to do in his tragedy of a
+<em>London Merchant</em>) that the life of a humble footman, of a
+poor parson in a torn cassock, of the poverty-hunted wife of an
+impoverished army-captain, of a country lad without known
+parentage, interest or fortune, may make finer reading than all the
+Court romances ever written; and, moreover, that "the highest life
+is much the dullest, and affords very little humour or
+entertainment." And, having rediscovered this world of natural and
+simple human nature, his genius proceeded to the creation of
+nothing less than an entirely new form of English literary
+expression, the medium of the novel.</p>
+
+<p>The preface to <em>Joseph Andrews</em> shows that Fielding was
+perfectly conscious of the greatness of his adventure. Such a
+species of writing, he says, "I do not remember to have seen
+hitherto attempted in our language." We can but wonder at, and
+admire, the superb energy and confidence which could thus embark on
+the conscious production of this new thing, amid want, pain, and
+distress. And wonder and admiration increase tenfold on the further
+discovery that this fresh creation in literature, fashioned in
+circumstances so depressing, is overflowing with an exuberance of
+healthy life and enjoyment. Having entered on his fair inheritance
+of this new world of human nature, Fielding pourtrays it from the
+standpoint of his own maxim, that life "everywhere furnishes an
+accurate observer with the ridiculous." So, into this, his
+newly-cut channel for imaginative expression (to use Mr Gosse's
+happy phrase) he poured the strength of a genius naturally inclined
+to that "exquisite mirth and laughter," which as he declared in his
+preface to these volumes, "are probably more wholesome physic for
+the mind and conduce better to purge away spleen, melancholy, and
+ill affections than is generally imagined." No book ever more
+thoroughly carried out this wholesome doctrine. The laughter in
+<em>Joseph Andrews</em> is as whole-hearted, if not as noisy, the
+practical jokes are as broad, as those of a healthy school-boy; and
+the pages ring with a spirit and gusto recalling Lady Mary's phrase
+concerning her cousin "that no man enjoyed life more than he did."
+To quote again from Mr Gosse: "A good deal in this book may offend
+the fine, and not merely the superfine. But the vitality and
+elastic vigour of the whole carry us over every difficulty... and
+we pause at the close of the novel to reflect on the amazing
+freshness of the talent which could thus make a set of West country
+scenes, in that despised thing, a novel, blaze with light like a
+comedy of Shakespeare."</p>
+
+<p class="centered"><a name="i354"><img src="images/354.jpg" alt=
+"Henry Fielding reading at the Bedford Arms" width="295" height=
+"500"></a></p>
+
+<p>So original in creation, so humane, so full of a brave delight
+in life, was the power that, mastering every gloomy obstacle of
+circumstance, broke into the stilted literary world of 1742; and
+Murphy's Irish rhetoric is not too warm when he talks of this
+sunrise of Fielding's greatness "when his genius broke forth at
+once, with an effulgence superior to all the rays of light it had
+before emitted, like the sun in his morning glory."</p>
+
+<p>Any detailed comment on the literary qualities of the genius
+which thus disclosed itself would exceed the limits of this memoir;
+and indeed such comment is, now, a thrice-told tale. To Sir Walter
+Scott, Fielding is the "father of the English novel"; to Byron,
+"the prose Homer of human nature." The magnificent tribute of
+Gibbon still remains a towering monument, whatever experts may tell
+us concerning the Hapsburg genealogy. "Our immortal Fielding," he
+wrote, "was of the younger branch of the Earls of Denbigh, who drew
+their origin from the Counts of Hapsburg. The successors of Charles
+V. may disdain their brethren of England; but the romance of
+<em>Tom Jones</em>, that exquisite picture of human manners, will
+outlive the palace of the Escurial and the Imperial Eagle of
+Austria." Smollett affirmed that his predecessor painted the
+characters, and ridiculed the follies, of life with equal strength,
+humour and propriety. The supreme autocrat of the eighteenth
+century, Dr Johnson himself, though always somewhat hostile to
+Fielding, read <em>Amelia</em> through without stopping, and
+pronounced her to be 'the most pleasing heroine of all the
+romances.' "What a poet is here," cries Thackeray, "watching,
+meditating, brooding, creating! What multitudes of truths has that
+man left behind him: what generations he has taught to laugh wisely
+and fairly." Finally we may turn neither to novelist nor historian,
+but to the metaphysical philosopher, "How charming! How wholesome
+is Fielding!" says Coleridge, "to take him up after Richardson is
+like emerging from a sick-room, heated by stoves, into an open lawn
+on a breezy day in May." Such are some estimates of the quality of
+Fielding's genius, given by men not incompetent to appraise him. To
+analyse that genius is, as has been said, beyond the scope of these
+pages. But Fielding's first novel is not only a revelation of
+genius. It frankly reveals much of the man behind the pen; and in
+its pages, and in those of the still greater novels yet to come, we
+may learn more of the true Fielding than from all the fatuities and
+surmises of his early biographers.</p>
+
+<p>Thus in <em>Joseph Andrews</em> for the first time we come
+really close to the splendid and healthy energy, the detachment,
+the relentless scorn, the warmth of feeling, that characterised
+Henry Fielding under all circumstances and at all times of his
+life. This book, as we have seen, was written under every outward
+disadvantage, and yet its pages ring with vigour and laughter. Here
+is the same militant energy that had nerved Fielding to fight the
+domination of a corrupt (and generally corrupting) Minister for
+eight lean years; and which in later life flung itself into a
+chivalrous conflict with current social crime and misery. Here is a
+detachment hardly less than that which fills the pages of the last
+<em>Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon</em> with a courage, a gaiety, a
+serenity that no suffering and hardship, and not even the near
+approach of death itself, could disturb. Here, again, Fielding
+consciously avows a moral purpose in his art; the merciless scorn
+of his insight in depicting a vicious man or woman is actuated, he
+expressly declares, by a motive other than that of 'art for art's
+sake.' And as this motive is scarce perceptible in the lifelike
+reality of the figures whom we see breathing in actual flesh and
+blood in his pages, and yet is of the first importance for
+understanding the character of their creator, the great novelist's
+confession of this portion of his literary faith may be quoted in
+full. The passage occurs in the preface to Book iii. of <em>Joseph
+Andrews</em>. Fielding is afraid, he explains, that his figures may
+be taken for particular portraits, whereas it is the type and not
+the individual that concerns him. "I declare here," he solemnly
+affirms, "once for all, I describe not Men, but Manners; not an
+Individual, but a Species." And he proceeds to make example of the
+lawyer in the stage coach as not indeed confined "to one
+Profession, one Religion, or one Country; but when the first mean
+selfish Creature appeared on the human Stage, who made Self the
+Centre of the whole Creation; would give himself no Pain, incur no
+Damage, advance no Money to assist, or preserve his
+Fellow-Creatures; then was our Lawyer born; and while such a Person
+as I have described, exists on Earth, so long shall he remain upon
+it." Not therefore "to mimick some little obscure Fellow" does this
+lawyer appear on Fielding's pages, but "for much more general and
+noble Purposes; not to expose one pitiful Wretch, to the small and
+contemptible Circle of his Acquaintance; but to hold the Glass to
+thousands in their Closets that they may contemplate their
+Deformity, and endeavour to reduce it."</p>
+
+<p>Yet another characteristic of Fielding's personality appears in
+the conscious control exercised over all the humorous and satiric
+zest of <em>Joseph Andrews</em>. Here is no unseemly riot of
+ridicule. The ridiculous he declares in his philosophic preface is
+the subject-matter of his pages; but he will suffer no imputation
+of ridiculing vice or calamity. "Surely," he cries, "he hath a very
+ill-framed Mind, who can look on Ugliness, Infirmity, or Poverty,
+as ridiculous in themselves"; and he formally declares that such
+vices as appear in this work "are never set forth as the objects of
+Ridicule but Detestation." What then were the limits which Fielding
+imposed on himself in treating this, his declared subject matter of
+the ridiculous? Hypocrisy and vanity, he says, appearing in the
+form of affectation; "Great Vices are the proper Object of our
+Detestation, smaller Faults of our Pity: but Affectation appears to
+me the only true Source of the Ridiculous." Such is Fielding's
+sensitive claim for the decent limits of ridicule; and such the
+consciously avowed subject of his work. But the force of his
+genius, the depth of his insight, the warmth of his detestations
+and affections, soon carried him far beyond any mere study in the
+ridicule of vain and hypocritical affectation. The immortal figure
+of Parson Adams, striding through these pages, tells us infinitely
+much of the character of his creator, but nothing at all of the
+nature of affectation. The "rural innocence of a Joseph Andrews,"
+to quote Miss Fielding's happy <a name="fnref8-1">phrase</a> <a
+class="footnote" href="#fn8-1">1</a> and of his charming Fanny, are
+as natural and fresh as Fielding's own Dorsetshire meadows, but
+instruct us not at all in vanity or hypocrisy.</p>
+
+<p>To turn to the individual figures of <em>Joseph Andrews</em>;
+what do they tell us of the man who called them into being. First
+and foremost, it is Parson Adams who unquestionably dominates the
+book. However much the licentious grossness of Lady Booby, the
+shameless self-seeking of her waiting-woman, Mrs Slipslop, the
+swinish avarice of Parson Trulliber, the calculating cruelty of Mrs
+Tow-wouse, to name but some of the vices here exposed, blazon forth
+that 'enthusiasm for righteousness' which constantly moved Fielding
+to exhibit the devilish in human nature in all its 'native
+Deformity,' it is still Adams who remains the central figure of the
+great comic epic. Concerning the good parson, appreciation has
+stumbled for adequate words, from the tribute of Sir Walter Scott
+to that of Mr Austin Dobson. "The worthy parson's learning," wrote
+Sir Walter, "his simplicity, his evangelical purity of heart, and
+benevolence of disposition, are so admirably mingled with pedantry,
+absence of mind, and with the habit of athletic and gymnastic
+exercise, ... that he may be safely termed one of the richest
+productions of the Muse of Fiction." And to Mr Austin Dobson, this
+poor curate, compact as he is of the oddest contradictions, the
+most diverting eccentricities, is "assuredly a noble example of
+primitive goodness, and practical Christianity." We love Adams, as
+Fielding intended that we should, for his single-hearted goodness,
+his impulsiveness, his boundless generosity, his muscular courage;
+we are never allowed to forget the dignity of his office however
+ragged be the cassock that displays it; we admire his learning; we
+delight in his oddities. But above all he reflects honour on his
+creator by the inflexible integrity of his goodness. A hundred
+tricks are played on him by shallow knaves, and the result is but
+to convince us of the folly of knavery. His ill-clad and uncouth
+figure moves among the vicious and prosperous, and we perceive the
+ugliness of vice, and the poverty of wealth. With his nightcap
+drawn over his wig, a short grey coat half covering a torn cassock,
+the crabstick so formidable to ruffians in his hand, and his
+beloved AEschylus in his pocket, Adams smoking his pipe by the inn
+fire, or surrounded by his "children" as he called his parishioners
+vying "with each other in demonstrations of duty and love," fully
+justifies John Forster's comment on Fielding's manly habit of
+"discerning what was good and beautiful in the homeliest aspects of
+humanity." Before the true dignity of Abraham Adams, whether he be
+publicly rebuking the Squire and Pamela for laughing in church, or
+emerging unstained from adventures with hogs-wash and worse, the
+accident of his social position as a poor curate, contentedly
+drinking ale in the squire's kitchen, falls into its true
+insignificance.</p>
+
+<p class="centered"><a name="i355"><img src="images/355.jpg" alt=
+"Assignment for 'Joseph Andrews'" width="750" height="512"></a></p>
+
+<p>Rumour assigned to Fielding's friend and neighbour at East
+Stour, the Rev. William Young, the honour of being the original of
+Parson Adams; and it is a pleasant coincidence that the legal
+assignment for <em>Joseph Andrews</em>, here reproduced in
+facsimile, should bear the signature, as witness, of the very man
+whose "innate goodness" is there immortalised. If there be any
+detractors of Fielding's personal character still to be found, they
+may be advised to remember the truism that a man is known by his
+friends, and to apply themselves to a study of William Young in the
+figure of Parson Adams.</p>
+
+<p>Of the charming picture of rustic beauty and innocence presented
+in the blushing and warmhearted Fanny less need be said; for
+Fielding's ideal in womanhood was soon to be more fully revealed in
+the lovely creations of Sophia and Amelia. And honest Joseph
+himself, his courage and fidelity, his constancy, his tenderness
+and chivalrous passion for Fanny, his affection for Mr Adams, his
+voice "too musical to halloo to the dogs," his fine figure and
+handsome face, concerns us here chiefly as demonstrating that
+Fielding, when he chose, could display both virtue and manliness as
+united in the person of a perfectly robust English country lad.</p>
+
+<p>These then, are some of the figures that Fielding loved to
+create, breathing into their simple virtues a vigorous human life,
+fresh as Coleridge said, as the life of a Spring morning. In these
+joyous creations of his heart and of his genius, the great novelist
+assuredly gives us a perfectly unconscious revelation of his own
+character. And among the changing scenes of this human comedy one
+incident must not be forgotten. In the famous episode of the stage
+coach, all Fielding's characteristic and relentless hatred of
+respectable hypocrisy, all his love of innate if ragged virtue is
+betrayed in the compass of a few pages: in those pages in which we
+see the robbed, half-murdered, and wholly naked Joseph lifted in
+from the wayside ditch amid the protests and merriment of the
+respectable passengers; and his shivering body at last wrapped in
+the coat of the postilion,--"a Lad who hath since been transported
+for robbing a Hen-roost,"--who voluntarily stripped off a
+greatcoat, his only garment, "at the same time swearing a great
+Oath (for which he was rebuked by the Passengers) 'that he would
+rather ride in his Shirt all his Life, than suffer a
+Fellow-Creature to lie in so miserable a Condition.'"</p>
+
+<p>Much has been written concerning the notorious feud between
+Fielding and Richardson, a feud ostensibly based upon the fact that
+<em>Joseph Andrews</em> was, to some extent, frankly a parody of
+Richardson's famous production <em>Pamela</em>. In 1740, two years
+before the appearance of <em>Joseph Andrews</em> that middle-aged
+London printer had published <em>Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded</em>,
+achieving thereby an enormous vogue. That amazing mixture of
+sententious moralities, of prurience, and of mawkish sentiment,
+became the rage of the Town. Admirers ranked it next to the Bible;
+the great Mr Pope declared that it would "do more good than many
+volumes of Sermons"; and it was even translated into French and
+Italian, becoming, according to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who did
+not love Richardson, "the joy of the chambermaids of all nations."
+That all this should have been highly agreeable to the good
+Richardson, a 'vegetarian and water-drinker, a worthy,
+domesticated, fussy, and highly nervous little man,' ensconced in a
+ring of feminine flatterers whom he called 'my ladies,' is obvious;
+and proportionate was his wrath with Fielding's <em>Joseph
+Andrews</em>, of which the early chapters, at least, are a
+perfectly frank, and to Richardson audacious, satire on
+<em>Pamela</em>. The caricature was indeed frank. Joseph is
+introduced as Pamela's brother; he writes letters to that virtuous
+maid-servant; and the Mr B. of Richardson becomes the Squire Booby
+of Fielding. But there can be hardly two opinions as to such
+ridicule being an entirely justified and wholesome antidote to the
+pompous and nauseous original. To Fielding's robust and masculine
+genius, says Mr Austin Dobson, "the strange conjunction of purity
+and precaution in Richardson's heroine was a thing unnatural and a
+theme for inextinguishable Homeric laughter." To Thackeray's
+sympathetic imagination the feud was the inevitable outcome of the
+difference between the two men. Fielding, he says "couldn't do
+otherwise than laugh at the puny cockney bookseller, pouring out
+endless volumes of sentimental twaddle, and hold him up to scorn as
+a moll-coddle and a milksop. His genius had been nursed on sack
+posset, and not on dishes of tea. His muse had sung the loudest in
+tavern choruses, and had seen the daylight streaming in over
+thousands of empty bowls, and reeled home to chambers on the
+shoulders of the watchman. Richardson's goddess was attended by old
+maids and dowagers, and fed on muffins and bohea. 'Milksop!' roars
+Harry Fielding, clattering at the timid shop-shutters. 'Wretch!
+Monster! Mohock!' shrieks the sentimental author of
+<em>Pamela</em>; and all the ladies of his court cackle out an
+affrighted chorus."</p>
+
+<p>Looking back on the incident it seems matter for yet more
+Homeric laughter that Richardson should have called the resplendent
+genius of Fielding "low." But the feud, it may be surmised, led to
+much of the odium that seems to have attached to Fielding's name
+amongst some of his contemporaries. Feeling ran high and was
+vividly expressed in those days; and when cousinly admiration for
+Fielding was coupled by an excellent comment on Richardson's book
+as the delight of the maidservants of all nations, personal retorts
+in favour of the popular sentimentalist were but too likely to
+ensue. Apart from this aspect of the matter the ancient quarrel
+does not seem a very essential incident in Fielding's life.</p>
+
+<p>The lack of means indicated by Fielding himself, in his
+reminiscence of this winter of 1741-2 as darkened by the illness of
+himself, his wife and of a favourite child, attended "with other
+Circumstances, which served as very proper Decorations to such a
+Scene," received but little alleviation from the publication of
+<em>Joseph Andrews</em>. The price paid for the book by Andrew
+Millar was but £183, 11s.; and there is no record that Millar
+supplemented the original sum, as he did in the case of <em>Tom
+Jones</em>, when the sale was assured. The first edition appears to
+have consisted of 1,500 copies. A second edition, of 2,000 copies
+was issued in the same <a name="fnref8-2">summ</a>er, <a class=
+"footnote" href="#fn8-2">2</a> and a third edition followed in
+1743.</p>
+
+<p>Fielding's formal declaration that he described "not men but
+manners"; his solemn protest, in the preface to this very book,
+that "I have no Intention to vilify or asperse anyone: for tho'
+everything is copied from the Book of Nature, and scarce a
+Character or Action produced which I have not taken from my own
+Observations and Experience, yet I have used the utmost Care to
+obscure the Persons by such different Circumstances, Degrees, and
+Colours, that it will be impossible to guess at them with any
+degree of Certainty"--represent rather his intention than the
+result. The portraits of "manners" by the "prose Homer of human
+nature" were too lifelike to escape frequent identification. Thus
+not only was the prototype of Parson Adams discovered, but that of
+his antithesis, the pig-breeding Mr Trulliber, was thought to exist
+in the person of the Rev. Mr Oliver, the Dorsetshire curate under
+whose tutelage Fielding had been placed when a boy. Tradition also
+connects Mr Peter Pounce with the Dorsetshire usurer Peter <a name=
+"fnref8-3">Walter</a>. <a class="footnote" href="#fn8-3">3</a></p>
+
+<p>Two echoes have come down to us of the early appreciation of
+this novel. A translation of <em>Joseph Andrews</em>, "par une Dame
+Angloise," and bound for Marie Antoinette by Derome le Jeune, was
+placed on the shelves of her library in the Petit <a name=
+"fnref8-4">Trianon</a>. <a class="footnote" href="#fn8-4">4</a>
+And, seven years after the appearance of <em>Joseph Andrews</em>,
+Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, when sixty years old, writes from her
+Italian exile: "I have at length received the box with the books
+enclosed, for which I give you many thanks as they amuse me very
+much. I gave a very ridiculous proof of it, fitter indeed for my
+granddaughter than myself. I returned from a party on horseback;
+and after having rode 20 miles, part of it by moonshine, it was ten
+at night when I found the box arrived. I could not deny myself the
+pleasure of opening it; and falling upon Fielding's works was fool
+enough to sit up all night reading. I think Joseph Andrews better
+than his <a name="fnref8-5">Foundling</a>." <a class="footnote"
+href="#fn8-5">5</a></p>
+
+<h2><a name="chapter9">CHAPTER IX</a><br>
+<br>
+THE <em>Miscellanies</em> AND <em>Jonathan Wild</em></h2>
+
+<p class="quoted">"Is there on earth a greater object of contempt
+than the poor scholar to a splendid beau; unless perhaps the
+splendid beau to the poor scholar."<br>
+ &nbsp;&nbsp;<em>Covent Garden Journal</em>, No. 61.</p>
+
+<p>If the 'sunrise' of Fielding's genius did indeed shine forth on
+the publication of <em>Joseph Andrews</em>, it was a sunrise
+attended by dark clouds. For, with the appearance of these two
+little volumes, we enter on the most obscure period of the great
+novelist's life, and on that in which he appears to have suffered
+the severest 'invasions of Fortune.'</p>
+
+<p>As regards the winter immediately preceding the appearance of
+that joyous epic of the highway, he himself has told us that he was
+'laid up in the gout, with a favourite Child dying in one Bed, and
+my Wife in a Condition very little better, on another, attended
+with other Circumstances, which served as very proper Decorations
+to such a Scene.' In the following February, an entry in the
+registers of St Martin's in the Fields records the burial of a
+child "Charlott Fielding." So it is probable that the very month of
+the appearance of his first novel brought a private grief to
+Fielding the poignancy of which may be measured by his frequent
+betrayals of an anxious affection for his children.</p>
+
+<p>To such distresses of sickness and anxiety, there was now,
+doubtless, added the further misery of scanty means. For a few
+months later an advertisement (hitherto overlooked) appears in the
+<em>Daily Post</em>, showing that Fielding was already eagerly
+pushing forward the publication of the <em>Miscellanies</em>, that
+incoherent collection which is itself proof enough that necessity
+alone had called it into being. "The publication of these Volumes,"
+he says, "hath been hitherto retarded by the Author's indisposition
+last Winter, and a train of melancholy Accidents, scarce to be
+parallel'd; but he takes this opportunity to assure his Subscribers
+that he will most certainly deliver them within the time mentioned
+in his last receipts, viz. by the 25th December <a name=
+"fnref9-1">next</a>." <a class="footnote" href="#fn9-1">1</a></p>
+
+<p>We may take it, then, that the first six months of 1742 were
+attended by no easy circumstances; and, accordingly, during these
+months Fielding's hard-worked pen produced no less than three very
+different attempts to win subsistence from those humoursome jades
+the nine Muses. To take these efforts in order of date, first
+comes, in March, his sole invocation of the historic Muse, the
+<em>Full Vindication of the Dutchess Dowager of Marlborough</em>,
+published almost before Joseph Andrews was clear of the printers,
+and sold at the modest price of one shilling. We learn from the
+title page that the <em>Vindication</em> was called forth by a
+"late <em>scurrilous</em> Pamphlet," containing "<em>base</em> and
+<em>malicious</em> Invectives" against Her Grace. Together with
+Fielding's natural love for fighting, a family tie may have given
+him a further incitement to draw his pen on behalf of the aged
+Duchess. For his first cousin, Mary Gould, the only child of his
+uncle James Gould, M.P. for Dorchester, had married General Charles
+Churchill, brother to the great Duke. Whether this cousinship by
+marriage led to any personal acquaintance between 'old Sarah' and
+Harry Fielding we do not know; and the muniment room at Blenheim
+affords no trace of any correspondence between the Duchess and her
+champion. But certainly the <em>Vindication</em> lacks nothing of
+personal warmth. Fielding tells us that he has never contemplated
+the character of that 'Glorious Woman' but with admiration; and he
+defends her against the attacks of her opponents through forty
+strenuous pages, in which the curious may still hear the echoes of
+the controversies that raged round the Duke and his Duchess, their
+mistress Queen Anne, and other actors of the Revolution. The
+<em>Vindication</em> appeared in March; and a second edition was
+called for during the year. As far as Millar's payment goes
+Fielding, as appears from the assignment in <em>Joseph
+Andrews</em>, received only £5; and it is to be feared that the
+Duchess (who is said to have paid the historian Hooke £5000 for his
+assistance in the production of her own celebrated pamphlet) placed
+but little substantial acknowledgment in Fielding's lean purse. Her
+champion at any rate had, within three years, modified the views
+expressed in this <em>Vindication</em>, concerning the munificence
+of Her Grace's private generosity; for in his journal the <em>True
+Patriot</em>, there occurs the following obituary notice, "A Man
+supposed to be a Pensioner of the late Duchess of Marlborough....
+He is supposed to have been Poor."</p>
+
+<p>This same month of March marked Fielding's final severance with
+the <em>Champion</em>. The partners of that paper, meeting on March
+the 1st, ordered "that Whereas Henry Fielding Esq., did Originally
+possess Two Sixteenth Shares of the Champion as a Writer in the
+said paper and having withdrawn himself from that Service for above
+Twelve Months past and refused his Assistance in that Capacity
+since which time Mr Ralph has solely Transacted the said Business.
+It is hereby Declared that the said Writing Shares shall devolve on
+and be vested in Mr James <a name="fnref9-2">Ralph</a>." <a class=
+"footnote" href="#fn9-2">2</a> It is curious that Fielding did not
+add to his impoverished exchequer by selling his <em>Champion</em>
+shares.</p>
+
+<p>Having sought assistance from the Muse of history in March,
+Fielding returns to his old charmer the dramatic Muse in May;
+assisting in that month to produce a farce, at Drury Lane, entitled
+<em>Miss Lucy in Town</em>. In this piece, he tells us, he had a
+very small share. He also received for it a very small
+remuneration; £10, 10s. being recorded as the price paid by Andrew
+Millar.</p>
+
+<p>In the following month Fielding's inexhaustible energies were
+off on a new tack, producing, in startling contrast to <em>Miss
+Lucy</em>, a classical work, executed in collaboration with his
+friend the Rev. William Young, otherwise Parson Adams. The two
+friends contemplated a series of translations of all the eleven
+comedies of Aristophanes; adorned by notes containing "besides a
+full Explanation of the Author, a compleat History of the Manners
+and Customs of the Ancient Greeks particularly of the Athenians";
+and in June they inaugurated their scheme with the work in
+question, a translation of the <a name="fnref9-3">Plutus</a>. <a
+class="footnote" href="#fn9-3">3</a> William Young, says Hutchins,
+"had much learning which was the cement of Mr Fielding's connexion
+with him"; and Fielding's own scholarship, irradiated by his wit,
+would assuredly have made him an ideal translator of Greek comedy.
+But the public of 1742 appears to have afforded very little
+encouragement to this scheme, preferring that "pretty, dapper,
+brisk, smart, pert, Dialogue" of their own comedies, to which
+allusion is made in the authors' preface.</p>
+
+<p>The rest of the year shows nothing from a pen somewhat exhausted
+perhaps with the production of <em>Joseph Andrews</em> of the
+historical <em>Vindication</em>, and of parts of a Drury Lane farce
+and of the <em>Plutus</em>, all within five months. And the winter
+following, in which the promised <em>Miscellanies</em> should have
+appeared, brought, in the renewed illness of his wife, an anxiety
+that paralysed even Fielding's buoyant vigour. This we learn from
+his own touching apology for the further delay of those volumes; a
+delay due, their author tells us, to "the dangerous Illness of one
+from whom I draw all the solid Comfort of my Life, during the
+greatest Part of this Winter. This, as it is most sacredly true, so
+will it, I doubt not, sufficiently excuse the Delay to all who know
+<a name="fnref9-4">me</a>." <a class="footnote" href="#fn9-4">4</a>
+Early in the following year, after this second winter of crushing
+anxiety, and under an urgent pressure for means, Fielding tried
+again his familiar <em>rôle</em> of popular dramatist, giving his
+public the husks they preferred, in the comedy of the <em>Wedding
+Day</em>. This comedy was produced at Drury Lane on the 17th of
+February 1743.</p>
+
+<p>If Fielding had failed to descend to the taste of the Town in
+offering them Aristophanes, he flung them in the <em>Wedding
+Day</em> something too imperfect for acceptance, even by the
+'critic jury of the pit,' And the bitter humour in which he was now
+shackling his genius to the honourable task of immediate
+bread-winning, or in his own words to the part of "hackney writer,"
+comes out clearly enough in the well-known anecdote of the first
+night of this comedy. In Murphy's words, Garrick, then a new
+player, just taking the Town by storm, "told Mr Fielding he was
+apprehensive that the audience would make free in a particular
+passage; adding that a repulse might so flurry his spirits as to
+disconcert him for the rest of the night, and therefore begged that
+it might be omitted. 'No, d--mn 'em,' replied the bard, 'if the
+scene is not a good one, let them find <em>that</em> out.'
+Accordingly the play was brought on without alteration, and, just
+as had been foreseen, the disapprobation of the house was provoked
+at the passage before objected to; and the performer alarmed and
+uneasy at the hisses he had met with, retired into the green-room,
+where the author was indulging his genius, and solacing himself
+with a bottle of champaign." Fielding, continues Murphy, had by
+this time drank pretty plentifully, and "'<em>What's the matter,
+Garrick?</em>' says he, '<em>what are they hissing now?</em>' Why
+the scene that I begged you to retrench; I knew it would not do;
+and they have so frightened me that I shall not be able to collect
+myself again the whole night. <em>Oh! d--mn 'em</em>, replies the
+author, <em>they HAVE found it out, have they!</em>" That Fielding
+should be scornfully indifferent to the judgment of the pit on work
+forced from him by overwhelming necessities, and which his own
+judgment condemned, is a foregone conclusion; but that he suffered
+keenly in having to produce imperfect work, and was jealously
+anxious to clear his reputation, as a writer, in the matter of this
+particular comedy, is no less apparent from the very unusual
+personal explanation he offered for it, soon after the brief run of
+the play was over. For no man was more shy of autobiographical
+revelations. His biographers are continually reduced to gleaning
+stray hints, here and there, concerning his private <a name=
+"fnref9-5">life</a>. <a class="footnote" href="#fn9-5">5</a> And
+therefore we can measure by this emergence from a habitual personal
+reticence the soreness with which he now published work unworthy of
+his genius. "Mr Garrick," Fielding tells us, speaking of this
+distressed winter of 1742-3 "... asked me one Evening, if I had any
+play by me; telling me he was desirous of appearing in a new Part
+[and] ... as I was full as desirous of putting Words into his
+Mouth, as he could appear to be of speaking them, I mentioned [a]
+Play the very next morning to Mr <em>Fleetwood</em> who embraced my
+Proposal so heartily, that an Appointment was immediately made to
+read it to the Actors who were principally to be concerned in it."
+On consideration, however, this play appeared to Fielding to need
+more time for perfecting, and also to afford very little
+opportunity to Garrick. So, recollecting that he still had by him a
+play which, although 'the third Dramatic Performance' he ever
+attempted, contained a character that would keep the audience's "so
+justly favourite Actor almost eternally before their Eyes," he
+decided, with characteristic impetuosity, to a change at the last
+moment. "I accordingly," he writes, "sat down with a Resolution to
+work Night and Day, owing to the short Time allowed me, which was
+about a Week, in altering and correcting this Production of my more
+Juvenile Years; when unfortunately the extreme Danger of Life into
+which a Person, very dear to me, was reduced, rendered me incapable
+of executing my Task. To this Accident alone I have the vanity to
+apprehend, the Play owes most of the glaring Faults with which it
+appeared.... Perhaps, it may be asked me why then did I suffer a
+Piece which I myself knew was imperfect, to appear? I answer
+honestly and freely, that Reputation was not my Inducement; and
+that I hoped, faulty as it was, it might answer a much more solid,
+and in my unhappy situation, a much more urgent Motive." This hope
+was, alas, frustrated; not even the brilliancy of a cast which
+included Garrick, Mrs Pritchard, Macklin, and Peg Woffington, could
+carry the <em>Wedding Day</em> over its sixth night; and the
+harassed author received 'not £50 from the House for it.' The
+comedy is a coarsely moral attack on libertinism, a fact which
+probably, in no wise added to the popularity of the play in the pit
+and boxes of 1743.</p>
+
+<p>A doggerel prologue, both written and spoken by Macklin, gives
+an excellent picture of the playhouse humours, and of the wild pit,
+of those exuberant days; and contains moreover the following sound
+advice, addressed to Fielding</p>
+
+<p class="quoted">"Ah! thou foolish follower of the ragged Nine<br>
+ You'd better stuck to honest Abram Adams, by half;<br>
+ He, in spite of critics can make your Readers laugh."</p>
+
+<p>The next publication of these lean years was the
+<em>Miscellanies</em>, a collection of mingled prose, verse, and
+drama, of which the only connecting link seems to be the urgent
+need of money which forced so heterogenous a medley from so great
+an artist. These long delayed volumes appeared, probably, in April,
+and were, says Fielding, composed with a frequent "Degree of
+Heartache." They include the lover's verses of his early youth;
+philosophical, satiric, and didactic essays; a reprint of the
+political effusion dedicated to Dodington; a few plays; the
+fragment entitled <em>A Journey from this World to the Next</em>;
+and the splendid ironic outburst on villany, <em>Jonathan
+Wild</em>.</p>
+
+<p>The <em>Preface</em>, largely occupied as it is with those
+private circumstances which forced the hasty production of the
+<em>Wedding Day</em>, has other matter of even greater interest for
+the biographer. Thus Fielding's sensitive care of his reputation in
+essential matters appears in the fiery denial here given to
+allegations of publishing anonymous scandals: "I never was, nor
+will be the Author of anonymous Scandal on the private History or
+Family of any Person whatever. Indeed there is no Man who speaks or
+thinks with more detestation of the modern custom of Libelling. I
+look on the practice of stabbing a Man's Character in the Dark, to
+be as base and as barbarous as that of stabbing him with a Poignard
+in the same manner; nor have I ever been once in my Life guilty of
+it." Here too, he marks his abhorrence of that 'detestable Vice'
+hypocrisy, which vice he was, before long, to expose utterly in the
+person of Blifil in <em>Tom Jones</em>. His happy social
+temperament is betrayed in the characteristic definition of good
+breeding as consisting in "contributing with our utmost Power to
+the Satisfaction and Happiness of all about us." And in these pages
+we have Fielding's philosophy of <em>goodness</em> and
+<em>greatness</em>, delivered in words that already display an
+unrivalled perfection of style. Speaking of his third volume, that
+poignant indictment of devilry the <em>Life of Mr Jonathan Wild the
+Great</em>, it is thus that Fielding exposes the iniquity of
+villains in "great" places:--"But without considering
+<em>Newgate</em> as no other than Human Nature with its mask off,
+which some very shameless Writers have done, a Thought which no
+Price should purchase me to entertain, I think we may be excused
+for suspecting, that the splendid Palaces of the Great, are often
+no other than <em>Newgate</em> with the Mask on. Nor do I know
+anything which can raise an honest Man's Indignation higher than
+that the same Morals should be in one Place attended with all
+imaginable Misery and Infamy and in the other with the highest
+Luxory and Honour. Let any impartial Man in his Senses be asked,
+for which of these two Places a Composition of Cruelty, Lust,
+Avarice, Rapine, Insolence, Hypocrisy, Fraud and Treachery, was
+best fitted, surely his Answer must be certain and immediate; and
+yet I am afraid all these Ingredients glossed over with Wealth and
+a Title, have been treated with the highest Respect and Veneration
+in the one, while one or two of them have been condemned to the
+Gallows in the other."</p>
+
+<p>Here is the converse of that insight which could discern
+goodness under a ragged cassock, or in a swearing postilion. And,
+having discerned the true nature of such Great Men, Fielding
+proceeds to point out that "However the Glare of Riches and Awe of
+Title may terrify the Vulgar; nay however Hypocrisy may deceive the
+more Discerning, there is still a Judge in every Man's Breast,
+which none can cheat or corrupt, tho' perhaps it is the only
+uncorrupt thing about him"; that nothing is so preposterous as that
+men should laboriously seek to be villains; and that this Judge,
+inflexible and honest "however polluted the Bench on which he
+sits," always bestows on the spurious Great the penalty of fear, an
+evil which "never can in any manner molest the Happiness" of the
+"Enjoyments of Innocence and Virtue."</p>
+
+<p>The subsequent philosophic dissertation on the qualities of
+goodness and greatness is interesting for such passages as the
+definition of a good man as one possessing "Benevolence, Honour,
+Honesty, and Charity"; and the fine declaration that of the passion
+of Love "goodness hath always appeared to me the only true and
+proper Object." And the very springs of action underlying half at
+least of each of the three great novels, and almost every page of
+<em>Jonathan Wild</em>, are revealed in the final declaration of
+the writer's intention to expose in these pages vice stripped of
+its false colours; to show it "in its native Deformity." As the
+native and stripped deformity of vice is perhaps not often fully
+apprehended and certainly is very seldom exposed in our own age,
+Fielding, by the very sincerity and fire of his morality, doubtless
+loses many a modern reader.</p>
+
+<p>It is in the third volume of the <em>Miscellanies</em>, a volume
+completely occupied by <em>Jonathan Wild</em>, that Fielding first
+fully reveals himself as public moralist. And in this Rogue's
+progress to the gallows he displays so concentrated a zeal, that
+nothing short of his genius and his humour could have saved these
+pages from the dullness of the professional reformer. For the
+little volume consists of a relentless exposure of the deformity
+and folly of vice. Here the foul souls of Wild and his associates,
+stripped of all the glamour of picturesque crime, stand displayed
+in their essential qualities, with the result that even the
+pestilential air of thieves' slums, of 'night cellars,' and of
+Newgate purlieus, an air which hangs so heavy over every page,
+falls back into insignificance before the loathsomeness of the
+central figure. A few years later, in the preface to <em>Tom
+Jones</em>, Fielding formally asserted his belief that the beauty
+of goodness needed but to be seen 'to attract the admiration of
+mankind'; in <em>Jonathan Wild</em> he appears to be already at
+work on the converse doctrine, that if the deformity of vice be but
+stripped naked, abhorrence must ensue. Such a naked criminal is
+Wild; and in the contemplation of his vices, as in the case of the
+arch hypocrite Blifil, in <em>Tom Jones</em>, and of the shameless
+sensualist "My Lord," in <em>Amelia</em>, Fielding's characteristic
+compassion for the faults of hard pressed humanity is, for the
+time, scorched up in the fierceness of his anger and scorn at
+deliberate cruelty, avarice and lust. Under the spell of Fielding's
+power of painting the devil in his native blackness, we feel that
+for such as Wild hanging is too handsome a fate. It is easy for his
+Newgate chaplain to assert that "nothing is so sinful as sin"; it
+takes a great genius and a great moralist to convince us, as in
+this picture, that nothing is so deformed or so contemptible. The
+dark places of <em>Jonathan Wild</em> receive some light in the
+character of the good jeweller, in the tender scenes between that
+honest ruined tradesman and his wife and children, and in the
+devoted affection of his apprentice. But the true illumination of
+the book, and its personal value for the biographer, lie in the
+white heat of anger, the "sustained and sleepless irony" to adopt
+Mr Austin Dobson's happy phrase, with which Fielding, with a force
+unwavering from the first page to the last, here assails his
+subject. An underlying attack on the Ministerial iniquity of "Great
+Men" in high places seems to be often suggested; if this be a true
+inference, it does but give us further proof of Fielding's energies
+as a political, no less than as a moral, reformer. Certainly,
+through all the squalid scenes of the book, the contention is
+insisted on that criminals of Wild's tyrannical stamp may as easily
+be found in courts, and at the head of armies, as among the poor
+leaders of Newgate gangs. To the wise moralist it is the same
+rogue, whether picking a pocket or swindling his country.</p>
+
+<p>And not to forget the wit in the moral reformer, we may leave Mr
+Jonathan Wild listening to one of the reasons given by the Newgate
+chaplain for his Reverence's preference for punch over wine: "Let
+me tell you, Mr Wild there is nothing so deceitful as the spirits
+given us by wine. If you must drink let us have a bowl of punch; a
+liquor I the rather prefer as it is nowhere spoken against in
+Scripture."</p>
+
+<p>After <em>Jonathan Wild</em> the most interesting fragment of
+the <em>Miscellanies</em> is the <em>Journey from this World to the
+Next</em>. In this essay Fielding reveals his philosophy, his
+sternness, his affections, and his humour, as a man might do in
+intimate conversation. His warm humanity breathes in the conception
+that "the only Business" of those who had won admission to Elysium
+'that happy Place,' was to "contribute to the Happiness of each
+other"; and again in the stern declaration of Heaven's doorkeeper,
+the Judge Minos, that "no Man enters that Gate without Charity."
+And indeed the whole chapter devoted to the judgments administered
+by Minos on the spirits that come, confident or trembling, before
+him, and are either admitted to Heaven, sent back to earth, or
+despatched to the "little Back Gate" opening immediately into the
+bottomless pit, is full of personal revelation. We feel the glee
+with which Fielding consigns the "little sneaking soul" of a miser
+to diabolically ingenious torments; the satisfaction with which he
+watches Minos apply a kick to the retreating figure of a duke,
+possessed of nothing but "a very solemn Air and great Dignity"; and
+the pleasure it gave him to observe the rejection accorded to "a
+grave Lady," the Judge declaring that "there was not a single Prude
+in Elysium." Again, nothing could be more true to Fielding's nature
+than the account of the poet who is admitted, not for the moral
+value he himself places on his Dramatic Works (which he endeavours
+to read aloud to Minos), but because "he had once lent the whole
+profits of a Benefit Night to a Friend, and by that Means had saved
+him and his Family from Destruction"; unless it were the account of
+the poverty driven wretch, hanged for a robbery of eighteen-pence,
+who yet could plead that he had supported an aged Parent with his
+labour, that he had been a very tender Husband, and a Kind Father,
+and that he had ruined himself for being Bail for a Friend. "At
+these words," adds the historian, "the gate opened, and
+<em>Minos</em> bid him enter, giving him a slap on the Back as he
+passed by him."</p>
+
+<p>When the author's own turn came, he very little expects, he
+tells us, "to pass this fiery Trial. I confess'd I had indulged
+myself very freely with Wine and Women in my Youth, but had never
+done an Injury to any Man living, nor avoided an opportunity of
+doing good; but I pretended to very little Virtue more than general
+Philanthropy and Private Friendship." Here Minos cut the speaker
+short, bidding him enter the gate, and not indulge himself
+trumpeting forth his virtues. Whether or no we may here read the
+reflections of Fielding's maturity, looking honestly back over his
+own forty years and forward with humble fear into the future, we
+may certainly see reflected in both confession and judgment much of
+the doctrine and the practice of his life.</p>
+
+<p>After the failure, early in 1743, of the <em>Wedding Day</em>,
+and the subsequent publication of the <em>Miscellanies</em>,
+Fielding seems to have thrown his energies for twelve months into
+an exclusive pursuit of the law. This appears from his statement,
+made a year later, in May 1744, that he could not possibly be the
+author of his sister's novel <em>David Simple</em>, which had been
+attributed to him, because he had applied himself to his profession
+"with so arduous and intent a diligence that I have had no leisure,
+if I had inclination, to compose anything of this kind." Clearly,
+in the period that covers the publication of <em>Joseph
+Andrews</em> an historical pamphlet, parts of a farce and of
+<em>Plutus</em>, and of the <em>Miscellanies</em>, Fielding found
+both leisure and inclination for writing; so this sudden immersion
+in law must relate to the twelve months or so intervening between
+these works and the publication of his statement. Murphy
+corroborates this bout of hard legal effort. After the <em>Wedding
+Day</em> says that biographer "the law from this time had its hot
+and cold fits with him." The cold fits were fits of gout; and
+inconveniences felt by Fielding from these interruptions were, adds
+Murphy "the more severe upon him, as voluntary and wilful neglect
+could not be charged upon him. The repeated shocks of illness
+disabled him from being as assiduous an attendant at the bar, as
+his own inclination and patience of the most laborious application,
+would otherwise have made him."</p>
+
+<p>Mr Counsellor Fielding follows his retrospect of this strenuous
+attack on the law with a declaration that, henceforth, he intends
+to forsake the pursuit of that 'foolscap' literary fame, and the
+company of the 'infamous' nine Muses; a decision based partly on
+the insubstantial nature of the rewards achieved, and partly it
+would seem due to the fact that at Fielding's innocent door had
+been laid, he declares, half the anonymous scurrility, indecency,
+treason, and blasphemy that the few last years had <a name=
+"fnref9-6">produced</a>. <a class="footnote" href="#fn9-6">6</a> In
+especial he protests against the ascription to his pen of that
+'infamous paltry libel' on lawyers, the <em>Causidicade</em>, an
+ascription which, as he truly says, accused him "not only of being
+a bad writer and a bad man, but with downright idiotism in flying
+in the face of the greatest men of my profession." He also declares
+that no anonymous work had issued from his pen since his promise to
+that effect; and that these false accusations had injured him
+cruelly in ease, reputation and interest. This solemn declaration
+that the now detested Muses shall no longer beguile Fielding's pen
+affords excellent reading in view of the fact that this absorbed
+barrister must, within a year or two, have been at work on <em>Tom
+Jones</em>. The whole emphatic outburst was probably partly an
+effort to assert himself as now wholly devoted to the law, and
+partly an example of one of those "occasional fits of peevishness"
+into which, Murphy tells us, distress and disappointment would
+betray him.</p>
+
+<p>The preface to his sister's novel <em>David Simple</em>, in
+which Fielding took occasion to announce these protests and
+assertions, is his only extant publication for this year of 1744;
+and apart from its biographical value is not of any great moment.
+Ample proof may be found in it of brotherly pride and admiration
+for the work of a sister "so nearly and dearly allied to me in the
+highest friendship as well as relation." There is the noteworthy
+declaration that the "greatest, noblest, and rarest of all the
+talents which constitute a genius" is the gift of "a deep and
+profound discernment of all the mazes, windings, and labyrinths
+which perplex the heart of man." The utterance concerning style, by
+so great a master of English, is memorable--"a good style as well
+as a good hand in writing is chiefly learned by practice." And a
+delightful reference should not be forgotten to the carping
+ignorant critic, who has indeed, "had a little Latin inoculated
+into his tail," but who would have been much the gainer had "the
+same great quantity of birch been employed in scourging away his
+ill-nature."</p>
+
+<p>Disabled by gout and harassed by want of money, a yet greater
+distress was now fast closing on Fielding in the prolonged illness
+of his wife. "To see her daily languishing and wearing away before
+his eyes," says Murphy, "was too much for a man of his strong
+sensations; the fortitude with which he met all other calamities of
+life [now] deserted him." In the autumn of 1744 Mrs Fielding was at
+Bath, doubtless in the hope of benefit from the Bath waters. And
+here, in November, she died. Her body was brought to London for
+burial in the church of St. Martin's in the Fields; receiving on
+the 14th of November, 1744, honourable interment in the chancel
+vault, to the tolling of the great tenor bell, and with the fullest
+ceremonial of the time. Indeed it is evident, from the charges
+still preserved in the sexton's book, that Fielding rendered to his
+wife such stately honours as were occasionally accorded to the
+members of the few great families interred in the old church.</p>
+
+<p>The death of this beloved wife, Murphy tells us, brought on
+Fielding "such a vehemence of grief that his friends began to think
+him in danger of losing his reason." When we remember that he
+himself has explicitly stated that lovely picture of the 'fair soul
+in the fair body,' the Sophia of <em>Tom Jones</em>, to have been
+but a portrait of Charlotte Fielding, we can in some measure
+realise his overwhelming grief at her death. And that the exquisite
+memorial raised to his wife by Fielding's affection and genius was
+not more beautiful in mind or face than the original, is
+acknowledged by Lady Bute, a kinswoman of the great novelist. Lady
+Bute was no stranger, "to that beloved first wife whose picture he
+drew in his Amelia, where, as she said, even the glowing language
+he knew how to employ did not do more than justice to the amiable
+qualities of the original, or to her beauty. He loved her
+passionately, and she returned his affection; yet had no happy life
+for they were almost always miserably poor, and seldom in a state
+of quiet and safety. His elastic gaiety of spirit carried him
+through it all; but meanwhile, care and anxiety were preying upon
+her more delicate mind, and undermining her constitution. She
+gradually declined, caught a fever and died in his arms." That
+Fielding's married life was unhappy, whatever were its outward
+conditions, is obviously a very shallow misstatement; but, for the
+rest, the picture accords well enough with our knowledge of his
+nature. The passionate tenderness of which that nature was capable
+appears in a passage from those very <em>Miscellanies</em>, which,
+he tells us, were written with so frequent a "Degree of Heartache."
+In the <em>Journey from this World to the Next</em>, Fielding
+describes how, on his entrance into Elysium, that "happy region
+whose beauty no Painting of the Imagination can describe" and where
+"Spirits know one another by Intuition" he presently met "a little
+Daughter whom I had lost several years before. Good Gods! What
+Words can describe the Raptures, the melting passionate Tenderness,
+with which we kiss'd each other, continuing in our Embrace, with
+the most extatic Joy, a Space, which if Time had been measured here
+as on Earth, could not have been less than half a Year."</p>
+
+<p>The fittest final comment on Henry Fielding's marriage with
+Charlotte Cradock is, perhaps, that saying of a member of his own
+craft of the drama, "Now to love anything sincerely is an act of
+grace, but to love the best sincerely is a state of grace."</p>
+
+<h2><a name="chapter10">CHAPTER X</a><br>
+<br>
+PATRIOTIC JOURNALISM</h2>
+
+<p class="quoted">"he only is the <em>true Patriot</em> who always
+does what is in his Power for his Country's Service without any
+selfish Views or Regard to private Interests."--The <em>True
+Patriot</em>.</p>
+
+<p>Fielding's active pen seems to have been laid aside for twelve
+months after the death of his wife; and it is perfectly in accord
+with all that we know of his passionate devotion to Charlotte
+Cradock that her loss should have shattered his energies for the
+whole of the ensuing year. Murphy, as we have seen, speaks of the
+first vehemence of his grief as being so acute that fears were
+entertained for his reason. According to Fielding's kinswomen, Lady
+Mary Wortley Montagu and Lady Bute, the first agonies of his grief
+approached to frenzy; but "when the first emotions of his sorrow
+were abated" his fine balance reasserted itself, and to quote again
+from Murphy, "philosophy administered her aid; his resolution
+returned, and he began again to struggle with his fortune."</p>
+
+<p>As we hear no more of exclusive devotion to the law, it may be
+assumed that the attempt of the previous year to live by that
+arduous calling alone was now abandoned; and to a man of Fielding's
+strong Protestant and Hanoverian convictions the year of the '45,
+when a Stewart Prince and an invading Highland army had captured
+Edinburgh and were actually across the border, could not fail to
+bring occupation. Fielding believed ardently that Protestant
+beliefs, civil liberty, and national independence of foreign powers
+were best safeguarded by a German succession to the English throne;
+so by the time Prince Charles and 6,000 men had set foot on English
+soil, the former 'Champion of Great Britain' was again up in arms,
+discharging his sturdy blows in a new weekly newspaper entitled the
+<em>True Patriot</em>.</p>
+
+<p>The <em>True Patriot</em> is chiefly notable as affording the
+first sign that Fielding was now leaving party politics for the
+wider, and much duller, field of Constitutional liberty. A man
+might die for the British Constitution; but to be witty about it
+would tax the resources of a Lucian. And, accordingly, in place of
+that gay young spark Mr Pasquin, who laid his cudgel with so hearty
+a good will on the shoulders of the offending 'Great Man,' there
+now steps out a very philosophic, mature, and soberly
+constitutional <em>Patriot</em>; a patriot who explicitly asserts
+in his first number, "I am of no party; a word I hope by these my
+labours to eradicate out of our constitution: this being indeed the
+true source of all those evils which we have reason to complain
+of." And again, in No. 14, "I am engaged to no Party, nor in the
+Support of any, unless of such as are truly and sincerely attached
+to the true interest of their Country, and are resolved to hazard
+all Things in its Preservation." Here is a considerable change from
+the personal zest that placed Mr Quiddam and Mr Pillage before
+delighted audiences in the Little Theatre in the Haymarket.</p>
+
+<p>The available copies of the <em>True Patriot</em>, now in the
+British <a name="fnref10-1">Museum</a>, <a class="footnote" href=
+"#fn10-1">1</a> include only thirty-two numbers, starting from No.
+1, which appeared on the 5th of November, 1745, and ending on June
+3, 1746. The first number contains a characteristic tribute to Dean
+Swift, whose death had occurred 'a few days since.' Doctor Jonathan
+Swift, says the <em>Patriot</em>, was "A genius who deserves to be
+rank'd among the first whom the World ever saw. He possessed the
+Talents of a Lucian a Rabelais and a Cervantes and in his Works
+exceeded them all. He employed his Wit to the noblest Purposes in
+ridiculing as well Superstition in Religion as Infidelity and the
+several Errors and Immoralities which sprung up from time to time
+in his Age; and lastly in defence of his Country.... Nor was he
+only a Genius and a Patriot; he was in Private Life a good and
+charitable Man and frequently lent Sums of Money, without interest,
+to the Poor and Industrious; by which means many Families were
+preserved from Destruction." In No. 2, the <em>Patriot</em>
+reiterates his "sincere Intention to calm and heal, not to blow up
+and inflame, any Party-Divisions"; but even the task of defending
+the British Constitution could not stifle Fielding's wit, and he
+escapes, for breathing space as it were, into a column devoted to
+the news items of the week, gathered from various papers, and
+adorned by comments of his own, printed in italics. And in this
+running commentary on the daily occurences of the time we get
+nearer, perhaps, to the table-talk of Henry Fielding than by any
+other means. Thus he faithfully repeats the inflated obituary lists
+that were then in fashion, but with such a variation as the
+following, "Thomas Tonkin, ... universally lamented by his
+Acquaintance. Upwards of 40 Cows belonging to one at Tottenham
+Court, <em>universally lamented by all their Acquaintance</em>." On
+a notice of an anniversary meeting of the Society for propagating
+the Gospel in Foreign Parts there is the pertinent comment "<em>It
+is a Pity some Method--was not invented for the Propagation of the
+Gospel in Great Britain</em>." After the deaths of a wealthy banker
+and factor, comes the obituary of "One Nowns a Labourer, <em>most
+probably immensely poor, and yet as rich now as either of the two
+Preceeding</em>"; beside which may be placed the very
+characteristic assertion in No. 6 that "Spleen and Vapours inhabit
+Palaces and are attired with Pomp and Splendor, while they shun
+Rags and Prisons."</p>
+
+<p>There is scarcely a personal allusion in all the thirty-two
+numbers of the <em>Patriot</em>, save the charming picture of that
+gentleman sitting in his study "meditating for the good and
+entertainment of the public, with my two little children (as is my
+usual course to suffer them) playing near me." And the ending of
+his horrid nightmare, in which a Jacobite executioner was placing a
+rope round his neck, "when my little girl entered my bedchamber and
+put an end to my dream by pulling open my eyes, and telling me that
+the taylor had brought home my cloaths for his Majesty's Birthday."
+The number for January 28 must not be overlooked, containing as it
+does, a scathing and humourous exposure of the profligate young
+sparks of the Town, from no less a pen than that of the Rev. Mr.
+Abraham Adams; and Parson Adams' letter concludes with a paragraph
+in which may be heard the voice of the future zealous magistrate:
+"No man can doubt but that the education of youth ought to be the
+principal care of every legislation; by the neglect of which great
+mischief accrues to the civil polity in every city." When himself
+but a lad of twenty, and in the prologue of his first comedy,
+Fielding had entered his protest against certain popular vices of
+the time, and had made merry over its follies. The desire to make
+the world he knew too well a better place than he found it is just
+as keen in the wit and humourist of thirty-nine; a desire,
+moreover, undulled by twenty years of vivacious living. Surely not
+the least amazing feature of Fielding's genius is this dual
+capacity for exuberant enjoyment, and incisive judgement. "His
+wit," said Thackeray, "is wonderfully wise and detective; it
+flashes upon a rogue and brightens up a rascal like a policeman's
+lantern."</p>
+
+<p>To this time of national ferment belongs a publication of which
+we know nothing but the title, a <em>Serious Address</em>; and also
+one of our rare glimpses of the novelist's home life. Joseph Warton
+writes to his brother Tom, on October 29, 1746:--"I wish you had
+been with me last week when I spent two evenings with Fielding and
+his sister, who wrote David Simple, and you may guess I was very
+well entertained. The lady indeed retir'd pretty soon, but Russell
+and I sat up with the Poet till one or two in the morning, and were
+inexpressibly diverted. I find he values, as he justly may, Joseph
+Andrews above all his writings: he was extremely civil to me, I
+fancy, on my Father's account." Joseph Warton's father was Vicar of
+Basingstoke, Professor of Poetry at Oxford, and moreover, something
+of a Jacobite; whereby, we may surmise, that the <em>True
+Patriot</em> did not allow his staunch Hanoverian sentiments too
+great an invasion into his private society. Alas, that it did not
+occur to Warton to preserve, for the entertainment of later ages,
+some fuller record of those two <em>noctes ambrosianae</em>.</p>
+
+<p>This sister, Sally Fielding as her cousin Lady Mary Wortley
+Montagu called her, made some figure in the literary world of the
+day. Richardson extolled her "knowledge of the human heart"; Murphy
+writes of her "lively and penetrating genius"; and her classical
+scholarship is attested by a translation of Xenophon's
+<em>Memorabilia</em>. That she also shared some of the engaging
+qualities of her brother may be assumed from the lines written to
+the memory of the "esteemed and loved ... Mrs. Sarah Fielding," by
+her friend Dr. John Hoadley.</p>
+
+<p class="quoted">"Her unaffected Manners, candid Mind,<br>
+ Her Heart benevolent, and Soul resign'd;<br>
+ Were more her Praise than all she knew or thought<br>
+ Though Athens Wisdom to her Sex she taught."</p>
+
+<p class="centered"><a name="i356"><img src="images/356.jpg" alt=
+"Beaufort Buildings, Strand, in 1725" width="610" height="500">
+</a></p>
+
+<p>Sarah Fielding's name occurs again as living with her brother in
+that house in Beaufort Buildings with which is associated perhaps
+the happiest instance of Fielding's warm-hearted generosity. The
+story may be given as nearly as possible in the words of the
+narrator, one G. S., writing from Harley Street in 1786. After
+speaking of the conspicuous good nature of "the late Harry
+Fielding," G. S. says: "His receipts were never large, and his
+pocket was an open bank for distress and friendship at all times to
+draw on. Marked by such a liberality of mind it is not to be
+wondered at if he was frequently under pecuniary embarrassments....
+Some parochial taxes for his house in Beaufort Buildings being
+unpaid, and for which he had been demanded again and again [we may
+remember how Mr. Luckless' door was "almost beat down with
+duns"]...he was at last given to understand by the collector who
+had an esteem for him, that he could procrastinate the payment no
+longer." To a bookseller, therefore he addressed himself, and
+mortgaged the coming sheets of some work then in hand. He received
+the cash, some ten or twelve guineas, and was returning home, full
+freighted with this sum, when, in the Strand, within a few yards of
+his own house, he met an old college chum whom he had not seen for
+many years. "Harry felt the enthusiasm of friendship; an hundred
+interrogatives were put to him in a moment as where had he been?
+where was he going? how did he do? &amp;c. &amp;c. His friend told
+him in reply he had long been buffeting the waves of adverse
+fortunes, but never could surmount them." Fielding took him off to
+dine at a neighbouring tavern, and as they talked, becoming
+acquainted with the state of his friend's pocket, emptied his own
+into it; and a little before dawn, he turned homewards "greater and
+happier than a monarch." Arrived at Beaufort Buildings his sister,
+who had anxiously awaited him, reported that the collector had
+called for the taxes twice that day. "Friendship," answered Harry
+Fielding "has called for the money and had it;--let the collector
+call again." Well might his cousin Lady Mary say of the man of whom
+such a story could be told, "I am persuaded he has known more happy
+moments than any prince upon earth."</p>
+
+<p>During the summer following Warton's visit to the brother and
+sister, Fielding published a <em>Dialogue between an Alderman and a
+Courtier</em>. And in the following November his second marriage
+took place, at the little City church of St Bene't's, Paul's Wharf.
+The story of this marriage cannot be better told than in the words
+of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's granddaughter, Lady Louisa Stuart,
+quoting from the personal knowledge of her mother and
+grandmother:</p>
+
+<p>"His biographers seem to have been shy of disclosing that after
+the death of this charming woman [his first wife] he married her
+maid. And yet the act was not so discreditable to his character as
+it may sound. The maid had few personal charms, but was an
+excellent creature, devotedly attached to her mistress, and almost
+broken-hearted for her loss. In the first agonies of his own grief,
+which approached to frenzy, he found no relief but from weeping
+with her; nor solace, when a degree calmer, but in talking to her
+of the angel they mutually regretted. This made her his habitual
+confidential associate, and in process of time he began to think he
+could not give his children a tenderer mother, or secure for
+himself a more faithful housekeeper and nurse. At least this was
+what he told his friends; and it is certain that her conduct as his
+wife confirmed it, and fully justified his good opinion." From a
+supposed allusion by Smollett, in the first edition of
+<em>Peregrine Pickle</em>, (an allusion afterwards suppressed) it
+would appear that Fielding's old schoolfellow and lifelong friend
+'the good Lord Lyttelton' so far approved the marriage as himself
+to give Mary Daniel away; and, as the dates in the Twickenham
+Register of births show that the marriage was one of justice as
+well as expediency, this well accords with Lyttelton's upright and
+honourable character. Of Fielding's affectionate and grateful
+loyalty to his second wife ample evidence appears in the pages of
+his last book, the <em>Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon</em>.
+Throughout this touching record of the journey of a dying man,
+there are references to her tenderness, ability and devotion. At
+the sad parting from children and friends, on the morning of their
+departure for Lisbon, he writes of her behaviour as "more like a
+heroine and philosopher, though at the same time the tenderest
+mother in the world." When, during the voyage down the Thames, an
+unmannerly custom house officer burst into the cabin where Fielding
+and his wife were sitting, the man was soundly rated for breaking
+"into the presence of a lady without an apology or even moving his
+hat"; by which we may see his sensitive care that due respect was
+accorded her. He tells us how he persuaded her with difficulty to
+take a walk on shore when their vessel was wind bound in Torbay, it
+being "no easy matter for me to force [her] from my side." With
+anxious forboding he thinks of his "dear wife and child" facing the
+world alone after his death, for "in truth I have often thought
+they are both too good and too gentle to be trusted to the power of
+any man I know, to whom they could possibly be so trusted." And in
+a more formal tribute he acknowledges the abilities that
+accompanied her worth, when he says that "besides discharging
+excellently well her own and all tender offices becoming the female
+character; ... besides being a faithful friend, an amiable
+companion, and a tender nurse, [she] could likewise supply the
+wants of a decrepit husband and occasionally perform his part."
+That Fielding suffered socially by the fact of his second marriage
+is probable. But the fact is proof, if proof were needed, of his
+courage in reparation, and of the unworldly spirit in which he
+ultimately followed the dictates of that incorruptible judge which
+he himself asserted to be in every man's breast.</p>
+
+<p>It was in December 1747, just a month after his second marriage,
+that Fielding again flung himself into the arena of contentious
+journalism, 'brandishing' his pen as truculently as ever on behalf
+of the Protestant and Hanoverian succession, and in despite of the
+Jacobite cause. He called his new paper "<em>The Jacobite's
+Journal</em>, by John Trott Plaid Esq're.," and the ironic title
+was accompanied by a woodcut traditionally associated with Hogarth.
+The ironic mask, Fielding explains, was assumed "in order if
+possible to laugh Men out of their follies and to make men ashamed
+of owning or acting by" Jacobite principles.</p>
+
+<p>The <em>Jacobite's Journal</em> appeared at a moment when public
+opinion, and public gossip also, seem to have been immersed in the
+question whether a notorious pamphlet purporting to have been found
+among the papers of a late Minister, Mr. Thomas Winnington, were
+genuine or a libel. Into this fray Fielding promptly plunged,
+publishing, in December <a name="fnref10-2">1747</a>, <a class=
+"footnote" href="#fn10-2">2</a> a shilling pamphlet entitled <em>A
+Proper Answer to a Late Scurrilous Libel, ... By the Author of the
+Jacobites Journal.</em> This little pamphlet, copies of which may
+be seen in the British Museum, is merely a further vigorous
+declamation for civil liberty and the Protestant religion, as under
+King George, and contains hardly any reference either to Winnington
+or to the author. It was retorted on in two further pamphlets. In
+one of these a Lady Fanny and her friend, enjoying a 'Chit chat,'
+discuss the news that Lady Fanny is she "whom F---g represents in a
+<em>Plaid Jocket</em> in the front of his <em>Jacobite</em>
+Journal." "The Whirling Coxcomb," cries Lady Fanny enraged, "what
+had he to do with ridiculing any Party, who had travell'd round the
+whole Circle of Parties and Ministers, ever since he could brandish
+a <a name="fnref10-3">Pen</a>." <a class="footnote" href=
+"#fn10-3">3</a> Her Ladyship adds some further sneers on writers
+pensioned to amuse people with their nonsense. The other counter
+pamphlet consists of conversations overheard, all over the town, on
+the subject of Winnington and his <em>Apology</em>. Here a mercer
+and a bookseller abuse Fielding for boxing the political compass,
+and for selling his pen. Another bookseller insinuates that
+Fielding's own attack on the <em>Apology</em> is but a half-hearted
+affair--"Ah Sir, you know not what F---g could do if he were
+willing ... you would have seen him mince and hash it so as to make
+half the Town weep and the other laugh. Don't you think the Pen
+that writ <em>Pasquin, Joseph Andrews</em>, and the
+<em>Champion</em> could have answered the Apology if he had had the
+Will?" "But I can't see why the Author of the Jacobite Journal
+should want that will," protests a Bencher. "Alas Sir!" cries the
+bookseller, "You forget the Power of <em>Necessity</em>. If a Man
+that wants Bread can establish a Paper by the P--t Off--e [Post
+Office?] taking off two thousand every week is he not more
+excusable...." To which the Bencher replies that possibly it is
+Fielding's 'Wavering Principles' that have "brought him to the
+Necessity of writing for <a name="fnref10-4">Bread</a>." <a class=
+"footnote" href="#fn10-4">4</a> From all which we may assume that
+Fielding's superiority to what he calls the "absurd and irrational
+Distinction of Parties [which] hath principally contributed to
+poison our <a name="fnref10-5">Constitution</a>" <a class=
+"footnote" href="#fn10-5">5</a> was very little understood by the
+heated party factions of 1747.</p>
+
+<p>To call one's political opponent a 'Whirling Coxcomb,' or a
+'pensioned scribbler,' was a very mild amenity in eighteenth
+century party warfare; and the abuse of such small fry as these
+anonymous pamphleteers might be wholly disregarded did it not show
+Fielding's prominence, during these anxious times, as a strenuous
+Hanoverian, and also the fact that he had now not only largely
+abjured party politics, but that what party tenets he still held
+were changed. Indeed as much may surely be deduced from the
+following philosophic passage in his <em>True Patriot</em>. "I have
+formerly shown in this Paper, that the bare objecting to a Man a
+<em>Change</em> in his <em>Political Notions</em>, ought by no
+means to affect any Person's <em>Character</em>; because in a
+Country like this it is simply impossible that a Man of sound
+Sense, and strict Honour, should always adhere to the same
+<em>Political <a name="fnref10-6">Creed</a></em>." <a class=
+"footnote" href="#fn10-6">6</a> It is very little material to our
+knowledge of Fielding as an honest man and a great genius to
+discover, were it possible, precisely what changes his political
+views underwent. When Sir Robert Walpole essayed to corrupt the
+nation Fielding fought strenuously in the cause of political
+honour; when a Stewart invasion threatened (as he thought) both
+civil liberty and Protestant beliefs he flung himself as zealously
+into the defence of the Church of England and of the Hanoverian
+Government. It is clear that the latter exertions stirred up much
+cheap obliquy; and it must be admitted that such references to his
+antagonists as "last weeks Dunghill of Papers" were likely to
+entail unsavory retort.</p>
+
+<p>This abuse seems to have broken out with an excess of virulence
+not long after the appearance of the <em>Jacobite's Journal</em>; a
+fate, as Fielding observes, little to be expected by the editor of
+a loyal paper. His dignified protest in the matter is worth
+recalling. In a leading article he declares that "before my paper
+hath reached the 20th. number a heavier load of Scandal hath been
+cast upon me than I believe ever fell to the Share of a Single Man.
+The Author of the Journal was soon guessed at; Either from some
+Singularity in Style, or from little care which being free from any
+wicked Purpose, I have ever taken to conceal my Name. Of this
+several Writers were no sooner possessed than they attempted to
+blacken it with every kind of Reproach; pursued me into private
+Life, <em>even to my boyish Years</em>; where they have given me
+almost every Vice in Human Nature. Again they have followed me with
+uncommon Inveteracy into a Profession in which they have very
+roundly asserted that I have neither Business nor Knowledge: And
+lastly, as an Author they have affected to treat me with more
+Contempt than Mr. Pope, who hath great Merit and no less Pride in
+the Character of a Writer hath thought proper to bestow on the
+lowest Scribbler of his Time. All this moreover they have poured
+forth in a vein of Scurrility which hath disgraced the Press with
+every abusive Term in our Language." Although, as Fielding adds,
+those who knew him would not take their opinion from those who knew
+him not, it is to be feared that the scurrilous libellers of the
+day succeeded in creating a prejudice that is hardly yet dispersed.
+For such petty clamours would be trifling enough round the figure
+of the creator of the English novel, were it not that in the abuse
+of the gutter press of his day we may probably find the reason for
+much of the vague cloud which has so strangely overhung Fielding's
+name. In his own spirited protest he tells us of the 'ordure' that
+was thrown at him; and it is an old saying that if enough mud be
+thrown some will stick.</p>
+
+<p>In the February following the appearance of his new paper
+Fielding must have been at Twickenham; for the baptism of his son
+William appears in the Parish Register for that month. A writer of
+thirty years ago says that the house celebrated as that in which
+Fielding lived was then still standing, a quaint old fashioned
+wooden dwelling, in Back Lane; and adds the information that
+Fielding had two rooms, the house being then let in <a name=
+"fnref10-7">lodgings</a>. <a class="footnote" href="#fn10-7">7</a>
+Lysons, however, in his <em>Environs of London</em>, published in
+1795, says that Fielding "rented a house at this time in the
+Back-Lane at Twickenham," adding that he received his information
+from the Earl of Orford. The site is now occupied by a row of
+cottages. In his <em>Parish Register for Twickenham</em> Horace
+Walpole commemorates the great novelist's residence in that quiet
+village, so full of eighteenth century memories. Here, he says,</p>
+
+<p class="quoted">"... Fielding met his bunter Muse,<br>
+ And, as they quaff'd the fiery juice,<br>
+ Droll Nature stamp'd each lucky hit<br>
+ With unimaginable wit."</p>
+
+<p>Bunter was a cant word for a woman who picks up rags about the
+street; and it may seem to later generations that the epithet
+fitted far more nicely the <em>bunter muse</em> of that "facile
+retailer of <em>ana</em> and incorrigible society-gossip," that
+rag-picker of anecdotes, Mr. Horace Walpole himself.</p>
+
+<p>When the <em>Journal</em> had been running some six months,
+Fielding formally relinquished his ironic character of a Jacobite,
+partly because, as he says, the evils of Jacobitism were too
+serious for jesting and required more open denunciation; partly
+because the age required more highly seasoned writing, the general
+taste in reading very much resembling "that of some particular Man
+in eating who would never willingly devour what doth not stink";
+and partly from the ineptitude of the public to appreciate the
+ironic method. This latter passage is of interest as coming from
+the author of that great masterpiece in irony, <em>Jonathan
+Wild</em>. Fielding has observed, he tells us that "though Irony is
+capable of furnishing the most exquisite Ridicule; yet as there is
+no kind of humour so liable to be mistaken it is of all others the
+most dangerous to the Writer. An infinite Number of Readers have
+not the least taste or relish for it, I believe I may say do not
+understand it; and all are apt to be tired when it is carried to
+any degree of Length."</p>
+
+<p>The <em>Jacobite's Journal</em> is of course mainly occupied
+with maintaining the Protestant British Constitution; but here, as
+in the <em>True Patriot</em>, Fielding allows himself a pleasant
+running commentary on the daily news. He also erects a <em>Court of
+Criticism</em> in which, by virtue of his "high Censorial Office,"
+he administers justice in "all matters in the Republic of
+Literature." By thus adopting the title of "Censor of Great
+Britain" the editor of the <em>Jacobites Journal</em> preserves his
+identity with that censorial <em>Champion</em> who nine years
+before had essayed to keep rogues in fear of his Hercules' club.
+Two judgments delivered by the <em>Court</em> are of interest. In
+one, due castigation is given to that incorrigible mimic and wit
+Foote, who was once threatened by no less a cudgel than that of Dr.
+Johnson himself. Foote was evading all law and order by his
+inimitable mimicries at the Little Theatre in the Haymarket; and
+for these performances at his "scandal-shop" is very properly
+brought up before Mr. Censor's <em>Court</em>. Whereupon Foote
+begins to mimic the <em>Court</em> "pulling a Chew of Tobacco from
+his Mouth, in Imitation of his Honour who is greatly fond of that
+weed." The culprit suffers conviction for crime against law and
+good manners. Having thus seen to the public welfare, Fielding also
+happily settles a little score of his own on one of his anonymous
+libellers. "One Porcupine Pillage," he records, "came into the
+court and threw a great shovelful of dirt at his honour, <em>but
+luckily none of it hit him</em>." His comments on weekly news items
+are no less characteristic than those hidden in the columns of the
+<em>Patriot</em>. Thus, on a trotting match, he observes, "Trotting
+is a Sport truly adapted to the English Genius." And on a man found
+dead in Jewin Street "formerly an eminent Dealer in Buckrams, but
+[who] being greatly reduced is supposed to have died for Want," he
+notes, "<em>either of Common Sense in himself or Common Humanity in
+his Aquaintance</em>." His own humanity is shown in the wise
+appeals, repeated on more than one page of the <em>Journal</em>,
+for some effective provision for the distressed widows and children
+of the poor clergy. And his unbiassed judgment appears in the
+<em>amende honorable</em> to Richardson, in the form of generous
+and unstinted praise of <em>Clarissa</em>.</p>
+
+<p>The first number of the <em>Jacobite's Journal</em> was dated
+Dec. 5, 1747, and 'Mr. Trott Plaid' formally takes leave of his
+subject exactly eleven months later, on November 5, 1748, declaring
+that Jacobites were, by then, little to be <a name=
+"fnref10-8">feared</a>. <a class="footnote" href="#fn10-8">8</a>
+Ten days before this last 'brandish' of Fielding's Constitutional
+pen, on October 26, 1748, his oaths had been received as a Justice
+of the Peace for Westminster.</p>
+
+<h2><a name="chapter11">CHAPTER XI</a><br>
+<br>
+TOM JONES</h2>
+
+<p class="quoted">"In God's Name let us speak out honestly and set
+the good against the bad."<br>
+ &nbsp;&nbsp;No. 48 of the <em>Jacobite's Journal.</em></p>
+
+<p>The two years of Fielding's life preceding his appointment as a
+Bow Street magistrate (an appointment comparable only to the choice
+of Robert Burns as an exciseman) were marked, as we have seen, by
+lively passages in the political arena, and a steady output of
+political journalism. Indeed, by this time, the public must have
+associated swingeing denunciations of Jacobites, and glowing
+eulogies of the British Constitution, with Harry Fielding's name;
+just as seven years previously he had been in their eyes the
+'Champion' journalist of a brilliant Opposition; and, for ten years
+before that, the witty writer of a stream of popular farces and
+comedies. For there is no evidence that his audacious innovation,
+his splendid adventure in literature, <em>Joseph Andrews</em>,
+really revealed the existence of a new genius in their midst to the
+Whigs and Tories of those factious days, to the gay frequenters of
+the play-house, to the barristers at Westminster Hall and on the
+Western Circuit. In 1748 Fielding must have been, to his many
+audiences, a witty and well-born man of letters who, at forty-one,
+had as yet achieved no towering success; a facile dramatist; and a
+master of slashing political invective, growing perplexingly
+impartial, alike in his praise and his condemnation. While, as
+regards outward circumstances, the struggling barrister, baffled in
+his professional hopes by persistent attacks of gout, was now so
+far enlisted, to use his own fine image, under the black banner of
+poverty, that even the small post and hard duties of a Bow Street
+magistrate were worth his <a name="fnref11-1">acceptance</a>. <a
+class="footnote" href="#fn11-1">1</a></p>
+
+<p>Such was Harry Fielding as the world of 1748 knew him, in the
+Coffee houses, the Mall, the Green-room and the Law-courts. What
+that world did not know was that all this dramatic, journalistic,
+and political action, was little more than the surface movement of
+a vitality far too exuberant to be contained in any one groove of
+hackney writing,--of an impetuous 'enthusiasm for righteousness'
+far too ardent to pass by any flagrant social, moral, or political
+abuse without inflicting some form of chastisement; and that
+beneath this ever active surface movement Fielding's genius was
+slowly maturing in that new continent of literature the borders of
+which he had already crossed seven years before. In the pages of
+<em>Joseph Andrews</em>, he had, as we know, tentatively explored
+that continent feeling his way along the unknown paths of this long
+neglected world of human nature; bringing back with him one
+immortal figure, that living embodiment of simple piety and
+scholarship, of charity and honest strength, Parson Adams;
+disclosing hints of discoveries, not yet perfected, among the
+humours and villanies, the virtues and charms, of a dozen other
+inhabitants of his <em>terra incognita</em>. But there is no sign
+that the greatness of his discovery, the splendour of his addition
+to the empire of English literature, was in the least apprehended
+during the seven years following the appearance of <em>Joseph
+Andrews</em>. Only Fielding himself was conscious that he had
+created a kind of writing "hitherto unattempted in our
+language."</p>
+
+<p>And, having crossed the borders of this new continent, he seems,
+after his first survey, to have deliberately immersed himself in
+one portion, and that the blackest, of his re-discovered world. For
+<em>Jonathan Wild</em>, with its disclosure of the active spirit of
+'diabolism,' of naked vice, is little else than the exploration of
+those darkest recesses of human nature which can be safely entered
+only by the sanest and healthiest of intellects. Fielding's
+strength was equal to his exploit; and from this, his second
+adventure, he brought back a picture of the deformity and folly of
+vice, drawn with a just and penetrating scorn unequalled, perhaps,
+by any English moralist. But neither of these two essays in the new
+field of writing had covered more than isolated or outlying
+portions, the first in sunlight, the second in shadow, of that vast
+territory. And it was not till the perfect maturity of his powers
+and of his experience, not till he had seen both the 'manners of
+many men,' and the workings of many hearts, not in a word till he
+had made himself master of great tracts of that human nature which
+had so long lain neglected, that Fielding in <em>Tom Jones</em>
+disclosed himself as the creator of the English novel.</p>
+
+<p>Little is known as to when the conception of <em>Tom Jones</em>
+first shaped itself in his mind, of where he lived during the
+writing of the great Comic Epic, or of the time occupied in its
+completion. Appropriately for a book expressly designed "to
+recommend goodness and innocence" the plan of the novel was
+suggested, many years before its appearance, by the 'good Lord
+Lyttelton'; and we know, further, that the writing occupied 'some
+thousands of hours'; but <em>Tom Jones</em> does not emerge into
+definite existence till the summer of 1748.</p>
+
+<p>Legend it is true, attesting to the greatness of the achievement
+contained in the six little volumes, endows many localities with
+the fame of their origin. A well-credited contemporary writer, the
+Rev. Richard Graves, declared that the novelist "while he was
+writing his novel of Tom Jones" lived at Tiverton (Twerton), one
+and a half miles from Bath, and dined daily at Prior Park the seat
+of his munificent and pious friend Ralph Allen. Mr Graves says that
+Fielding then lived in "the first house on the right hand with a
+spread eagle over the <a name="fnref11-2">door</a>." <a class=
+"footnote" href="#fn11-2">2</a> Salisbury is insistent that part at
+least of the great novel was written at Milford House, near to that
+city. An anonymous old engraver asserts the same honour for
+Fielding's Farm at East Stour, an assertion certainly not confirmed
+by the newly found documents concerning Fielding's sale of property
+at Stour in 1738. Twickenham claims that the book was wholly
+composed in the house in Back Lane. And to an ancient building at
+Tintern Parva in the Wye Valley, said to have once been the lodging
+of the Abbot of Tintern, was also assigned the reputation of being
+the birthplace of the English novel. If the latter tradition were
+true, the fact that it was in the Harlequin chamber of the Abbots
+of Glastonbury that Henry Fielding was born, becomes strangely
+matched by the birth, some forty years later, of his masterpiece,
+in the lodging of the Abbot of Tintern. The one point of real
+interest in all these traditions is the fact that the fame of
+<em>Tom Jones</em> has been sufficient to create a widespread
+popular legend. The truth probably is that the book was written in
+the many shifting scenes of Fielding's life during these years; now
+at Bath whither his gout and the generous hospitality of Ralph
+Allen would take him; now in Salisbury, the home of his boyhood,
+and the scene of his courtship with the lovely original of Sophia
+Western; possibly in his own county of Somerset; and most probably
+both at Twickenham, and in London.</p>
+
+<p class="centered"><a name="i357"><img src="images/357.jpg" alt=
+"Prior Park, near Bath, the seat of Ralph Allen, 1750" width="700"
+height="476"></a></p>
+
+<p>From these various legends it is pleasant to be able to
+disentangle one clear picture of the making of <em>Tom Jones</em>.
+Before the manuscript was placed in the printers' hands Fielding
+submitted it to the opinion both of the elder Pitt, and of the
+estimable and pious Lyttelton; and the account of this memorable
+meeting cannot be better given than in the words of a descendant of
+the hostess on that occasion, the Rev. George Miller,
+great-grandson of that Sanderson Miller of Radway, Warwickshire,
+who numbered many men of note among his acquaintance, and with whom
+Fielding was on terms of intimate <a name=
+"fnref11-3">friendship</a>. <a class="footnote" href=
+"#fn11-3">3</a> Writing to the present writer, in 1907, Mr. Miller
+says: "Lord Chatham and Lord Lyttleton came to Radway to visit my
+ancestor, when Lord Chatham planted three trees to commemorate the
+visit, and a stone urn was placed between them. Fielding was also
+of the party and read 'Tom Jones' in manuscript after dinner for
+the opinion of his hearers before publishing it. My father told me
+this often and he had the account from his Grandmother who survived
+her husband several years and who was the hostess on the occasion."
+Unhappily no record exists of the comments of one of the greatest
+of English statesmen when listening to this reading, in manuscript,
+of indubitably one of the greatest of English novels.</p>
+
+<p>The vagueness which hangs over the places in which <em>Tom
+Jones</em> was written, the certainty that in all of them poverty
+was constantly present, is in perfect accord with the power of
+detachment manifested in this book from circumstances that would
+surely have tinged, if not over-whelmed, a weaker genius. Sickness
+and poverty are stern sponsors; but neither were suffered to leave
+more than two traces on the pages destined to outlive so greatly
+the harsh circumstances in which they had birth. There is the frank
+acknowledgement of the writer's dependence on Lyttelton's noble
+generosity, without which the book had never, Fielding says, been
+completed, since "I partly owe to you my Existence during great
+Part of the Time which I have employed in composing it." And a
+touching betrayal occurs of his anxiety for the future provision of
+the "prattling babes, whose innocent play hath often been
+interrupted by my labours." Fielding was sensitively anxious for
+his wife and children; but, for himself, living as he did with
+visions such as that of the <em>Invocation</em> introducing Book
+xiii of <em>Tom Jones</em>, the precise situation of his "little
+Parlour," or the poorness of its furniture, cannot have appeared
+very material. "Come bright Love of Fame," he cries "... fill my
+ravished Fancy with the Hopes of charming Ages yet to come ... Do
+thou teach me not only to foresee, but to enjoy, nay, even to feed
+on future Praise. Comfort me by a solemn Assurance, that when the
+little Parlour in which I sit at this Instant, shall be reduced to
+a worse furnished Box, I shall be read, with Honour, by those who
+never knew nor saw me, and whom I shall neither know nor see."</p>
+
+<p>This capacity of Fielding for relegating circumstance to its
+true level, the detached idealism that moulded his genius, are,
+indeed, shown once for all in the fact that the exquisite picture
+of virtue, the whole-hearted attack on vice, the genial humour, the
+sunny portraits of humanity, the splendid cheerfulness of <em>Tom
+Jones</em>, that 'Epic of Youth,' came from a man in middle age,
+immersed in disheartening struggles, and fighting recurrent ill
+health. Superficial critics have called Fielding a realist because
+his figures are so full-blooded and alive that we feel we have met
+them but yesterday in the street; to eyes so shortsighted life
+itself must seem merely realistic. As none but an idealist could
+have conceived Parson Adams, so the creator of Sophia again
+announced himself an idealist in the Dedication of <em>Tom
+Jones</em>. Here, in language of pure symbolism, he contends that
+the ideal virtues such as goodness and innocence, may most
+effectively be presented to men in a figure, for "an Example is a
+Kind of Picture, in which Virtue becomes as it were an Object of
+Sight, and strikes us with an Idea of that Loveliness, which
+<em>Plato</em> asserts there is in her naked <a name=
+"fnref11-4">Charms</a>." <a class="footnote" href="#fn11-4">4</a>
+To the man who could write thus, and, who, in later pages of his
+great 'Epic,' could humbly desire of Genius "do thou kindly take me
+by the Hand, and lead me through all the Mazes, the winding
+Labyrinth of Nature. Initiate me into all those Mysteries which
+profane Eyes never beheld,"--to this man the material surroundings
+of life must have seemed of little greater import than the fittings
+of that narrow box to the occupation of which he looked forward
+with so calm a foresight. Indeed he himself acknowledges a
+carelessness of outward comfort on his own behalf. "Come," he
+cries, to the spirit of mercenary success, "Thou jolly Substance,
+with thy shining Face, ... hold forth thy tempting Rewards; thy
+shining chinking Heap; thy quickly-convertible Bank-bill, big with
+unseen Riches; thy often-varying Stock; the warm, the comfortable
+House; ... Come thou, and if I am too tasteless of thy valuable
+Treasures, warm my Heart with the transporting Thought of conveying
+them to others." His happy constitution, wrote his cousin Lady
+Mary, "made him forget everything when he was before a venison
+pasty or a flask of champagne"; but behind those healthy
+exhilarations was, assuredly, a serenity based on a clear
+perception of the values of life. To a man of Fielding's happy
+social temperament, and who was yet also initiated into mysteries
+and occupied in converting ideal loveliness into 'an object of
+sight,' such matters as duns and pawnbrokers would seem precisely
+fit for oblivion in venison and champagne. In the creator of Tom
+Jones and of Sophia the most indestructible delight in living, and
+the keenest discernment of the unsubstantial qualities of that
+delight, appear to have been admirably interwoven.</p>
+
+<p>By June 11, 1748, the book was far enough advanced for the
+publisher, Andrew Millar, to pay £600 for it, as appears from a
+receipt now in the possession of Mr. Alfred <a name=
+"fnref11-5">Huth</a>. <a class="footnote" href="#fn11-5">5</a> And
+it is eminently characteristic of the finances of a man who, as
+Lady Mary said, would have wanted money had his estates been as
+extensive as his imagination, that the receipt for this £600 is
+dated more than six months before the publication of the book. For
+it was not till February 28, 1749, that the <em>General
+Advertiser</em> announced</p>
+
+<p class="quoted">This day is published, in six vols., 12 mo<br>
+ THE HISTORY OF TOM JONES,<br>
+ A FOUNDLING<br>
+ <em>Mores hominum multorum vidit</em>.<br>
+ <em>By</em> HENRY FIELDING, <em>Esqre</em></p>
+
+<p>Henceforth Fielding ceases to be the boisterous politician, the
+witty dramatist; his poverty and his struggles for subsistence fall
+back, at his own bidding, among the accidents of life; and he
+stands revealed as the supreme genius, the creator of the English
+novel, the inheritor of that lasting fame which he had dared so
+confidently to invoke.</p>
+
+<p>The immediate success of the book, in that eighteenth-century
+world into which it was launched, is attested by the notice in the
+<em>London Magazine</em> of the very month of its publication.
+Under the heading of a "Plan of a late celebrated NOVEL," the
+<em>Magazine</em> devotes its five opening pages to a summary of a
+book "which has given great Amusement and we hope Instruction to
+the polite Part of the Town." The summary is preceded by a
+description of <em>Tom Jones</em> as a novel "calculated to
+recommend religion and virtue, to shew the bad consequences of
+indiscretion, and to set several kinds of vice in their most
+deformed and shocking light." The reviewer declares that "after one
+has begun to read it, it is difficult to leave off before having
+read the whole." And he concludes, "Thus ends this pretty novel,
+with a most just distribution of rewards and punishments, according
+to the merits of all the persons who had any considerable share in
+<a name="fnref11-6">it</a>." <a class="footnote" href=
+"#fn11-6">6</a> Three months later Horace Walpole wrote, "Millar
+the bookseller has done very generously by him [Fielding]: finding
+Tom Jones, for which he had given him £600, sell so greatly, he has
+since given him another hundred." An admirer breaks out into rhyme,
+in the <em>Gentleman's Magazine</em> for August 1749,--</p>
+
+<p class="quoted">"let Fielding take the pen!<br>
+ Life dropt her mask, and all mankind were men."</p>
+
+<p>thereby anticipating Thackeray's famous complaint that in his
+day no one dared "to depict to his utmost power a Man." Lady
+Bradshaigh, writing by a happy irony of fate to Richardson, says
+"as to Tom Jones I am fatigued with the name, having lately fallen
+into the company of several young ladies, who had each a 'Tom
+Jones' in some part of the world, for so they call their
+favourites." The gentlemen also had their Sophias, one indeed
+having bestowed that all-popular name on his 'Dutch mastiff puppy.'
+That eccentric eighteenth century philosopher, and enthusiastic
+Greek scholar, Lord Monboddo declared that <em>Tom Jones</em> had
+more of character in it than any other work, ancient or modern,
+known to him, adding, "in short, I never saw anything that was so
+animated, and as I may say, <em>all alive</em> with characters and
+manners as <em>the History of Tom Jones</em>"; a criticism that
+recalls Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's remark that no man enjoyed life
+more than did Fielding. Doubtless it was his own magnificent
+capacity for living that endowed the very creatures of his pen with
+so abundant a vitality. In her own copy Lady Mary wrote <em>Ne plus
+Ultra</em>.</p>
+
+<p class="centered"><a name="i358"><img src="images/358.jpg" alt=
+"Lady Mary Wortley Montagu--1710" width="377" height="500"></a></p>
+
+<p>To turn from the popular voices of the day to the comments of
+those capable of appraising genius, "What a master of composition
+Fielding was!" exclaimed Coleridge, "Upon my word I think 'Oedipus
+Tyrannus,' the 'Alchemist,' and 'Tom Jones' the three most perfect
+plots ever planned." To Sir Walter Scott <em>Tom Jones</em> was
+"truth and human nature itself." Gibbon described the book as "the
+first of ancient or modern romances"; and, as we have seen,
+declared that its pages would outlive the Imperial Eagle of those
+Hapsburgs from whom Fielding was said to be descended. "There can
+be no gainsaying the sentence of this great judge," wrote
+Thackeray. "To have your name mentioned by Gibbon is like having it
+written on the dome of St Peter's. Pilgrims from all the world
+admire and behold it." Pilgrims from all the world have likewise
+admired <em>Tom Jones</em>. Translations have appeared in French,
+<a name="fnref11-7">German</a>, <a class="footnote" href=
+"#fn11-7">7</a> Spanish, Swedish, Russian, Polish and Dutch; and as
+for the English editions, they range from the three editions issued
+within the year of publication to the several noble volumes newly
+edited in our own day, and the sixpenny copies on our railway
+bookstalls. So fully has time justified the invocation to future
+fame sent forth from the little ill-furnished parlour of the
+struggling barrister.</p>
+
+<p>To analyse the grounds for a chorus of praise ranging from the
+'young ladies' of the eighteenth century to the utterances of
+distinguished critics, and popular authors of our own day, would be
+to confound literary criticism with biography. But there are some
+points appertaining to Fielding's great novel which cannot be here
+disregarded, in that they closely affect his personal character.
+Such are the light in which he himself regarded his masterpiece,
+the intention with which he wrote it, and the means which he
+selected to carry that intention into effect.</p>
+
+<p>All these he himself very plainly sets forth in his
+<em>Dedication</em> to Lyttelton and in other passages of <em>Tom
+Jones</em>. As to his intention. "I declare," he says, in the
+<em>Dedication</em>, "that to recommend Goodness and Innocence hath
+been my sincere Endeavour in this History." And the means selected
+for this end, and for the companion object of persuading men from
+guilt, are as clearly stated. First as we have seen, Fielding plays
+the part of pure idealist, purposing to create a picture "in which
+virtue becomes as it were an object of sight." For such pictures we
+have but to think of Sophia Western, and of that final page of
+<em>Tom Jones</em>, than which no more charming representation of
+mutual affection, esteem, and well doing can be imagined. But
+besides this means of reaching his audience Fielding adopted, he
+tells us, a second method. He argues that no acquisitions of guilt
+can compensate a man for the loss of inward peace, for the
+attendant horror, anxiety, and danger, to which he subjects
+himself; thus endeavouring to enlist man's self-interest no less
+than his admiration, on the side of virtue. Again, he explains yet
+another method by which he essays to foil the progress of evil,
+viz. to show that virtue and innocence are chiefly betrayed "into
+the snares that deceit and villainy spread for them" by
+indiscretion; a moral which he has "the more industriously laboured
+... since I believe it is much easier to make good Men, wise than
+to make bad Men good." For this purpose, he concludes, namely to
+show, as in a figure, the beauty of virtue, to persuade men that in
+following innocence and virtue they follow their own obvious
+interests, to arm them from the snares of villainy and deceit, "I
+have employed all the Wit and Humour of which I am Master in the
+following History; wherein I have endeavoured to laugh Mankind out
+of their favourite Follies and Vices."</p>
+
+<p>And, conscious that wit and humour require a rein quite unneeded
+by the methods of the professional moralist, Fielding further
+asserts that in these pages his laughter is worthy of the aim which
+he sets before him. Here, he carefully insists, are wit and humour
+wholly void of offence. He assures his reader that in the whole
+course of the work, he will find "nothing prejudicial to the Cause
+of Religion and Virtue; nothing inconsistent with the strictest
+Rules of Decency, nor which can offend even the chastest Eye in the
+Perusal." As the almost incredible change from the manners of 1749
+to those of the following century, and of our own day, has
+injuriously affected the reputation of Fielding among readers
+ignorant of past conditions, this protest, in striking accord with
+the prologue for his first play acted when he was but a lad of
+twenty, cannot be too emphatically recorded. And no further
+justification of Fielding's words need be entered than that verdict
+of the eighteenth century scholar and bishop of the English Church,
+Doctor Warburton, when he declared that "Mr. Fielding [stands] the
+foremost among those who have given a faithful and chaste copy of
+life and manners."</p>
+
+<p>Such were the noble purposes to which Fielding consciously
+dedicated his genius in <em>Tom Jones,</em> and such was the
+careful restraint with which he exercised his chosen methods of wit
+and humour. That these purposes, executed by a supreme genius in
+the language and scenes of his own day, should ever have laid their
+author open to a charge of immorality is perhaps one of the most
+amazing pieces of irony in the whole history of English literature.
+But as this charge of moral laxity has been seriously brought
+against the pages of <em>Tom Jones</em>, and is perhaps not yet
+quite exploded, it cannot be wholly disregarded. The imputation
+amounts, briefly, to a too easy forgiveness for the youthful sins
+of Jones, and the involving that engaging youth in too deep a
+degradation. The answers to these charges are, firstly, that
+Fielding held strongly, and here exhibits, the humane and wise
+doctrine that a man should be judged, not by what he sometimes
+does, but by what he <em>is</em>. And, secondly, that as Sir Walter
+Scott pointed out, when dealing with this very matter, "the vices
+into which Jones suffers himself to fall are made the direct cause
+of placing him in the distressful situation which he occupies
+during the greater part of the narrative; while his generosity, his
+charity, and his amiable qualities become the means of saving him
+from the consequences of his folly." Fielding was not wholly
+concerned with the acts of a man; to him the admission of the
+Penitent Thief into Paradise, at the eleventh hour, could have been
+no stumbling block. And, further, Tom Jones not only suffers for
+his ill doing, but wins no heaven until he wholly purges himself
+from the sin which did so easily beset him.</p>
+
+<p>The distinction between doing and being is very fully enunciated
+by Fielding himself, in the <em>Introduction</em> to Book vii. "A
+single bad Act," he says, "no more constitutes a Villain in Life,
+than a single bad Part on the Stage". And again, "Now we, who are
+admitted behind the Scenes of this great Theatre of Nature, (and no
+Author ought to write any Thing besides Dictionaries and
+Spelling-Books who hath not this Privilege) can censure the Action,
+without conceiving any actual Detestation of the Person, whom
+perhaps Nature may not have designed to act an ill Part in all her
+Dramas: For in this Instance, Life most exactly represents the
+Stage, since it is often the same Person who represents the Villain
+and the Heroe". Coleridge has expressed the same truth in words
+written in a copy of <em>Tom Jones</em>, "If I want a servant or
+mechanic I wish to know what he <em>does</em>--but of a Friend I
+must know what he <em>is</em>. And in no writer is this momentous
+distinction so finely brought forward as by Fielding. We do not
+care what Blifil does ... but Blifil <em>is</em> a villain and we
+feel him to be <a name="fnref11-8">so</a>." <a class="footnote"
+href="#fn11-8">8</a></p>
+
+<p>It is true that, as Scott regrets the depth of degradation into
+which Tom Jones is suffered to fall, so Coleridge expresses a wish,
+"relatively to Fielding himself" that the great novelist had
+emphasised somewhat more the repentance of his hero: but this may
+be balanced by that other noble tribute to his morality, "I dare
+believe who consulted his heart and conscience only without
+adverting to <em>what the world</em> would say could rise from the
+perusal of Fielding's <em>Tom Jones</em>, <em>Joseph Andrews</em>
+and <em>Amelia</em> without feeling himself the better man--at
+least without an intense conviction that he could not be guilty of
+a base <a name="fnref11-9">act</a>." <a class="footnote" href=
+"#fn11-9">9</a> To be forced to watch the temporary degradation of
+a noble nature, and the miseries ensuing, is surely one of the most
+effective means of rousing a hatred of vice. That such an
+exhibition should ever have been construed into moral laxity on the
+part of the author, especially when the restoration of the hero's
+character is drawn as entirely due to his ingrained worship of
+innocence and virtue, is almost incredible.</p>
+
+<p class="centered"><a name="i359"><img src="images/359.jpg" alt=
+"George, First Baron Lyttelton" width="346" height="500"></a></p>
+
+<p>In exact accordance with Fielding's character as moralist in
+intent, although supreme artist in execution, is the fact of the
+dedication of <em>Tom Jones</em> to his life-long friend Lyttelton.
+George Lyttelton, statesman, scholar, and orator, was a friend of
+whom any man might be proud. It was said of him that he "showed the
+judgment of a minister, the force and wit of an orator, and the
+spirit of a gentleman." As theologian he wrote a treatise on
+<em>The Conversion of St. Paul</em> which, a hundred years later,
+was described as being "still regarded as one of the subsidiary
+bulwarks of Christianity." As poet he won the praise of Gray for
+his tender and elegiac verse. Thomson sang of his "sense refined,"
+and adds</p>
+
+<p class="quoted">Serene yet warm, humane yet firm his mind<br>
+ As little touch'd as any man's with bad;</p>
+
+<p>And Pope drew his character as</p>
+
+<p class="quoted">"Still true to virtue and as warm as true."</p>
+
+<p>It was to this devout scholar, this refined gentleman, this
+warm-hearted follower of virtue, that <em>Tom Jones</em> was
+dedicated, nay more, to him it owed both origin and completion. "To
+you, Sir," Fielding writes in his <em>Dedication</em>, "it is owing
+that this History was ever begun. It was by your Desire that I
+first thought of such a Composition.... Again, Sir, without your
+Assistance this History had never been completed.... I partly owe
+to you my Existence during great Part of the Time in which I have
+employed in composing it." And that Lyttelton cordially approved
+the book which owed so much to his own insight and generosity is
+evident from the references, in the <em>Dedication</em>, to his
+favourable judgment.</p>
+
+<p>With the appearance of <em>Tom Jones</em> Fielding steps into
+his own place among the immortals. But lofty as his genius was, his
+feet were firmly planted in the world which he relished so keenly.
+To no man could be applied more happily the motto chosen by him for
+his title page, <em>mores hominum multorum vidit</em>--he saw the
+manners of many men. This characteristic emerges in a personal
+reminiscence of the novelist, at the very moment when the sheets of
+<em>Tom Jones</em> were passing through the press. The great-nephew
+of his intimate friend Mrs Hussey relates; "Henry Fielding was fond
+of colouring his pictures of life with the glowing and variegated
+tints of Nature, by conversing with persons of every situation and
+calling, as I have frequently been informed by one of my great
+aunts, the late Mrs Hussey, who knew him intimately. I have heard
+her say, that Mr Fielding never suffered his talent for sprightly
+conversation to mildew for a moment; and that his manners were so
+gentlemanly, that even with the lower classes, with which he
+frequently condescended particularly to chat such as Sir Roger de
+Coverley's old friends, the Vauxhall water-men, they seldom
+outstepped the limits of propriety. My aunt ... [was] a fashionable
+sacque and mantua-maker, and lived in the Strand, ... One day Mr
+Fielding observed to Mrs Hussey, that he was then engaged in
+writing a novel, which he thought would be his best production; and
+that he intended to introduce into it the characters of all his
+friends. Mrs Hussey, with a smile, ventured to remark, that he must
+have many niches, and that surely they must already be filled. 'I
+assure you, my dear madam,' replied he, 'there shall be a bracket
+for a bust of you.' Some time after this, he informed Mrs Hussey
+that the work was in the press; but, immediately recollecting that
+he had forgotten his promise to her, went to the printer, and was
+time enough to insert, in vol. iii. p. 17, where he speaks of the
+shape of Sophia Western--'Such charms are there in affability, and
+so sure is it to attract the praises of all kinds of people.... It
+may indeed be compared to the celebrated Mrs Hussey.' To which
+observation he has given the following note: 'A celebrated
+mantua-maker in the Strand, famous for setting off the shapes of <a
+name="fnref11-10">women</a>.'" <a class="footnote" href=
+"#fn11-10">10</a></p>
+
+<p>Here is yet further proof, that Fielding loved not only to see
+the manners of many men, but also to render them whatever service
+lay within his power. Never were the warmest heart and the loftiest
+genius more happily united than in the creator of the English
+novel.</p>
+
+<p>Lyttelton not only suggested and approved the great Comic Epic,
+and enabled distressed genius to live while composing it; his own
+worth and benevolence, together with those of the generous Allen,
+afforded Fielding, as he tells us, the materials for the picture
+here presented of Allworthy. "The World," he says, speaking of this
+picture, "will not, I believe, make me the Compliment of thinking I
+took it from myself. I care not: This they shall own, that the two
+Persons from whom I have taken it, that is to say, two of the best
+and worthiest Men in the World, are strongly and zealously my
+Friends." And a point of still closer personal interest is the
+fact, already noticed, that in the lovely character and person of
+Sophia Western, Fielding raised an enduring memorial to that
+beloved wife whose death had occurred a few years before the
+publication of <em>Tom Jones</em>. The authenticity of the portrait
+is explicitly stated in the <em>Invocation</em> prefixed to Book
+xiii. Apostrophizing that 'gentle Maid,' bright 'Love of Fame,'
+Fielding bids her, in the eighteenth century phrase that falls so
+strangely on a modern ear, "Foretell me that some tender Maid,
+whose Grandmother is yet unborn, hereafter, when under the
+fictitious Name of <em>Sophia</em> she reads the real worth which
+once existed in my <em>Charlotte</em>, shall, from her sympathetic
+Breast, send forth the <em>Heaving Sigh.</em>" Then follows,
+immediately, his own desire that he too may live in the knowledge
+and honour of far distant readers. Fielding lies buried under
+southern skies, far from his wife's English grave; but in the
+immortal pages of his masterpiece they are not divided.</p>
+
+<h2><a name="chapter12">CHAPTER XII</a><br>
+<br>
+MR JUSTICE FIELDING</h2>
+
+<p class="quoted">"The principal Duty which every Man owes is to
+his Country."<br>
+ <em>Enquiry into the ... Increase of Robbers</em>.</p>
+
+<p>To have created the English novel were, it might seem,
+achievement enough to tire for a while the most vigorous of
+intellects; but to the author of <em>Tom Jones</em> the apathy of
+repose was unknown. At no period of Fielding's short life can he be
+discerned as doing nothing; and, indeed, to an insight so
+penetrating, to an ardour so irrepressible, the England of George
+the Second can have afforded but very little inducement to
+inaction.</p>
+
+<p>Thus, in the one month of October 1748, the pages of <em>Tom
+Jones</em> must have been nearing completion, if indeed the sheets
+were not already passing through the press. The Hanoverian
+philippics of "Mr Trott-Plaid" were still resounding in the
+<em>Jacobite's Journal</em>. While, on the 26th. of the month,
+Fielding's oaths were received for an entirely new rôle, that of a
+Justice of the Peace for <a name="fnref12-1">Westminster</a>. <a
+class="footnote" href="#fn12-1">1</a> Ten days later the
+<em>Jacobite's Journal</em> had ceased to exist; and that a rumour
+was abroad connecting this demise of the <em>Journal</em> with the
+bestowal of a new and arduous post on its editor appears from a
+paragraph in the <em>London Evening Post</em>. On Nov. 8, that
+organ prepares its readers for the fact that the now defunct "Mr
+Trott-Plaid" may possibly "rise awful in the Form of a Justice."
+Within four weeks of this announcement 'Justice Fielding's' name
+appears for the first time in the Police-news of the day, in a
+committal dated December <a name="fnref12-2">10th</a> <a class=
+"footnote" href="#fn12-2">2</a> . And two days later he is sending
+three thieves to the Gatehouse, and admitting a suspected thief to
+bail, "after an Examination which lasted several hours." And it is
+interesting to notice that throughout this first month of his
+magisterial work the now 'awful form' of Justice Henry Fielding was
+kept constantly tempered in the public mind by the fact of his
+still undiminished popularity as a dramatist. In this December his
+comedies, with the inimitable 'romp' Kitty Clive as <em>Miss
+Lucy</em>, or the <em>Intrigueing Chambermaid</em> or
+<em>Chloe</em>, as the case might be, were played no fewer than
+nine times on the Drury Lane boards.</p>
+
+<p>Scarcely had Fielding bent his genius to these new
+responsibilities of examining Westminster suspects and sending the
+rogues of that city to prison, than he appears preparing for an
+extension of those duties over the county of Middlesex. To be a
+county magistrate in 1750, however, necessitated the holding of
+landed estate worth £100 per annum; and Fielding's estate, for many
+years, seems to have been his pen. In this difficulty he turned to
+the Duke of Bedford, whose public virtues, and private generosity,
+were so soon to be acknowledged in the Dedication of <em>Tom
+Jones</em>. It was but three weeks after his appointment that the
+Westminster magistrate wrote as follows to the giver of those
+"princely Benefactions":</p>
+
+<p><br>
+</p>
+
+<p>"Bow Street. Decr. 13. 1748.</p>
+
+<p>"My Lord,</p>
+
+<p>"Such is my Dependence on the Goodness of your Grace, that
+before my Gout will permit me to pay my Duty to you personally, and
+to acknowledge your last kind Favour to me, I have the Presumption
+to solicite your Grace again. The Business of a Justice of Peace
+for Westminster is very inconsiderable without the Addition of that
+for the County of Middlesex. And without this Addition I cannot
+completely serve the Government in that office. But this
+unfortunately requires a Qualification which I want. Now there is a
+House belonging to your Grace, which stands in Bedford St., of 70l.
+a year value. This hath been long untenanted, and will I am
+informed, require about 300l. to put in Repair. If your Grace would
+have the Goodness to let me have a Lease of this House, with some
+other Tenement worth 30l. a year, for 21 years, it would be a
+complete Qualification. I will give the full Worth for this lease,
+according to the valuation which any Person your Grace shall be
+pleased to appoint sets upon it. The only favour I beg of your
+Grace is, that I be permitted to pay the Money in two years, at
+four equal half-yearly Payments. As I shall repair the House as
+soon as possible, it will be in Reality an Improvement of that
+small Part of your Grace's estate, and will be certain to make my
+Fortune.</p>
+
+<p>"Mr Butcher will acquaint your Grace more fully than perhaps I
+have been able to do; and if Your Grace thinks proper to refer it
+to him, I and mine will be eternally bound to pray for your Grace
+tho I sincerely hope you will not lose a Farthing by doing so vast
+a service to,</p>
+
+<p>"My Lord your Grace's<br>
+"Most obliged most obed' humble servant<br>
+"H. <a name="fnref12-3">Ffielding</a>." <a class="footnote" href=
+"#fn12-3">3</a></p>
+
+<p>It seems probable that the Duke found better means of helping
+wit and genius, than by the leasing of the dilapidated tenement in
+Bedford Street. At any rate a month later, on January 11, we find
+Fielding duly swearing to an estate as consisting of "several
+Leasehold Messuages or Tenements Lying or being in the several
+parishes of St Paul Covent Garden, St Martin in the ffields, St
+Giles in the ffields, and St Georges Bloomsbury ... now in the
+possession or occupation of [my] Tennants or Undertennants, for and
+during the Term of Twenty one years of the clear yearly value of
+£100...." This statement, which is preserved in the Middlesex
+Records, is followed by Fielding's signature, appended to an oath
+that his qualification to serve as a Justice of the Peace for the
+county is as above <a name="fnref12-4">described</a>. <a class=
+"footnote" href="#fn12-4">4</a></p>
+
+<p>On the day following this sworn statement, January 12, 1749, his
+oaths were received as a Justice of the Peace for <a name=
+"fnref12-5">Middlesex</a>. <a class="footnote" href="#fn12-5">5</a>
+But even this did not satisfy all the requirements of those days of
+doctrinal inquisitions and Jacobite risings. The certificate may
+still be seen among the Middlesex Records, duly certified by
+Charles Tough, Minister of the Parish and Church of St Pauls,
+Covent Garden, and 'Sworn in Court,' that "Henry Fielding Esq. on
+Sunday the 26th day of March, 1749, did receive the Sacrament of
+the Lord's Supper in ye Parish Church aforesaid, immediately after
+Divine Service and Sermon, according to the usage of the Church of
+<a name="fnref12-6">England</a>." <a class="footnote" href=
+"#fn12-6">6</a> And among the same archives the dusty <em>Oath
+Roll</em> is preserved, bearing, under date of April 5, 1749, the
+signature of <em>Henry ffielding</em> to a declaration of disbelief
+in the doctrine of Transubstantiation; a comprehensive oath of
+faithful service to King George and abjuration of King James; an
+oath directed against the power of the Holy See; and an oath of
+true allegiance to King George. All which oaths and declarations,
+it appears from the endorsement of the <em>Roll</em>, were taken
+immediately after the administration of Holy Communion, as attested
+by two credible <a name="fnref12-7">witnesses</a>. <a class=
+"footnote" href="#fn12-7">7</a></p>
+
+<p class="centered"><a name="i360"><img src="images/360.jpg" alt=
+"The Bow Street Police Court, Sir John Fielding presiding" width=
+"291" height="500"></a></p>
+
+<p>It is with this second Commission in the Peace that we enter on
+the last five years of Fielding's crowded life, years full of that
+valiant struggle with eighteenth century crime to which the health
+of the great novelist was ultimately sacrificed. For no magistrate
+ever fulfilled more faithfully, or at greater personal cost, the
+first obligation of his Oath, "Ye shall swear that as Justice of
+Peace ... ye shall do equall right to the Poor and to the Rich,
+after your Cunning Witt and Power and after the Laws and Customes
+of the Realm...." And Fielding brought to his new post something
+more than a zealous discharge of the daily and nightly duties of an
+eighteenth century police magistrate. His genius and his patriotism
+found opportunity in the squalid Bow Street Court-room for
+advocating reforms as yet untouched by the slow hand of the
+professional philanthropist. The names of those reformers, of the
+men and women who swept away the pestilential horrors of eighteenth
+century prisons, of the statesmen who abolished laws that hung a
+man for stealing a handkerchief, and destroyed the public gallows
+that gave the mob their <em>Tyburn holiday</em>, of the creators of
+our temperance legislation, of our poor-law system, of our model
+dwellings,--all these are held high in honour. Because Henry
+Fielding was above all things a great creative genius his wise and
+strenuous efforts to raise social conditions, and to eradicate
+social sores, have been unduly forgotten.</p>
+
+<p>"Whatever he desired, he desired ardently," says Murphy. We soon
+have evidence of Justice Henry Fielding's ardent desire to cleanse
+London from some of the crying evils of his time. Of these evils
+none pressed more cruelly on the honest citizens than the
+prevalence and brutality of street robberies. To the well-protected
+Englishman of to-day the London of 1750 would seem a nightmare of
+lawlessness. Thieves, as Fielding tells us, attacked their victims
+with loaded pistols, beat them with bludgeons and hacked them with
+cutlasses; and as to the murderers of the period, he has recorded
+how he himself was engaged on <em>five</em> different murders, all
+committed by different gangs of street robbers within the space of
+one week. The exploit of one such gang may be quoted, from a
+newspaper paragraph of the first month of Fielding's administration
+at Bow Street. "On Friday evening," says the <em>General
+Advertiser</em> for January 23, 1749, "about twenty fellows arm'd
+with Pistols, Cutlasses, Hangers, &amp;c. went to the Gatehouse and
+one of them knocking at the Door, it was no sooner open'd than they
+all rush'd in, and struck and desperately wounded the Turnkey, and
+all that oppos'd them, and in Triumph carried off the Fellow who
+pick'd General Sinclaire's pocket of his watch as he was going into
+Leicester House." Surely, cries the indignant newspaper, "this
+instance of Daring Impudence must rouse every Person of Property to
+assemble and consult means for their own Security at least; for if
+Goals can be forc'd in this manner, private Houses can make but
+little resistance against such Gangs of Villains as at present
+infest this Great Metropolis." It was admitted that the numbers and
+arms of street robbers rendered it ordinarily impossible to arrest
+them in the act; and Fielding tells us how "Officers of Justice
+have owned to me that they have passed by [men] with Warrants in
+their Pockets against them without daring to apprehend them; and
+indeed they could not be blamed for not exposing themselves to sure
+Destruction: For it is a melancholy Truth, that at this very Day a
+Rogue no sooner gives the Alarm within certain Purlieus, than
+twenty or thirty armed Villains are found ready to come to his
+Assistance." And the new Justice found no effectual means at his
+disposal for coping with what he very aptly calls the enslaved
+condition of Londoners, assaulted, pillaged, and plundered; unable
+to sleep in their own houses, or to walk the streets, or to travel
+in safety. There were the Watch, who, we learn from <em>Amelia</em>
+were "chosen out of those poor old decrepid People, who are from
+their Want of bodily Strength rendered incapable of getting a
+Livelihood by Work. These Men, armed only with a Pole, which some
+of them are scarce able to lift, are to secure the Persons and
+Houses of his Majesty's Subjects from the Attacks of Gangs of
+young, bold, stout, desperate and well-armed Villains.... If the
+poor old Fellows should run away from such Enemies, no one I think
+can wonder, unless he should wonder that they are able even to make
+their <a name="fnref12-8">Escape</a>." <a class="footnote" href=
+"#fn12-8">8</a> These lineal descendants of Dogberry were
+supplemented by constables who it appears had to apply to the
+military when called upon to cope with the mere suppression of a
+gaming-house; and by "Thief-catchers," individuals so popularly
+odious that "the Thief-catcher is in Danger of worse Treatment from
+the Populace than the Thief." While the law was thus handicapped,
+the thief, on his side, had the advantage of the irregular
+buildings and the immense number of lanes, alleys, courts, and
+bye-places of London and Westminster, which, says Fielding, "had
+they been intended for the very purpose of concealment, they could
+scarce have been better contrived. Upon such a view the whole
+appears as a vast Wood or Forest, in which a Thief may harbour with
+as great Security as Wild Beasts do in the Desarts of Africa or
+Arabia." Also the thief's organisation was excellent: "there are at
+this Time," Fielding observes, "a great Gang of Rogues whose Number
+falls little short of a Hundred, who are incorporated in one Body,
+have Officers and a Treasury; and have reduced Theft and Robbery
+into a regular System." Further, he could generally bribe or deter
+the prosecutor. And in a last resource "rotten Members of the Law"
+forged his defence, and abundant false witnesses supported it. An
+illuminating example of the methods employed by our Georgian
+ancestors towards "deterring" prosecution occurs in a smuggling
+case of 1748, perpetrated shortly before Fielding first took
+office. A party of smugglers caught a custom-house officer and a
+shoemaker on their way to give evidence. The officer had 'every
+joint of him' broken; and after other torture, the description of
+which is more suitable for eighteenth century pages than our own,
+was dispatched. The less fortunate shoemaker was hung by the middle
+over a dry well, and left there. Several days afterwards the
+smugglers, returning and hearing him groan, cut the rope, let him
+drop to the bottom, and threw in logs and stones to cover him. And
+it was not only from the common thief that the Londoner of 1750
+suffered. That fine flower of eighteenth century lawlessness, the
+gentleman of the road, carried his audacities into the heart of the
+Town itself. "I was sitting in my own dining-room on Sunday night,"
+writes Horace Walpole, to a friend, "the clock had not struck
+eleven, when I heard a loud cry of 'stop thief!' A highwayman had
+attacked a postchaise in Piccadilly: the fellow was pursued, rode
+over the watchman, almost killed him, and escaped."</p>
+
+<p>It was into a conflict with this epidemic of crime that
+Fielding, at forty-three, and with already broken health, flung his
+energies, to such purpose that in these last five years of his life
+it is but too easy to forget the creator of <em>Joseph
+Andrews</em>, of <em>Tom Jones</em>, and of <em>Amelia</em>, in his
+last 'ardent desire,' as ardently pursued, to purify the sorely
+diseased body politic. His method of attack was twofold. He dealt
+vigorously with the individual criminal; and he sought to remove
+some of the causes by which those criminals were engendered. The
+individual attack is, for the most part, but sordid reading. Thus
+from a fragment of the Westminster <em>Committment Books</em>,
+preserved with the Middlesex Records, we may see how in January and
+February of this year 1749 'Henry Fielding Esq.' committed to the
+New Prison such cases as:</p>
+
+<table cellspacing="4" cellpadding="8" border="0" width="90%"
+summary=
+"Table: People committed to prison for riot, beating, burglary, ill fame, etc.">
+<tr>
+<td>Thomas Thrupp</td>
+<td>for riot</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td>Thomas Trinder</td>
+<td>for burglary</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td>T. Chamberlain and Terence Fitz Patrick</td>
+<td>for assault</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td>C. O'Neal</td>
+<td>for assaulting two Watchmen</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td>Mary Hughes and Caterine Edmonds</td>
+<td>for assault and beating</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td>John Smithson</td>
+<td>for exercising the art of pattenmaker without<br>
+ having been brought up thereto for seven years</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td>Cornelius York</td>
+<td>for filing guineas</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td>Christo Kelsey</td>
+<td>for ill fame</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td>Bryan Park</td>
+<td>for assault</td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+
+<p>This sorry list, interspersed with cases of murder, of robbery
+with violence, and of smuggling, may doubtless be extended over the
+entire five years of Fielding's work on the Bench; and to reiterate
+the details of such work would be as tedious now as the monotonous
+discharge of these duties must once have been to the author of
+<em>Tom <a name="fnref12-9">Jones</a></em>. <a class="footnote"
+href="#fn12-9">9</a> Of much more enduring interest is the great
+novelist's second line of attack on the problem confronting
+him.</p>
+
+<p>For Henry Fielding's insight was far too profound for him to
+fail to strike at the root of individual crime, in those conditions
+which bred the criminal as surely as, to use his own favourite
+simile, unclean surroundings breed disease. And he had not been six
+months on the Bench before finding his first opportunity in a
+<em>Charge</em> delivered, as their Chairman, to the Westminster
+Grand Jury, on June 29, <a name="fnref12-10">1749</a>. <a class=
+"footnote" href="#fn12-10">10</a> This "very loyal, learned,
+ingenious, excellent and useful" Charge was published "By Order of
+the Court, and at the unanimous Request of the Gentlemen of the
+Grand Jury"; and it is, Mr Austin Dobson tells us, "still regarded
+by lawyers as a model exposition." It is also a stirring appeal to
+the worthy jurors to discharge their duties as befitted men called
+upon to exercise one of the most ancient and honourable of English
+liberties: "Grand Juries, Gentlemen," declared their new Chairman,
+"are in Reality the only Censors of this Nation. As such, the
+Manners of the People are in your Hands, and in yours only. You,
+therefore, are the only Correctors of them.... To execute this Duty
+with Vigilance, you are obliged by the Duty you owe both to God and
+to your Country." Here is the same zeal, now directed to
+stimulating the conscience of the Westminster Jurors, which moved
+<em>Captain Vinegar</em> to lay about him so lustily on all the
+abuses within reach of his newspaper, and which inspired the
+'father of the English Novel' with the admitted motive,--"I
+declare, that to recommend Goodness and Innocence hath been my
+sincere Endeavour in this History"--if not with the consummate art
+of his pages.</p>
+
+<p>Fielding specially directs the energies of his jurors to the
+repression of open profligacy, the more as, through the 'egregious
+folly' of their parents, the <em>Town</em> had then become the
+'seminaries of education' for youths of birth and station. And he
+bids them attend to those 'temples of iniquity' the masquerade
+rooms of the time, with a side glance at Foote's scandalous
+performances; to the gaming houses; to the prevalent vice of
+profane swearing, that "detestable Crime, so injurious to the
+Honour of God, so directly repugnant to His positive Commands, so
+highly offensive to the Ears of all good Men, and so very
+scandalous to the Nation in the Ears of Foreigners"; and to the
+libeller, a species of 'Vermin' whom "men ought to crush wherever
+they find him, without staying till he bite them." It is noteworthy
+also, that to the genius of Fielding, 'watching, brooding,
+creating,' the characteristic feature of his age seemed to be a
+"fury after licentious and luxurious pleasures." "Gentlemen," he
+cries, "our News-Papers, from the Top of the Page to the Bottom,
+the Corners of our Streets up to the very Eves of our Houses,
+present us with nothing but a View of Masquerades, Balls, and
+Assemblies of various Kinds, Fairs, Wells, Gardens, &amp;c. tending
+to promote Idleness, Extravagance and Immorality, among all Sorts
+of People." Many of the public, he declares, make diversion "no
+longer the Recreation or Amusement, but the whole Business of their
+Lives"; and not content with three theatres they must have a
+fourth. What would he have said to a London in which not four but a
+hundred and twenty theatres draw nightly, and sometimes twice a
+day, their crowded audiences.</p>
+
+<p>Two days after the delivery of this <em>Charge</em> (which the
+<em>General Advertiser</em> praises as "excellent and learned") a
+three days street riot broke out, which it fell to Fielding to
+subdue. On Saturday July 1 a mob had gathered in the Strand, about
+a disorderly house where a sailor was said to have been robbed.
+Beadle Nathaniel Munns, arriving on the scene, found the mob crying
+out "Pull down the house, pull down the house!"; and sent for the
+constables. Meanwhile the mob broke open the house and demolished
+and stripped the same; and throwing the goods out of the windows,
+set fire to them, causing such danger of a general conflagration
+that 'the parish engines' were sent for. A constable, <em>not being
+able to find any magistrate in Town</em>, went to Somerset House to
+procure assistance from the military, and on his returning with a
+corporal and twelve men, a force that later that night was
+increased to an officer and forty men, the mob was at last
+dispersed. On the next day, however, Sunday, they reassembled, and
+proceeded to demolish a second house, and to burn the goods thereof
+with an even larger fire than that of the preceding night. Mr
+Saunders Welch, High Constable for Holborn and, Fielding tells us,
+"one of the best Officers who was ever concerned in the Execution
+of Justice, and to whose Care, Integrity and Bravery the Public
+hath, to my Knowledge, the highest Obligations," passing through
+Fleet Street at the time, saw this second fire, and was told by the
+owner of another house that the mob threatened to come to him next.
+Upon which Mr Welch "well knowing the Impossibility of procuring
+any Magistrate at that Time who would act," went to the Tilt Yard
+and procured an officer and some forty men; and returning, found
+the third house in great part wrecked, the danger of fire here
+being aggravated by the extreme narrowness of the street on both
+sides and the fact that the premises of a bank were adjacent. This
+same Sunday night, also, the mob broke open the night-prison under
+Beadle Munns' house, rescuing two prisoners; and forced the
+Watch-house of the Liberty with stones and brick bats, to the
+imminent danger of the Beadle's life, as "sworn before me, Henry
+Fielding." Till three in the morning Mr Welch and the soldiers
+remained on duty, by which time the rioters had again dispersed.
+All this time Fielding, Mr Welch records, was out of town; but, by
+noon on Monday, the Justice was back in Bow Street: and, on being
+acquainted with the riot, immediately dispatched an order for a
+party of the Guards to bring the prisoners to his house, the
+streets being then full of a riotous crowd threatening danger of
+rescue. Fielding proceeded to examine the prisoners, a "vast mob"
+meanwhile being assembled in Bow Steet, and the streets adjacent.
+On information of the threatening aspect of the people he applied
+to the Secretary at War for a reinforcement of the Guards; and from
+his window, spoke to the mob, informing them of their danger, and
+exhorting them to disperse, but in vain. Rumours, moreover, came
+that four thousand sailors were assembling to march to the Strand
+that Monday night. In view of these rumours and of the riotous
+state of the streets, Fielding, the officer of the guard, and Mr
+Welch "sat up the whole night, while a large party of soldiers were
+kept ready under arms who with the peace officers patrolled the
+streets." And thanks to this vigorous action on the part of their
+new magistrate the citizens found peace restored within twelve
+hours of his return to town.</p>
+
+<p>The same day as that on which Fielding was addressing the
+riotous mob from his Bow Street windows, and sitting up all night
+with the officer of a military guard, he found time to write to the
+Duke of Bedford on his own behalf and on that of his family,
+concerning the provision for which he betrays so constant an
+anxiety.</p>
+
+<p><br>
+</p>
+
+<p>"Bow Street. July 3. 1749.</p>
+
+<p>"My Lord,</p>
+
+<p>"The Protection which I have been honoured with receiving at the
+Hands of your Grace, and the goodness which you were pleased to
+express some time toward me, embolden me to mention to your Grace
+that the Place of Solicitor to the Excise is now vacant by the
+Death of Mr Selwyn. I hope no Person is better qualified for it,
+and I assure you, my Lord, none shall execute it with more
+Fidelity. I am at this Moment busied in endeavouring to suppress a
+dangerous Riot, or I w'd. have personally waited on your Grace to
+solicite a Favour which will make me and my Family completely
+happy.</p>
+
+<p>"I am, &amp;c.,</p>
+
+<p>"H. <a name="fnref12-11">Ffielding</a>." <a class="footnote"
+href="#fn12-11">11</a></p>
+
+<p>The vacant post was secured, alas, by another candidate.</p>
+
+<p>A few weeks after the riotous scenes which had enabled Fielding
+to show himself a man of prompt action in times of popular ferment,
+the publication is advertised of his <em>Charge</em>, published "by
+order of the Court and at the request of the Gentleman of the Grand
+Jury." And on the same day he submits to the Lord Chancellor a copy
+both of this pamphlet, and of a draft of a <em>Bill for the better
+preventing Street Robberies &amp;c</em>, the design of which it
+appears Lord Hardwick had already encouraged.</p>
+
+<p><br>
+</p>
+
+<p>"Bow Street, July 21. 1749.</p>
+
+<p>"My Lord,</p>
+
+<p>"I beg your Lordship's acceptance of a Charge given by me to the
+Grand Jury of Westminster though I am but too sensible how unworthy
+it is of your notice.</p>
+
+<p>"I have likewise presumed to send my Draught of a Bill for the
+better preventing street Robberies &amp;c. which your Lordship was
+so very kind to say you would peruse; I hope the general Plan at
+least may be happy in your Approbation.</p>
+
+<p>"Your Lordship will have the goodness to pardon my repeating a
+desire that the name of Joshua Brogden, may be inserted in the next
+commission of the Peace for Middlesex and Westminster for whose
+[integrity] and Ability in the Execution of his office. I will
+engage my credit with your Lordship, an Engagement which appears to
+me of the most sacred Nature.</p>
+
+<p>"I am,<br>
+"My Lord, with the utmost Respect and Devotion,<br>
+"Your Lordship's most Obed't<br>
+"Most humble Servant<br>
+"H. <a name="fnref12-12">Ffielding</a>. <a class="footnote" href=
+"#fn12-12">12</a></p>
+
+<p>"To the Right Hon'ble.<br>
+"The Lord High Chancellor of G. Britain."</p>
+
+<p>All trace of the text of this draft Bill seems to have been
+lost; but the fact of the Lord Chancellor's consent to consider its
+provisions shows clearly enough how rapidly Fielding was adding to
+his now achieved fame as the author of <em>Tom Jones</em> the very
+different reputation of an authority on criminal legislation.</p>
+
+<p>The application on behalf of Joshua Brogden, later if not at
+this time the Justice's Clerk, recalls the further pleasant tribute
+paid to the soundness of Mr Brogden's morals in the <em>Journal of
+a Voyage to Lisbon.</em> If all Fielding's modest magisterial
+income of £300 a year had gone, as he declares it should have done,
+to his clerk, that functionary would, he tells us, have been "but
+ill paid for sitting almost sixteen hours in the twenty four, in
+the most unwholesome, as well as nauseous air in the universe, and
+which hath in his case corrupted a good constitution without
+contaminating his morals." It was Joshua Brogden who had witnessed,
+a few months earlier, the agreement with Andrew Millar for <em>Tom
+Jones</em>. Could the good clerk but have played the part of a
+Boswell to his illustrious master we should have something more
+than our present scanty materials for the personal life of Henry
+Fielding.</p>
+
+<p>Yet another of Fielding's rare letters belongs to this year; a
+letter conveying his formal congratulations to Lyttelton, on that
+model statesman's second marriage, and in which his warm heart
+again makes application, not on behalf of his own scanty means, but
+for a friend.</p>
+
+<p><br>
+</p>
+
+<p>"Bow Street, Aug't 29, 1749.</p>
+
+<p>"Sir,</p>
+
+<p>"Permit me to bring up the Rear of your Friends in paying my
+Compliments of Congratulation on your late Nuptials. There may
+perhaps be seasons when the Rear may be as honourable a Post in
+Friendship as in War, and if so such certainly must be every time
+of Joy and Felicity. Your present situation must be full of these;
+and so will be, I am confident, your future Life from the same
+Fountain. Nothing can equal the excellent character your Lady bears
+among those of her own Sex, and I never yet knew them speak well of
+a woman who did not deserve their good words. How admirable is your
+Fortune in the Matrimonial Lottery! I will venture to say there is
+no man alive who exults more in this, or in any other Happiness
+that can attend you than myself; and you ought to believe me from
+the same Reason that fully persuades me of the satisfaction you
+receive from any Happiness of mine; this Reason is that you must be
+sensible how much of it I owe to your goodness; and there is a
+great Pleasure in Gratitude though it is second I believe to that
+of Benevolence; for of all the Delights upon Earth none can equal
+the Raptures which a good mind feels on conferring Happiness on
+those whom we think worthy of it. This is the sweetest ingredient
+in Power, and I solemnly protest I never wished for Power, more
+than a few days ago for the sake of a Man whom I love, and that
+more perhaps from the esteem I know he bears towards you than from
+any other Reason. This Man is in Love with a young Creature of the
+most apparent worth, who returns his affection. Nothing is wanting
+to make two very miserable People extremely Blessed but a moderate
+portion of the greatest of human Evils. So Philosophers call it,
+and so it is called by Divines, whose word is the rather to be
+taken, as they are, many of them, more conversant with this Evil
+than ever Philosophers were. The Name of this man is Moore to whom
+you kindly destined that Laurel, which, though it hath long been
+withered, may not probably soon drop from the Brow of its present
+Possessor; but there is another Place of much the same Value now
+vacant: it is that of Deputy Licensor to the Stage. Be not offended
+at this Hint; for though I will own it impudent enough in one who
+hath so many Obligations of his own to you, to venture to recommend
+another man to your Favour, yet Impudence itself may possibly be a
+Virtue when exerted on the behalf of a Friend; at least I am the
+less ashamed of it, as I have known men remarkable for the opposite
+Modesty possess it without the mixture of any other good Quality.
+In this Fault then you must indulge me; for should I ever see you
+as high in Power as I wish, and as it is perhaps more my Interest
+than your own that you should be, I shall be guilty of the like as
+often as I find a Man in whom I can, after much intimacy discover
+no want, but that of the Evil above mentioned. I beg you will do me
+the Honour of making my Compliments to your unknown Lady, and
+believe me to be with the highest Esteem, Respect, Love, and
+Gratitude</p>
+
+<p>"Sir,<br>
+"Y'r most obliged<br>
+"Most obed't<br>
+"humble Servant</p>
+
+<p>"Henry Fielding.</p>
+
+<p>"To the Hon'ble<br>
+"George Lyttelton, <a name="fnref12-13">Esqr</a>." <a class=
+"footnote" href="#fn12-13">13</a></p>
+
+<p class="centered"><a name="i361"><img src="images/361.jpg" alt=
+"Edward Moore" width="352" height="500"></a></p>
+
+<p>This Edward Moore was a poet held worthy, it would seem, to
+possess the Laureat's 'withered' laurel (even in 1749 Fielding
+cannot refrain from a thrust at Colley Cibber); a journalist; a
+writer of whom Dibden declared that the tendency of all his
+productions was to "cultivate truth and morality"; a tradesman in
+the linen business; and the son of a dissenting minister: a
+combination of circumstances closely recalling Fielding's
+friendship for the good dissenter, jeweller, and poet, George
+Lillo. And it is to an undated letter by Edward Moore, hitherto
+overlooked, that we owe one of the rare references to Henry
+Fielding from a contemporary pen. Moore is writing to a dissenting
+minister at Taunton, one Mr John Ward, of whom it was said that
+venerable as he himself was for learning, worth, and piety he
+deemed it "<em>an honour to have his name connected with that of
+Moore</em>,"--a further proof of the quality of man whom Fielding
+choose for friend. Moore had been prevented, by Fielding's illness,
+from appointing an evening on which he might invite the Taunton
+minister to his lodgings to meet there some of the first wits of
+the day. "It is not," he writes, "owing to forgetfulness that you
+have not heard from me before. Fielding continues to be visited for
+his sins so as to be wheeled about from room to room; when he mends
+I am sure to see him at my lodgings; and you may depend upon timely
+notice. What fine things are Wit and Beauty, if a Man could be
+temperate with one, or a Woman chaste with the other! But he that
+will confine his acquaintance to the sober and the modest will
+generally find himself among the dull and the ugly. If this remark
+of mine should be thought to shoulder itself in without an
+introduction you will be pleased to note that Fielding is a Wit;
+that his disorder is the Gout, and intemperance the cause." It is
+of course idle to contend that Fielding always carried a cool head.
+Murphy tells us that to him might justly be applied a parody on a
+saying concerning Scipio,--"always over a social bottle or a book,
+he enured his body to the dangers of intemperance, and exercised
+his mind with Studies." But we must in justice remember that the
+Augustan age of English literature concerned itself but very little
+with our modern virtue of sobriety. That Fielding, with the other
+great men of his day, very often drank more than was good for him,
+amounts to little more than saying that he wore a laced coat when
+he had one, and carried a sword at his side.</p>
+
+<p>The execution of one of the Strand rioters, Bosavern Penlez by
+name, in September, had roused much controversy; and as the
+evidence in the case was in Justice Fielding's possession, and the
+attacks were levelled at the Government, we find him plunged once
+more into political pamphleteering in the publication, under the
+date of 1749, of the learned little treatise entitled "<em>A True
+State of the Case of Bosavern Penlez' who suffered on account of
+the late riot in the Strand. In which the Law regarding these
+Offences and the Statute of George I. commonly called the Riot Act
+are fully considered.</em>" The pamphlet opens with a warm protest
+against the abuse to which Fielding had been subjected by his
+political opponents. "It may easily be imagined," he writes, "that
+a Man whose Character hath been so barbarously, even without the
+least Regard to Truth or Decency, aspersed, on account of his
+Endeavours to defend the present Government, might wish to decline
+any future Appearance as a political Writer"; but more weighty
+considerations move him to lay the defence of the Riot Act in
+general, and of this application of it in particular, before a
+public which had been imposed upon "in the grossest and wickedest
+manner." We have already quoted the vivid depositions concerning
+this Strand riot, which were sworn before Fielding, and which he
+here reproduces; and his historical defence of the public need of
+suppressing riots, from the days of Wat Tyler onwards, may be left
+to the curious reader. Needless to say, Fielding makes out an
+excellent case against the toleration of mob law:--"When by our
+excellent Constitution the greatest Subject, no not even the King
+himself, can, without a lawful Trial and Conviction divest the
+meanest Man of his Property, deprive him of his Liberty, or attack
+him in his Person; shall we suffer a licentious Rabble to be
+Accuser, Judge, Jury, and Executioner; to inflict corporal
+Punishment, break open Men's Doors, plunder their Houses, and burn
+their Goods?" And, at the close, this pamphlet reveals the
+warm-hearted magistrate no less than the erudite lawyer. For of the
+two condemned prisoners, Wilson and Penlez, the case of the former
+seemed to Fielding "to be the Object of true Compassion."
+Accordingly he laid the evidence in his possession before "some
+very noble Persons," and, he adds, "I flatter myself that it might
+be a little owing to my Representation, that the Distinction
+between an Object of Mercy, and an Object of Justice at last
+prevailed". So the felon gained his respite, and a lasting niche
+for his name, in that he owed his life partly if not wholly to the
+generous compassion of Henry Fielding. The pamphlet seems to have
+made its mark, for a second edition was advertised within a month
+of publication.</p>
+
+<p>This eventful year, the year which had seen the publication of
+<em>Tom Jones</em>, the shackling of Fielding's genius within the
+duties of a London magistrate, the issue of two pamphlets occupied
+with criminal reform and administration, the drafting of a proposed
+Criminal Bill, and the suppression of a riot, closed sadly with the
+death of Fielding's little daughter, Mary Amelia, when barely
+twelve months old. She was buried at St Paul's, Covent Garden, on
+the seventeenth of December, 1749. And some time in the autumn or
+early winter Fielding himself appears to have been dangerously ill.
+This we learn from the following paragraph in the <em>General
+Advertizer</em> for December 28: "Justice Fielding has no
+Mortification in his Foot as has been reported: that Gentleman has
+indeed been very dangerously ill with a Fever, and a Fit of the
+Gout, in which he was attended by Dr Thompson, an eminent
+Physician, and is now so well recovered as to be able to execute
+his Office as usual."</p>
+
+<h2><a name="chapter13">CHAPTER XIII</a><br>
+<br>
+FIELDING AND LEGISLATION</h2>
+
+<p class="quoted">"The Subject, as well as the Child, should be
+left without excuse before he is punished: for, in that case alone,
+the Rod becomes the Hand either of the Parent or the
+Magistrate."<br>
+ &nbsp;&nbsp;<em>Inquiry Into the Causes of the late Increase of
+Robbers</em>.</p>
+
+<p>There is no Bill for the suppression of street robberies on the
+Statute Book for 1749 or 1750; so the draft which Fielding, with
+characteristic energy, despatched to the Lord Chancellor but a few
+months after his appointment to the Bench, was, presumably,
+pigeon-holed. Meanwhile, the criminal conditions of the metropolis
+seem to have become, if anything, more scandalous. In February
+1750, the <em>Penny Post</em> reports the gaols in and about London
+to be "now so full of Felons and desperate Rogues that the Keepers
+have not fetters enow to put upon them; so that in some Prisons two
+or three are chained together to prevent their escape." And on the
+fifth of the same month the <em>General Advertiser</em> hears that
+"near 40 Highwaymen, street Robbers, Burglars, Rogues, Vagabonds,
+and Cheats have been committed within a week last past by Justice
+Fielding." But however full of business the Bow Street court-room
+might be, that dreary <a name="fnref13-1">routine</a> <a class=
+"footnote" href="#fn13-1">1</a> would make, as we have said, but
+equally dreary reading. And the fact that both John and Henry
+Fielding appear to have been known as 'Justice Fielding' during the
+lifetime of the latter, lessens whatever biographical value might
+be extracted from the constant newspaper paragraphs recording the
+Fielding cases. It is clear that the house in Bow Street was the
+centre of an active campaign against the thieves, murderers,
+professional gamblers, and highwaymen, who were then so rife.
+Military guards conducted thither prisoners, brought for
+examination from Newgate, for fear of rescue from gangs lurking in
+the neighbouring streets. All "Persons who have been robbed" and
+their servants, were desired, by public advertisement, to attend
+Justice Fielding "at his House in Bow Street," to identify certain
+prisoners under examination. And thither came the "porters and
+beggars," the composing of whose quarrels Henry Fielding himself
+has told us, occupied his days. The generous spirit in which he
+treated such poor clients, and his tenderness for those driven by
+want into crime, are eminently characteristic of the man. By
+adjusting, instead of inflaming, these squalid quarrels, and by
+"refusing to take a shilling from a man who must undoubtedly would
+not have had another left," he reduced a supposed income of £500 a
+year to £300. And if the picture of the poor wretch, driven to
+highway robbery by the sight of his starving family, whom Tom Jones
+relieved from his own scanty purse, be not proof enough of the
+compassion that tempered Justice Fielding's sternness, we have his
+own express pleading for these unhappy victims of circumstance:
+"what can be more shocking," he cries, "than to see an industrious
+poor Creature, who is able and willing to labour forced by mere
+want into Dishonesty, and that in a Nation of such Trade and
+Opulence." So justly could Fielding apportion the contributary
+negligence of society towards the criminals bred by its apathy.</p>
+
+<p>And it was not only the impoverished porter who found help at
+Bow Street. "When," says Murphy, "in the latter end of [Mr
+Fielding's] days he had an income of four or five hundred a-year,
+he knew no use of money but to keep his table open to those who had
+been his friends when young, and had impaired their own fortunes."
+As Mr Austin Dobson says, in commenting on one of Horace Walpole's
+scurrilous <a name="fnref13-2">letters</a>, <a class="footnote"
+href="#fn13-2">2</a> "it must always have been a more or less
+ragged regiment which met about that kindly Bow Street board." The
+man who parted with his own hardly won arrears of rent to relieve
+the yet greater need of a College friend, was little likely to be
+less generous when the tardy 'jade Fortune' at last put some
+secured income into his hands.</p>
+
+<p>No special event marks the spring and summer of 1750. On the
+11th of January the Westminster General Quarter Sessions opened,
+and on the following day Fielding was again elected as chairman
+"for the two next Quarter Sessions"; which election was repeated,
+"for the two next <a name="fnref13-3">Sessions</a>, <a class=
+"footnote" href="#fn13-3">3</a>" in July. The Registers of St
+Paul's Covent Garden record the baptism of a daughter, Sophia, on
+the 21st of January. And an indication that the zealous magistrate
+was plunged, personally, into some of the tumults of the time
+occurs in the following trifling note to the Duke of Bedford.</p>
+
+<p><br>
+</p>
+
+<p>"My Lord,</p>
+
+<p>"In obedience to the Commands I have the Honour to receive from
+your Grace, I shall attend tomorrow morning and do the utmost in my
+Power to preserve the Peace on that occasion.</p>
+
+<p>"I am, with gratitude and Respect,<br>
+"My Lord,<br>
+"Your Grace's most obliged<br>
+"most obedient humble servant.</p>
+
+<p>"Henry <a name="fnref13-4">Ffielding</a>. <a class="footnote"
+href="#fn13-4">4</a></p>
+
+<p>"Bow Street,<br>
+"May 14, 1750."</p>
+
+<p>By the autumn, however, a rumour was abroad that the now famous
+author of <em>Tom Jones</em> was engaged on pages of a very
+different nature. The <em>General Advertiser</em>, for October 9,
+announces:--</p>
+
+<p>"We hear that an eminent Magistrate is now employed in preparing
+a Pamphlet for the Press in which the several causes that have
+conspired to render Robberies so frequent of late will be laid
+open; the Defects of our Laws enquired into, and Methods proposed
+which may discourage and in a great measure prevent this growing
+Evil for the future."</p>
+
+<p>This pamphlet, in which many a later reform was urged by
+Fielding's far-sighted zeal, seems to have been still in
+preparation for the next two months. And in November the reform of
+the law had to give place to a more immediate urgency in protecting
+the Lord Chancellor. The keepers of three gaming houses, closed by
+his lordship's orders, were reported to be plotting against that
+exalted dignitary; and the case, as appears from the following
+letter to a lawyer, Mr Perkins, was in Fielding's <a name=
+"fnref13-5">hands</a>. <a class="footnote" href="#fn13-5">5</a></p>
+
+<p><br>
+</p>
+
+<p>"Sir</p>
+
+<p>"I have made full enquiry after the three Persons and have a
+perfect account of them all. Their characters are such that perhaps
+three more likely Men could not be found in the Kingdom for the
+Hellish Purpose mentioned in the Letter. As the Particulars are
+many and the Affair of such Importance I beg to see you punctually
+at six this evening when I will be alone to receive you--and am,
+Sir,</p>
+
+<p>"Yr. most obed;<br>
+"humble servant</p>
+
+<p>"He Ffielding.</p>
+
+<p>"Bow Street. Nov. 25. 1750."</p>
+
+<p>When the keepers of gambling houses dared to fly at such high
+game as the person of the Lord Chancellor, there is no wonder that
+the safety of his Majesty's ordinary lieges was of small account.
+"Robbery," writes Horace Walpole, a few weeks before the date of
+the above letter, "is the only thing which goes on with any
+vivacity." And at the close of the year a Royal Proclamation was
+actually published, promising £100 over and above other rewards,
+and a free pardon, to any accomplice who should apprehend offenders
+committing murder, or robbery by violence, in London streets or
+within five miles of London, providing such an accomplice had not
+himself dealt a mortal wound. So startling a confession of
+impotence on the part of the Government served very fitly to
+introduce the pamphlet, then on the eve of publication. And if
+further proof be needed of the conditions of public safety at the
+beginning of the year 1751, it may be seen in the passage of the
+King's Speech delivered at the opening of Parliament on the 17th of
+January, in which his Majesty exhorted the Commons to suppress
+outrages and violences on life and property; words representing, of
+course, the policy of the Ministry.</p>
+
+<p>The title of Fielding's little book, dedicated to Lord Hardwick,
+and published about January 22, is <em>An Enquiry into the Causes
+of the late Increase of Robbers &amp;c. with some Proposals for
+remedying this growing Evil. In which the Present Reigning Vices
+are impartially exposed; and the Laws that relate to the Provision
+for the Poor and to the Punishment of Felons are largely and freely
+examined</em>. The <em>Enquiry</em> opens with a powerful
+denunciation of the licence then allowed to the three great causes,
+in Fielding's opinion, of the increasing demoralisation of the
+'most useful Part' of the people. These were, first, the immense
+number of places of amusement, all seducing the working classes to
+squander both their money and their time; this being "indeed a
+certain Method to fill the Streets with Beggars and the Goals with
+Debtors and Thieves." Here, in Fielding's view, new legislation was
+demanded. The second cause of the late excessive increase of crime,
+according to the <em>Enquiry</em>, was an epidemic of gin drinking,
+"a new Kind of Drunkenness unknown to our Ancestors [which] is
+lately sprung up amongst us." Gin, says Fielding, appeared to be
+the principal sustenance of more than an hundred thousand
+Londoners, "the dreadful Effects of which I have the Misfortune
+every Day to see, and to smell too." The crime resulting from such
+drunkenness was obvious; but Fielding, looking far beyond the
+narrow confines of his court-room, beheld a future gin-sodden race,
+and he appeals to the legislature to put a stop to a practice, the
+consequences of which must alarm "the most sluggish Degree of
+Public Spirit." It is surely something more than a coincidence that
+a few weeks after these warnings were published, Hogarth issued his
+awful plate of <em>Gin Lane</em>. A third source of crime, in
+Fielding's eyes, was the gambling among the 'lower Classes of
+Life,'--a school "in which most Highwaymen of great eminence have
+been bred," and a habit plainly tending to the "Ruin of Tradesmen,
+the Destruction of Youth, and to the Multiplication of every Kind
+of Fraud and Violence." In this case the 'Eminent Magistrate' finds
+new legislation less needed than a vigorous enforcement of existing
+laws; such, he adds, "as hath lately been executed with great
+Vigour within the Liberty of Westminster." Before long the pages of
+<em>Amelia</em> were to bring home yet more forcibly to Fielding's
+readers the cruel results of the pleasures (or speculations) of the
+needy gambler,--the 'Destruction of Familys,' thereby incurred, no
+less than the breeding of highwaymen. Who does not remember "that
+famous scene when Amelia is spreading, for the recreant who is
+losing his money at the Kings Arms, the historic little supper of
+hashed mutton, which she has cooked with her own hands, and denying
+herself a glass of white wine to save the paltry sum of sixpence,
+'while her Husband was paying a Debt of several Guineas incurred by
+the Ace of Trumps being in the hands of his Adversary'--a scene
+which it is impossible to read aloud without a certain huskiness in
+the <a name="fnref13-6">throat</a>." <a class="footnote" href=
+"#fn13-6">6</a> The last great cause of crime which the
+<em>Enquiry</em> considers, and with much learning and detail, is
+the condition of the poor. Here Fielding's views on our modern
+problem of the unemployed may be read. And here occurs a splendid
+denunciation of the 'House of Correction' or Bridewell of the
+period, a prison for idle and disorderly persons where "they are
+neither to be corrected nor employed: and where with the
+conversation of many as bad and sometimes worse than themselves
+they are sure to be improved in the Knowledge and confirmed in the
+Practice of Iniquity." The most impudent of the wretches brought
+before him, Fielding tells us, were always "such as have been
+before acquainted with the Discipline of Bridewell." These prisons,
+from which the disorderly and idle came out, "much more idle and
+disorderly than they went in," were, says Fielding, no other than
+"Schools of Vice, Seminaries of Idleness, and Common-sewers of
+Nastiness and Disease." A fixed (and lower) rate of wages, it is
+curious to note, is one remedy advocated in the <em>Enquiry</em>,
+for raising the condition of the poor.</p>
+
+<p>Such were the 'temptations' to robbery that Fielding would have
+removed, nobly conceiving the highest office of the legislature to
+be that of prevention rather than cure. The <em>Enquiry</em>
+concludes with offering some more immediate palliatives for the
+diseased state of the body politic, in the removing of actual
+'Encouragement to Robbery.' First among such encouragements
+Fielding places the fact that "the Thief disposes of his goods with
+almost as much safety as the honestest Tradesman"; and he urged the
+need of legislation to prohibit the amazing advertisements by which
+our ancestors promised to give rewards for the recovery of stolen
+goods "<em>and no questions asked</em>." Such advertisements he
+declares to be "in themselves so very scandalous and of such
+pernicious Consequence, that if Men are not ashamed to own they
+prefer an old Watch or a Diamond Ring to the Good of [the] Society
+it is a pity some effectual Law was not contrived to prevent their
+giving this public Countenance to Robbery for the future." And,
+under this head, he advocates legislation either for the regulating
+of pawnbrokers, or for the entire extirpation of a "Set of
+Miscreants which, like other Vermin, harbour only about the Poor
+and grow fat sucking their Blood." The subsequent legislation by
+which prosecutors were recompensed for loss of time and money, when
+prosecuting the 'wolves in society,' may be added to the measures
+forseen if not actually promoted by Fielding's enlightened zeal.
+And in nothing was he more in advance of his age than in his
+denunciation of that scandal of the eighteenth century, the conduct
+and frequency of public executions. It has taken our legislators a
+hundred years to provide the swift, solemn and private executions
+urged by Henry Fielding, in place of the brutal 'Tyburn holiday'
+enacted every six weeks for the benefit of the Georgian mob.
+Another matter demanding legislation was the great probability of
+escape afforded to thieves by the narrow streets and the
+common-lodging houses of the day. Of the latter, crowded with
+miserable beds from the cellar to the garret, let out, at twopence
+a night the single beds, and threepence the double ones, Fielding
+draws a picture as terrible as any of his friend Hogarth's plates.
+And he concludes "Nay I can add what I myself once saw in the
+Parish of Shoreditch where two little Houses were emptied of near
+seventy Men and Women," and where the money found on all the
+occupants (with the exception of a pretty girl who was a thief)
+"did not amount to one shilling." In all these houses gin,
+moreover, was sold at a penny the quartern. Housed thus, in
+conditions destructive of "all Morality, Decency and Modesty," with
+the street for bed if they fall sick ("and it is almost a Miracle
+that Stench, Vermin, and Want should ever suffer them to be well"),
+oppressed with poverty, and sunk in every species of debauchery,
+"the Wonder in Fact is," cries Fielding, "... that we have not a
+thousand more Robbers than we have; indeed that all these wretches
+are not thieves must give us either a very high Idea of their
+Honesty or a very mean one of their Capacity and Courage." And,
+leaving for a moment legislative reform, Fielding delivers a
+vigorous attack on the national sluggishness of public spirit which
+helped to render robbery a fairly safe profession. With such
+sluggishness his ardent nature had very little sympathy. "With
+regard to Private Persons," he protests, "there is no Country I
+believe in the World where that vulgar Maxim so generally prevails
+that what is the Business of every Man is the business of no Man;
+and for this plain Reason, that there is no Country in which less
+Honour is gained by serving the Public. He therefore who commits no
+crime against the Public, is very well satisfied with his own
+Virtue; far from thinking himself obliged to undergo any Labour,
+expend any Money, or encounter any Danger on such Account." And in
+no part of the <em>Enquiry</em> does the writer more truly show his
+wisdom than in the pages on 'false Compassion' that plausible
+weakness which refuses to prosecute the oppressors of the helpless
+and innocent, and which at that time, in the person of his Majesty,
+King George II. was, it appears, very active in pardoning offenders
+when convicted. Fielding's arguments are incontestable; but his
+apologue may have found even more favour in the age of wit. He
+hopes such good nature may not carry those in power so far, "as it
+once did a Clergyman in <em>Scotland</em> who in the fervour of his
+Benevolence prayed to God that He would be graciously pleased to
+pardon the poor Devil."</p>
+
+<p>To the devil, whether in man or in society, Fielding was ever a
+'spirited enemy'; and his first biographer tells us that "to the
+unworthy he was rather harsh." But the last page of this little
+book breathes that spirit of tenderness for hard pressed humanity
+which in Fielding was so characteristically mingled with a
+wholesome severity. If the legislature would take proper care to
+raise the condition of the poor, then he declares the root of the
+evil would be struck: "nor in plain Truth will the utmost severity
+to Offenders be justifiable unless we take every possible Method of
+preventing the offence ... the Subject as well as the child should
+be left without Excuse before he is punished: for in that Case
+alone the Rod becomes the Hand either of the Parent or the
+Magistrate." And his last word is one of compassion for the "many
+Cart-loads of our Fellow-creatures [who] once in six weeks are
+carried to Slaughter"; of whom much the greater part might, with
+'proper care and Regulations' have been made "not only happy in
+themselves but very useful Members of the Society which they now so
+greatly dishonour in the Sight of all Christendom."</p>
+
+<p>Henry Fielding is himself his own best illustration when he
+declares that the "good Poet and the good Politician do not differ
+so much as some who know nothing of either art affirm; nor would
+<em>Homer</em> or <em>Milton</em> have made the worst Legislators
+of their Times."</p>
+
+<p>To the reader of to-day the <em>Enquiry</em> betrays no party
+flavour, but its sedate pages clearly stirred up the hot feeling of
+the times. Early in February the Advertiser announced "<em>This Day
+is published A Letter to Henry Fielding Esqre. occasioned by his
+Enquiry into the causes of the late increase of Robbers
+&amp;c.</em>" And about the end of the month there appeared
+<em>Considerations</em>, in two numbers of the <em>True
+Briton</em>, "on Justice Fielding's 'Enquiry,' shewing his Mistakes
+about the Constitution and our Laws and that what he seems to
+propose is dangerous to our Properties, Liberties and
+Constitution." On March 7 was announced <em>Observations on Mr
+Fielding's Enquiry</em>, by one B. Sedgley. Some opposition squib,
+too, must have been launched, to judge by the following item from
+an advertisement column of the same date: "a Vindication of the
+Rights and Privileges of the Commonality of England, in Opposition
+to what has been advanced by the Author of the Enquiry, or to what
+may be promulgated by any Ministerial Artifices against the public
+Cause of Truth and Liberty. <em>By</em> Timothy Beck<em>the Happy
+Cobler of Portugal-<a name="fnref13-7">street</a></em>." <a class=
+"footnote" href="#fn13-7">7</a> Perhaps some collector of
+eighteenth century pamphlets may be able to reveal these comments
+of the '<em>Happy Gobler of Portugal-street</em>' upon the
+'artifices' of Henry <a name="fnref13-8">Fielding</a>. <a class=
+"footnote" href="#fn13-8">8</a></p>
+
+<p>In the February following the publication of the
+<em>Enquiry</em> a Parlimentary Committee was appointed "to revise
+and consider the Laws in being, which relate to Felonies and other
+Offences against the <a name="fnref13-9">Peace</a>." <a class=
+"footnote" href="#fn13-9">9</a> The Committee included Lyttelton
+and Pitt, and there is of course every probability that Fielding's
+evidence would be taken; but it seems impossible now to discover
+what share he may have had in this move by the Government towards
+fresh criminal legislation. There is, however, the evidence of his
+own hand that in the matter of prison administration his efforts
+were not limited to academic pamphlets, or to the indictment, so
+soon to be published, contained in the terrible prison scenes of
+<em>Amelia</em>. The following letter to the Duke of <a name=
+"fnref13-10">Newcastle</a> <a class="footnote" href=
+"#fn13-10">10</a> shows an anxious endeavour to secure such good
+government as was possible for at least one of the gaols.</p>
+
+<p><br>
+</p>
+
+<p>"My Lord</p>
+
+<p>"It being of the utmost consequence to the Public to have a
+proper Prison Keeper of the new Prison at the Time, I beg leave to
+recommend Mr William Pentlow a Constable of St George Bloomsbury to
+your Grace's Protection in the present Vacancy. He is a Man of
+whose Courage and Integrity I have seen the highest Proofs, and is
+indeed every way qualified for the charge. I am with the most
+Perfect Respect,</p>
+
+<p>"My Lord,<br>
+"Your Grace's most obedient<br>
+"and most humble servant,</p>
+
+<p>"Henry Ffielding<br>
+"Bow Street Jan. 15. 1750 [1751]."</p>
+
+<p>A second edition of the <em>Enquiry</em> appeared early in the
+spring; and according to the <em>Journals of the House of
+Commons</em> it was resolved, in April, that a Bill be brought in
+on the resolution of the Committee appointed two months previously
+to consider criminal legislation. Again it can only be surmised
+that Fielding's assistance would be invoked in the drafting of this
+Bill. That his vigorous denunciations of the national danger of the
+gin curse were in complete accord with the feeling of the
+Government is apparent from the fact that two months later, in June
+1751, the <em>Tippling <a name="fnref13-11">Act</a></em> <a class=
+"footnote" href="#fn13-11">11</a> received the royal assent, by
+which Act very stringent restrictions were imposed on the sale of
+spirits.</p>
+
+<p class="centered"><a name="i362"><img src="images/362.jpg" alt=
+"Sir John Fielding" width="342" height="500"></a></p>
+
+<p>In June Fielding again appears as Chairman of the Westminster <a
+name="fnref13-12">Sessions</a>. <a class="footnote" href=
+"#fn13-12">12</a> And in September cases occur as brought before
+John Fielding and others "at Henry Fielding's house in Bow <a name=
+"fnref13-13">Street</a>," <a class="footnote" href=
+"#fn13-13">13</a> from which it appears that Fielding's blind
+half-brother was already acting as his assistant. In the following
+month John Fielding appears among the Justices of the Westminster
+Quarter <a name="fnref13-14">Sessions</a>. <a class="footnote"
+href="#fn13-14">14</a></p>
+
+<p>The year that had seen the publication of the <em>Enquiry</em>,
+affords proof enough of Fielding's active labours in criminal and
+social reform; but the last month of this year is marked by an
+occurrence of much greater import for English literature, the
+publication of the third great novel, <em>Amelia</em>.</p>
+
+<h2><a name="chapter14">CHAPTER XIV</a><br>
+<br>
+<em>Amelia</em></h2>
+
+<p class="quoted">"of all my Offspring she is my favourite
+Child."<br>
+ &nbsp;&nbsp;The <em>Covent Garden Journal</em>. No. 8.</p>
+
+<p>On the 2nd of December 1751 the <em>General Advertiser</em>
+announces that</p>
+
+<p class="quoted"><em>On Wednesday the 18th of this Month will be
+published</em></p>
+
+<p class="quoted">IN FOUR VOLUMES DUODECIMO</p>
+
+<p class="quoted">AMELIA</p>
+
+<p class="quoted">By HENRY FIELDING, Esq;<br>
+<br>
+ <em>Beati ter et amplius<br>
+ Quos irrupta tenet Copula.</em> HOR.</p>
+
+<p>And the puff preliminary of the period may be read in the same
+columns, declaring that the "earnest Demand of the Publick" had
+necessitated the use of four printing presses; and that it being
+impossible to complete the binding in time, copies would be
+available "sew'd at Half-a-Guinea a Sett." Sir Walter Scott tells
+us that, at a sale to booksellers before publication, Andrew
+Millar, the publisher, refused to part with <em>Amelia</em> on the
+usual discount terms; and that the booksellers, being thus
+persuaded of a great future for the book, eagerly bought up the
+impression. Launched thus, and heralded by the popularity with
+which <em>Tom Jones</em> had now endowed Fielding's name, the
+entire edition was sold out on the day of publication; an event
+which evoked the observation from Dr Johnson that <em>Amelia</em>
+was perhaps the only book which being printed off betimes one
+morning, a new edition was called for before night. The Doctor gave
+not only unstinted praise, but also an involuntary tribute to
+<em>Amelia</em>. He read the book through, without pausing, from
+beginning to end. And he pronounced Amelia herself to be "the most
+pleasing heroine of all the <a name="fnref14-1">romanc</a>es." <a
+class="footnote" href="#fn14-1">1</a></p>
+
+<p>But to the majority of readers Amelia is, assuredly, something
+more than the most charming of heroines. She is the delightful
+companion; the wise and tender friend; a woman whose least
+perfection was that dazzling beauty which shone with equal lustre
+in the 'poor rags' lent her by her old nurse, or in her own
+clothing, just as the happy purity of her nature only glows more
+brightly for the dark scenes through which she moves. In the whole
+range of English literature there is surely no figure more warmly
+human, and yet less touched with human imperfection; none more
+simply and naturally alive, and yet truer in every crisis (and
+there were few of the sorrowful things of life unknown to her) to
+the best qualities of generous womanhood. And if it is largely for
+her glowing vitality that we love Amelia, we love her none the less
+in that she is no fool. It was hardly necessary to tell us, as
+Fielding is careful to do, that her sense of humour was keen, and
+that her insight into the ridiculous was tempered only by the
+deeper insight of her heart. Her understanding of her husband is as
+perfect as her love for him; and that love is far too profound to
+allow a moment's suggestion of mere placid amiability. Amelia,
+whether quizzing the absurdities of the affected fine ladies of her
+own rank, or cooking her husband's supper in the poor lodgings of
+their poverty; whether so radiant with happiness after seeing her
+little children handsomely entertained that with flushed cheeks and
+bright eyes, "she was all a blaze of beauty," or, pale with
+distress, bravely carrying her own clothes and the children's
+trinkets to the pawnbroker; whether betraying her own noble
+qualities of silence and forgiveness, or losing her temper with Mrs
+Bennett,--commands equal affection and admiration. "They say,"
+wrote Thackeray, "that it was in his own home that Fielding knew
+her and loved her: and from his own wife that he drew the most
+charming character in English fiction--Fiction? Why fiction! Why
+not history? I know Amelia just as well as Lady Mary Wortley
+Montagu."</p>
+
+<p>Lady Mary, and her daughter Lady Bute, have left very definite
+statements concerning this portrait which their cousin was alleged
+to have hidden under the fair image of Amelia. Lady Bute we are
+told was no stranger "to that beloved first wife whose picture he
+drew in his Amelia, where, as she said, even the glowing language
+he knew how to employ did not do more than justice to the amiable
+qualities of the <a name="fnref14-2">original</a>...." <a class=
+"footnote" href="#fn14-2">2</a> And Lady Mary herself writes, "H.
+Fielding has given a true picture of himself and his first wife, in
+the characters of Mr and Mrs Booth [Amelia and her husband], some
+compliments to his own figure excepted; and I am persuaded several
+of the incidents he mentions are real matters of <a name=
+"fnref14-3">fact</a>." <a class="footnote" href="#fn14-3">3</a>
+Against these persuations we must place the fact that this book
+contains no such explicit statement as that which in <em>Tom
+Jones</em> assures us of the original of the beautiful Sophia. But
+we shall not love Amelia the less if we see her, with her courage
+and her beauty, her happy gaiety of spirit, her tenderness and
+strength, solacing the distresses and calming the storms of
+Fielding's restless genius, rather than devoting those qualities to
+assuaging the misfortunes of Captain William Booth. For indeed
+Captain Booth has but one substantial title to our regard, and that
+is his adoration for his wife. True, he is a pretty figure of a
+man; he has a handsome face; he fights bravely, and would kick a
+rogue through the world; he believes in and loves his friends; and
+he plays charmingly with his children. But, deprive him of the good
+genius of his life, and Captain Booth would very speedily have sunk
+into the ruin and despair of any other profligate young gamester
+about the Town; and for this his adoration the culprit wins our
+forgiveness, even as Amelia not only forgave but forgot, when by
+virtue of her own unconscious goodness the Captain retrieved
+himself, at last, from the folly of his ways. Undoubtedly the man
+whom Amelia loved, and who had the grace to return that passion,
+was no scoundrel at heart.</p>
+
+<p>It is impossible, now, to discover with any certainty the
+incidents which Lady Mary was persuaded were matters of fact. The
+experiences of Captain Booth, when essaying to turn gentleman
+farmer, have been quoted as copies of Fielding's own ambitions at
+East Stour; but surely on very slender evidence. Much more personal
+seem many of the later scenes in the poor London lodgings, scenes
+of cruel distress and perfect happiness, of bitter disappointments
+and sanguine hope. Here, very probably, we have echoes of the
+struggles of Harry and Charlotte Fielding, in the days of hackney
+writing and of baffled efforts at the Bar; just as the dry
+statement by Arthur Murphy, that Fielding was "remarkable for ...
+the strongest affection for his children," comes to life in the
+many touching pictures of Amelia and Booth with their little son
+and daughter. The pursuit of such identity of incident may the more
+cheerfully be left to the anecdotist, in that the biographical
+value of <em>Amelia</em>, is far more than incidental. For the book
+is, as has been said, a one-part piece. Round the single figure of
+Amelia all the other characters revolve; and it was of Amelia that
+Fielding himself has told us, in words that are a master key to his
+own character "of all my offspring she is my favourite Child." As
+surely as a man may be known by his choice in a friend, so is the
+nature of the artist betrayed when he avows his partiality for one
+alone among all the creations of his genius.</p>
+
+<p>As to the remaining figures in this "model of human life," to
+quote Fielding's own descriptive phrase of his book, those which
+tell us most of their author are that worthy, authoritative,
+humourous clergyman, Dr Harrison; the good Sergeant Atkinson; and
+that fiery pedant Colonel Bath, with his kind heart hidden under a
+ferocious passion for calling out every man whom he conceived to
+have slighted his honour. Dr Harrison does not win quite the same
+place in our hearts as the man whom Thackeray calls 'dear Parson
+Adams'; his cassock rustles a little too loudly; the saint is a
+trifle obscured in the Doctor. But yet we love him for his warm and
+protecting affection for his 'children' as he calls Amelia and
+Booth; for his dry humour; and for that generosity which was for
+ever draining his ample purse. And perhaps we like him none the
+less for his scholar's raillery of that early blue-stocking Mrs
+Bennet; while his dignity never shows to greater advantage than
+when he throws himself bodily on the villain Murphy, achieving the
+arrest of that felon by the strength of his own arm, and the
+nimbleness of his own legs. And to this good Doctor is given a
+saying eminently characteristic of Justice Fielding himself. We are
+told that "it was a maxim of his that no man could descend below
+himself in doing any act which may contribute to protect an
+innocent person, or to bring a rogue to the gallows." Another trait
+of the Doctor recalls Fielding's oft reiterated aversion to what he
+calls grave formal persons: "You must know then, child," said he,
+to poor Booth, sunk in the melancholy problem of supporting a wife
+and three children on something less than £40 a year, "that I have
+been thinking on this subject as well as you; for I can think, I
+promise you, with a pleasant countenance." Of Amelia's
+foster-brother Sergeant Atkinson (from whom Major William Dobbin is
+directly descended) it is enough to say that the noble qualities
+concealed beneath the common cloth of his sergeant's coat perfectly
+confirm a sentence written many years before by the hand of his
+author. "I will venture to affirm," Fielding declares, in his early
+essay on the <em>Characters of Men</em>, "that I have known ...
+<em>a Fellow whom no man should be seen to speak to</em>, capable
+of the highest acts of Friendship and Benevolence."</p>
+
+<p>Fielding's energies in this his last novel, a novel be it
+remembered written in the midst of daily contact with the squalid
+vices exhibited in an eighteenth century court-room, seem to have
+been almost wholly absorbed in creating the most perfect escape
+from those surroundings in the person of Amelia. Beside the figure
+of his 'favourite child,' the vicious criminals of his stage, the
+malefic My Lord, the loathsome Trent, the debased Justice, the
+terrible human wrecks in Newgate, are but dark figures in a shadowy
+back-ground. Still, the great moralist shows no lack of vigour in
+his delineations of such offspring of vice. The genius that knew
+how to rouse every reader of <em>Tom Jones</em> to 'lend a foot to
+kick Blifil downstairs,' awards in the last pages of
+<em>Amelia</em>, a yet more satisfying justice to that nameless
+connoisseur in profligacy, My Lord.</p>
+
+<p class="centered"><a name="i363"><img src="images/363.jpg" alt=
+"Ralph Allen" width="346" height="500"></a></p>
+
+<p>In his Dedication to Ralph Allen, Fielding states that his book
+"is sincerely designed to promote the Cause of Virtue, and to
+expose some of the most glaring Evils, as well public as private,
+which at present infest this Country". The statement seems somewhat
+needless when prefacing pages which enshrine Amelia; and where also
+are displayed Blear Eyed Moll in the prison yard of Newgate, as
+Newgate was twenty years before the prison reforms of Howard were
+heard of; Justice Thrasher and his iniquities; the 'diabolisms' of
+My Lord and of his tool Trent; the ruinous miseries of excessive
+gambling; and the abuses of duelling. Indeed the avowedly didactic
+purpose of the moralist seems at times to cloud a little the fine
+perception of the artist. There are passages, in this book which,
+much as they redound to the honour of their writer, are
+indisputably heavy reading. But what shall not be forgiven to the
+creator of Amelia. "To have invented that character," cries
+Thackeray, also becoming didactic, "is not only a triumph of art,
+but it is a good action." And he tells us how with all his heart he
+loves and admires the 'kindest and sweetest lady in the world'; and
+how he thinks of her as faithfully as though he had breakfasted
+with her that morning in her drawing-room, or should meet her that
+afternoon in the Park.</p>
+
+<p>It is recorded that Fielding received from Andrew Millar £1000
+for the copyright of <em>Amelia</em>. But the reception of the new
+novel, after the first rush for copies, seems to have done little
+credit either to the brains or to the heart of the public. And in
+the month following <em>Amelia's</em> appearance, Fielding
+satirises the comments of the Town, in two numbers of his
+<em>Covent Garden Journal</em>; protesting that though he does not
+think his child to be entirely free from faults--"I know nothing
+human that is so,"--still "surely she does not deserve the Rancour
+with which she hath been treated by the Public." As ironic
+specimens of the faults complained of in his heroine, he quotes the
+accusations that her not abusing her husband "for having lost Money
+at Play, when she saw his Heart was already almost broke by it, was
+<em>contemptible Meanness</em>"; that she condescends to dress her
+husband's supper, and to dress her children, to whom moreover she
+shows too much kindness; that she once mentions the DEVIL; that she
+is a <em>low</em> character; and that the beauty of her face is
+hopelessly flawed by a carriage accident. Such are some of the
+charges brought against the lovely Amelia by the "Beaus, Rakes,
+fine Ladies, and several formal Persons with bushy wigs and canes
+at their Noses," who, in Fielding's satire, crowd the Court where
+his book is placed on trial for the crime of dullness. Then
+Fielding himself steps forward, and after pleading for this his
+'favourite Child,' on whom he has bestowed "a more than ordinary
+Pains in her Education," he declares, with the same hasty petulance
+that characterised that previous outburst in the preface to
+<em>David Simple</em>, that indeed he "will trouble the World no
+more with any children of mine by the same Muse." Two months later
+the <em>Gentleman's Magazine</em> prints a spirited appeal against
+this resolution. "His fair heroine's nose has in my opinion been
+too severely handled by some modern <a name=
+"fnref14-4">critics</a>," <a class="footnote" href="#fn14-4">4</a>
+writes Criticulus, after a passage of warm praise for the
+characterisation, the morality, and the 'noble reflections of the
+book'; and he proceeds to point out that the writings of such
+critics "will never make a sufficient recompense to the world, if
+<em>Mr Fielding</em> adheres to what I hope he only said in his
+warmth and indignation of this injurious treatment, that he will
+never trouble the public with any more writings of this kind." The
+words of the enlightened <em>Criticulus</em> echo sadly when we
+remember that in little more than two years the great genius and
+the great heart of Henry Fielding were to be silenced.</p>
+
+<p>The <em>London Magazine</em> for 1751 devotes the first nine
+columns of its December number to a resume of the novel, and
+continues this compliment in another nine columns of appendix. With
+a fine patronage the reviewer concludes that "upon the whole, the
+story is amusing, the characters kept up, and many reflections
+which [sic] are useful, if the reader will but take notice of them,
+which in this unthinking age it is to be feared very few will."
+Some imperfections he kindly excuses on the score of "the author's
+hurry of business in administering impartial justice to his
+majesty's good people"; but he cannot excuse what he declares to be
+the ridicule of <em>Liberty</em> in Book viii.; and he solemnly
+exhorts the author that as "he has in this piece very justly
+exposed some of the private vices and follies of the present age"
+so he should in his next direct his satire against political
+corruption, otherwise 'he and his patrons' will be accused of
+compounding the <a name="fnref14-5">same</a>. <a class="footnote"
+href="#fn14-5">5</a> It seems incredible that any suggestion should
+ever have attached to the author of <em>Pasquin</em> and the
+<em>Register</em>, as to one who could condone public corruption.
+And as for the accusation of tampering with "Liberty" the like
+charge was brought, we may remember, by the "Happy Cobler of
+Portugal Street" against Fielding's <em>Inquiry into the Encrease
+of Robbers</em>. The literary cobblers who pursued <em>Amelia</em>
+with the abuse of their poor pens may very well be consigned to the
+oblivion of their political brother. The comment of one hostile pen
+cannot however be dismissed as coming from a literary cobbler, and
+that is the 'sickening' abuse, to use Thackeray's epithet, which
+Richardson dishonoured himself in flinging at his great
+contemporary. That abuse the sentimentalist poured out very freely
+on <em>Amelia</em>; but, as Mr Austin Dobson says, "in cases of
+this kind <em>parva seges satis est</em>, and Amelia has long since
+outlived both rival malice and contemporary coldness. It is a proof
+of her author's genius that she is even more intelligible to our
+age than she was to her <a name="fnref14-6">own</a>." <a class=
+"footnote" href="#fn14-6">6</a></p>
+
+<p>In Fielding's satiric description of the Court before which his
+Amelia stood her trial, he describes himself as an 'old gentleman.'
+The adjective seems hardly applicable to a man of forty five; but,
+to quote again from Mr Austin Dobson, "however it may have chanced,
+whether from failing health or otherwise, the Fielding of
+<em>Amelia</em> is suddenly a far older man than the Fielding of
+<em>Tom Jones</em>. The robust and irrepressible vitality, the full
+veined delight of living, the energy of observation and strength of
+satire, which characterise the one, give place in the other to a
+calmer retrospection, a more compassionate humanity, a more
+benignant criticism of life." Murphy's Irish tongue declares a
+similar feeling in his comparison of the pages of this, the last of
+the three great novels, to the calm of the setting sun; a sun that
+had first broken forth in the 'morning glory' of <em>Joseph
+Andrews</em>, and had attained its 'highest warmth and splendour'
+in the inimitable pages of <em>Tom Jones</em>. There is indeed a
+mature wisdom and patience in Amelia such as none but a pedant
+could demand of her enchanting younger sister Sophia. In these
+later pages Sophia has grown up into a gracious womanhood, while
+losing none of her girlhood's gaiety and charm. That Amelia, his
+older and wiser though scarce sadder child, was the nearest, as he
+himself tells us, to Fielding's own heart, is one more indication
+that here is the perfected image of that beloved wife, from whose
+youthful grace and beauty his genius had already modelled one
+exquisite memorial.</p>
+
+<h2><a name="chapter15">CHAPTER XV</a><br>
+<br>
+JOURNALIST AND MAGISTRATE</h2>
+
+<p class="quoted">"However vain or romantic the Attempt may seem I
+am sanguine enough to aim at serving the noble Interests of
+Religion, Virtue, and good Sense, by these my lucubrations."<br>
+The <em>Covent Garden Journal</em>. No. 5.</p>
+
+<p>Nothing could be more characteristic of Fielding's active spirit
+than were the early months of 1752. For, no sooner had he deposited
+the four volumes of <em>Amelia</em> in the hands of the public,
+essaying to win his readers over to a love of virtue and a hatred
+of vice, by placing before their eyes that true "model of human
+life," than we find him launching a direct attack on the follies
+and evils of the age, by means of his old weapon, the press.</p>
+
+<p>The first number of the <em>Covent Garden Journal</em> appeared
+on the 4th of January, and its pages, produced under Fielding's own
+management and apparently largely written by his own pen, provided
+satires on folly, invectives against vice, and incitements to
+goodness and sense, delivered in the name of one <em>Sir Alexander
+Drawcansir, Knt. Censor of Great <a name=
+"fnref15-1">Britain</a></em>. <a class="footnote" href=
+"#fn15-1">1</a> The new paper ran but for seventy-two numbers;
+perhaps for all the wit and learning, the fire and zest of its
+columns, the public were reluctant to buy their own lashings. But
+it may be doubted whether, except in the pages of his three great
+novels, Henry Fielding ever revealed himself more completely than
+in these his last informal 'lucubrations.' Here, the active
+Justice, the accomplished scholar, the lawyer, and man of the
+world, the first wit of his day, talks to us of a hundred topics,
+chosen indeed on the spur of the moment, but discussed in his own
+incomparable words, and with the now mature authority of one, who
+had "dived into the inmost Recesses of Human Nature." No subject is
+too abstruse, none too trifling, for <em>Mr Censor</em> to
+illumine. Freed from the political bands of the earlier newspapers,
+this last <em>Journal</em>, produced be it remembered by a man in
+shattered health, and distracted by the squalid business of a Bow
+Street Court-room, ranges over an amazing compass of life and
+manners.</p>
+
+<p>Thus, one January morning, <em>Sir Alexander's</em> readers
+would open their paper to find him deploring the decline of "a
+Religion sometime ago professed in this Country, and which, if my
+Memory fails me not was called Christian." The following Saturday
+they are presented with a learned and pleasant argument to prove
+that every male critic should be eighteen years of age, and "BE
+ABLE TO READ." A few days later the pages of writers purveying the
+prevalent "Infidelity, Scurrility, and Indecency" are ingeniously
+allotted to various uses. In February the <em>Journal</em> accords
+a noble tribute "to that great Triumvirate Lucian, Cervantes, and
+Swift"; not indeed "for that Wit and Humour alone, which they all
+so eminently possesst, but because they all endeavoured with the
+utmost Force of their Wit and Humour, to expose and extirpate those
+Follies and Vices which chiefly prevailed in their several
+Countries." The design of Aristophanes and Rabelais on the other
+hand, appears to <em>Mr Censor</em>, if he may speak his opinion
+freely, "very plainly to have been to ridicule all Sobriety,
+Modesty, Decency, Virtue, and Religion out of the world." From such
+considerations it is an easy passage to a definition of 'real
+Taste' as derived from a "nice Harmony between the Imagination and
+the Judgment"; and to these final censorial warnings:--"<em>Evil
+Communications corrupt good Manners</em> is a quotation of St Paul
+from Menander. EVIL BOOKS CORRUPT AT ONCE BOTH OUR MANNERS AND OUR
+TASTE." Four days after this learned 'lucubration' the voice of the
+warm-hearted magistrate speaks in a reminder of the prevailing
+abject misery of the London poor who "in the most miserable
+lingering Manner do daily perish for Want in this Metropolis." And
+in almost the next number his Honour gives his readers letters from
+the fair <em>Cordelia</em>, from <em>Sarah Scandal</em>, and from
+other correspondents, of a wit pleasant enough to drive London's
+poverty far from their minds. Two days after attending to these
+ladies, the <em>Censor</em> takes up his keenest weapons in an
+attack on that "detestable vice of slander" by which is taken away
+the "<em>immediate Jewel of a Man's Soul</em>," his good name; a
+crime comparable to that of murder. Here we have <em>Sir
+Alexander</em> speaking with the same voice as did the playwright
+and journalist of ten years previously, when he declared, in his
+<em>Miscellanies</em>, that to stab a man's character 'in the dark'
+is no less an offence than to stab his flesh in the same
+treacherous manner. Indeed, throughout these last columns of weekly
+satire, wit, and learning, Fielding remains true to the constant
+tenor of his genius. He exposes the miser, the seducer of
+innocence, the self-seeker, the place-hunter, the degraded vendor
+of moral poison, the 'charitable' hypocrite, with the same fierce
+moral energy as that with which, when but a lad of one and twenty,
+he first assailed the vices of the society in which his own lot was
+cast. His unconquerable energy, an energy that neither sickness nor
+distress could abate, still assaults that "cursed Maxim ... that
+Everybody's business is Nobody's." And his wit has lost none of its
+point when thrusting at the lesser follies of the day; at the fair
+Clara's devotion to her pet monkey; at the insolence of the Town
+Beau at the playhouse; at the arrogance of carters in the streets;
+at the vagaries of fashion according to which Belinda graces the
+theatre with yards of ruff one day, and on the next discards that
+covering so entirely that the snowy scene in the boxes "becomes
+extremely delightful to the eyes of every Beholder."</p>
+
+<p>It is quite impossible to convey, within the limits of a few
+pages, all that <em>Sir Alexander</em> tells us of what he sees and
+hears, as the tragi-comedy of life passes before his Bow Street
+windows. For Fielding possessed in the highest degree the art of
+hearing, to use his own analysis, not with the ear only (an organ
+shared by man with "other Animals") but also with the head, and
+with the heart; just as his eye could penetrate beneath the velvet
+coat of the prosperous scoundrel, the reputation of the illiterate
+author, or the sorry rags of some honest hero of the gutter. And
+his <em>Covent Garden Journal</em> is, in truth, his journal of
+eleven months of a life into the forty odd years of which were
+compressed both the insight of genius, and the activities of twenty
+average men. Such a record cannot be sifted into a summary. The
+acknowledged motive of this last of Fielding's newspapers is,
+however, concise enough; and does equal honour to his patriotism
+and his humanity. The age, as it seemed to him, was an age of
+public degradation. Religion was vanishing from the life of the
+people; politics were a petty question of party jealousy; literary
+taste was falling to the level of alehouse wit and backstairs
+scandal; the youth of the nation were completing their education,
+when fifteen or sixteen years old, by a course of the Town, and
+then qualifying for a graduate's degree in like knowledge, by a
+foreign tour; the 'mob' was gaining a dangerous excess of power;
+the leaders of society were past masters and mistresses of vice and
+folly; the poor in the streets were sunk in misery, or brutalised
+into reckless crime. This was the England that <em>Mr Censor</em>
+saw from his house in Bow Street; this was the England which he set
+out to purify; and the means which he chose were his own familiar
+weapons of satire and ridicule. Of these, ridicule, he declares,
+when his <em>Journal</em> was but four weeks old, "is commonly a
+stronger and better method of attacking Vice than the severer kind
+of Satire." In accordance with which view, <em>General Sir
+Alexander</em> is represented, in a mock historic forecast, as
+having, in the space of twelve months, entirely cleansed his
+country from the evils afflicting it, by means of a "certain Weapon
+called a Ridicule." These evils moreover Fielding held to be most
+readily combated by assailing "those base and scandalous Writings
+which the Press hath lately poured in such a torrent upon us that
+the Name of an Author is in the ears of all good Men become almost
+an infamous appelation"; and, accordingly, the first number of his
+new paper discloses <em>Sir Alexander</em> in full crusade against
+these Grub-Street writers. But that he soon perceived the quixotic
+impolicy of such a campaign, appears very clearly, as early as the
+fifth number of the <em>Journal</em>:--"when Hercules undertook to
+cleanse the Stables of Augeas (a Work not much unlike my present
+Undertaking) should any little clod of Dirt more filthy perhaps
+than all the rest have chanced to bedawb him, how unworthy his
+Spirit would it have been to have polluted his Hands, by seizing
+the dirty clod, and crumbling it to Pieces. He should have known
+that such Accidents were incident to such an Undertaking: which
+though both a useful and heroic office, was yet none of the
+cleanliest; since no Man, I believe, ever removed great quantities
+of Dirt from any Place without finding some of it sticking to his
+skirts." Such dirty clods were undoubtedly thrown by nameless
+antagonists, as unworthy of Fielding's steel as was one whose name
+has come down to us, the despicable Dr John Hill, who once suffered
+a public caning at Ranelagh; and one clod, "more filthy perhaps
+than all the rest," soiled the hands of <a name=
+"fnref15-2">Smollett</a>. <a class="footnote" href="#fn15-2">2</a>
+But the dirt which was very freely flung on to our
+eighteenth-century Hercules has, by now, fallen back, with great
+justice, on to the heads of his abusers. Fielding has placed on
+record, in the <em>Journal</em>, his conviction that the man who
+reads the works of the five heroic satirists, Lucian, Cervantes,
+Swift, Moliere and Shakespeare, "must either have a very bad Head,
+or a very bad Heart, if he doth not become both a Wiser and a
+better Man." To-day, 'party and prejudice' having subsided, we are
+ready to say the same of the readers of the <em>Covent Garden
+Journal</em>; perceiving that, if <em>Mr Censor</em>, like his five
+great forerunners, chose to send his satire "laughing into the
+World," it was that he might better effect the 'glorious Purpose'
+announced in the fifth number of his paper: "However vain or
+romantic the Attempt may seem, I am sanguine enough to aim at
+serving the noble Interests of Religion, Virtue, and good Sense, by
+these my Lucubrations."</p>
+
+<p>To most men the production, twice a week, of a newspaper so wide
+in scope as the <em>Covent Garden Journal</em> (for its columns
+included the news of the day, as well as the manifold 'censorial'
+energies of <em>Sir Alexander</em>) would have been occupation
+enough; especially with a "constitution now greatly impaired and
+enfeebled," and when "labouring under attacks of the gout, which
+were, of course, severer than ever."</p>
+
+<p>But there is no hint of either editorial or valetudinarian
+seclusion in the fragmentary glimpses obtainable of Mr Justice
+Fielding during these eleven months of 1752. Thus, by an
+advertisement recurring throughout the <em>Journal</em>, he
+expressly invites to his house in Bow Street, "All Persons, who
+shall for the Future suffer by Robbers Burglars &amp;c.," that they
+may bring him "the best Description they can of such Robbers,
+&amp;c., with the Time, and Place, and Circumstances of the Fact";
+and that this invitation was likely to bring half London within his
+doors appears from Fielding's own description of the condition of
+the capital at the time. "There is not a street," he declares,
+speaking of Westminster, "which doth not swarm all day with
+beggars, and all night with thieves. Stop your coach at what shop
+you will, however expeditious the tradesman is to attend you, a
+beggar is commonly beforehand with him; and if you should directly
+face his door the tradesman must often turn his head while you are
+talking to him, or the same beggar, or some other thief at hand
+will pay a visit to his shop!" And nothing could prove more
+conclusively the arduousness of Fielding's work as a magistrate
+than the record of the last ten days of January, 1752. On the night
+of the 17th a peculiarly brutal murder had been perpetrated on a
+poor higgler in Essex; and the <em>Journal</em> for January 28,
+tells us how Fielding "spent near eight hours," examining,
+separately, suspected persons, "at the desire of several gentlemen
+of Fortune in the County of Essex"; having on the previous Friday
+and Saturday, been engaged "above Twenty hours in taking
+Depositions concerning this Fact." Then, on the day after the
+arrival of the murder suspects, we find two of the Shoreditch
+constables bringing no fewer than ten "idle lewd and disorderly"
+men and women before the Justice; a woman was charged by a diamond
+seller on suspicion of feloniously receiving "three Brilliant
+Diamonds"; Mr Welch, the notable High Constable of Holborn, brought
+seventeen "idle and lewd Persons" whom he had apprehended the night
+before; and, to complete this single day's work, an Italian was
+brought in, "all over covered with [the] Blood" of a brother
+Italian, whose head he had almost cut off. Twenty-nine cases on one
+day, and these in the midst of eight hour examinations concerning a
+murder, were surely work enough to satisfy even Fielding's
+energies. And, as another entry in his <em>Journal</em> mentions
+the examination of a suspected thief "very late at Night," there
+seems to have been no hour out of the twenty-four in which the
+great novelist did not hold himself at the service of the
+public.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile, the criminal licence of the streets was now receiving
+Ministerial attention. The King's Speech, delivered at the opening
+of Parliament in the previous November, had contained a passage
+which might have been inspired by Fielding himself: "I cannot
+conclude," said His Majesty, "without recommending to you in the
+most earnest manner, to consider seriously of some effectual
+provisions to suppress those audacious crimes of Robbery and
+Violence which are now become so frequent...and which have
+proceeded in great Measure from that profligate Spirit of
+Irreligion, Idleness, Gaming, and Extravagance, which has of late
+extended itself in an uncommon degree, to the Dishonour of the
+Nation, and to the great Offence and Prejudice of the sober and
+industrious Part of the People." Six weeks later the first number
+of the <em>Journal</em>, makes comment on the need of fresh
+legislation to suppress drunkenness; and on the twenty first of the
+month <em>Sir Alexander</em> announces, with something of special
+information in his tone, that the immediate suppression of crimes
+of violence "we can with Pleasure assure the Public is at present
+the chief attention of Parliament."</p>
+
+<p>It must have been with something of the pleasure which he so
+earnestly desires in one of the last utterances of his pen--"the
+pleasure of thinking that, in the decline of my health and life, I
+have conferred a great and lasting Benefit on my Country,"--that
+Fielding saw the royal assent given, in the following March, to an
+Act for the "<em>better preventing Thefts and Robberies and for
+regulating Places of Public Entertainment, and punishing Persons
+keeping disorderly <a name="fnref15-3">Houses</a>.</em>" <a class=
+"footnote" href="#fn15-3">3</a> For this Act is directed to the
+suppression of four of the abuses so strongly denounced, twelve
+months previously, in his own <em>Enquiry</em>; and when we recall
+the fact that he had already submitted, to the Lord Chancellor,
+draft legislation for the suppression of robberies, it is at least
+a plausible surmise that here we have a memorial of Henry
+Fielding's patriotic energy, preserved on the pages of the Statute
+Book <a name="fnref15-4">itself</a>. <a class="footnote" href=
+"#fn15-4">4</a> The four points so specially urged in the
+<em>Enquiry</em>, and here made law, are the suppression of the
+"multitude of places of Entertainment" for the working classes; the
+better suppression of Gaming Houses; the punishment of the
+scandalous advertisements offering rewards 'and no questions asked'
+for stolen goods; and the payment of certain prosecutors for their
+expenses in time and trouble, when a conviction had been
+obtained.</p>
+
+<p>In this same month of March another Act, which closely concerned
+Fielding's official work, received the royal assent. This was an
+Act "for better preventing the horrid Crime of <a name=
+"fnref15-5">Murder</a>." <a class="footnote" href="#fn15-5">5</a>
+The pressing need of such a measure had been already urged in the
+<em>Covent Garden journal</em>. In February the <em>Journal</em>
+declares that <em>"More shocking Murders have been committed within
+the last Year, than for many Years before. To what can this be so
+justly imputed as to the manifest decline of Religion among the
+lower People. A matter, which even, in a Civil Sense, demands the
+attention of the Government."</em> And Mr Censor returns to the
+subject on March 3: <em>"More Murders and horrid Barbarities have
+been committed within the last twelvemonth, than during many
+preceding years. This as we have before observed, is principally to
+be attributed to the Declension of Religion among the Common
+People."</em> By the end of the month the above-named Act had
+received the royal assent; and the first clause thereof again
+yielded Fielding the satisfaction of seeing a measure which he had
+warmly recommended in his Enquiry now placed on the Statute Book,
+namely the clause that the execution of the criminal be made
+immediate on his conviction. This Act, moreover, provides for the
+abatement of another scandal exposed by Fielding many years
+previously, in the pages of Jonathan Wild, that of the excessive
+supply of drink allowed to condemned prisoners.</p>
+
+<p>In the following month Fielding carried out a scheme, conceived
+he tells us "some time since," for combating this prevalence of
+murder. This was his shilling pamphlet, published about April 14,
+entitled "Examples of the Interposition of Providence in the
+<em>Detection</em> and <em>Punishment</em> of MURDER. Containing
+above thirty cases, in which this dreadful crime hath been brought
+to light in the most extraordinary and miraculous manner." The
+advertisement describes the <em>Examples</em> as <em>"very proper
+to be given to all the inferior Kind of People; and particularly to
+the Youth of both sexes, whose natural Love of Stories will lead
+them to read with Attention what cannot fail of Infusing in to
+their tender Minds an early Dread and Abhorrence of staining their
+Hands with the Blood of their Fellow-creatures"</em> Low as was the
+price, a "large allowance" was made by Andrew Millar to those who
+bought any quantity; and Fielding distributed the little volume
+freely in Court.</p>
+
+<p>The thirty-three <em>Examples</em> are introduced and concluded
+by Fielding's own denunciation of this, "the blackest sin, which
+can contaminate the hands, or pollute the soul of man." And from
+these pages we may learn his own solemnly declared belief in a
+peculiarly "immediate interposition of the Divine providence" in
+the detection of this crime; and also his faith in "the fearful and
+tremendous sentence of eternal punishment" as that divinely
+allotted to the murderer. He warns the murderer, moreover, that by
+hurrying a fellow-creature to a sudden and unprepared death he may
+be guilty of destroying not only his victim's body, but also his
+soul. And it may be questioned whether Fielding ever put his
+unrivalled mastery of style to a nobler intention than in the
+closing words of this pamphlet, words designed to be read by the
+lowest of the people: "Great courage may, perhaps, bear up a bad
+mind (for it is sometimes the property of such) against the most
+severe sentence which can be pronounced by the mouth of a human
+judge; but where is the fortitude which can look an offended
+Almighty in the face? Who can bear the dreadful thought of being
+confronted with the spirit of one whom we have murdered, in the
+presence of all the Host of Heaven, and to have justice demanded
+against our guilty soul, before that most awful judgement-seat,
+where there is infinite justice as well as infinite power?"</p>
+
+<p>The dedication of this pamphlet, dated Bow Street, April 8,
+1752, is addressed to Dr Madox, Bishop of Worcester, and in it
+Fielding recalls a conversation he had some time previously had
+with that prelate, in which he had mentioned the plan of such a
+book, and received immediate encouragement from his lordship. A
+further appreciation of the <em>Examples</em> appears in a
+paragraph in the <em>Journal</em> for May 5: "Last week a certain
+Colonel of the Army bought a large number of the book called
+<em>Examples of the Interposition of Providence in the Detection
+and Punishment of Murder</em>, in Order to distribute them amongst
+the private soldiers of his Regiment. An Example well worthy of
+Imitation!"</p>
+
+<p>Fielding never allows us to forget for any length of time one or
+another of his contrasting activities, however absorbed he may seem
+to be in some one field of action. Now, when he is plunged in a
+hand-to-hand struggle with the criminal conditions of London, when
+he is admonishing the gayer end of the Town with his weekly
+censorial satire and ridicule, and while he is watching the
+enactment of new legislation for which he had so strenously
+pleaded,--he suddenly reappears in his earlier rôle of classical
+scholar. On June 17, the columns of the <em>Journal</em> advertise
+proposals for "A New Translation into English of the Works of
+LUCIAN. From the original Greek. With Notes, Historical, Critical
+and Explanatory. By Henry Fielding Esquire; and the Rev. Mr William
+Young." To which notice there is added, a few days later, the
+assurance that "Everything which hath the least Tendency to the
+Indecent will be omitted in this Translation." The most delightful,
+perhaps, of all the leading articles in the <em>Covent Garden
+Journal</em> is that in which the merits of this "Father of True
+Humour" are delineated. The facetious wit, the "attic Elegance of
+Diction," the poignant satire, the virtues and abilities of Lucian
+are here so persuasively presented that scarce a reader but surely
+would hasten, as he laid his paper down, to Mr Fielding's or Mr
+Young's house, or to Millar in the Strand or Dodsley in Pall Mall,
+where orders (with a guinea to be paid on booking the same) were
+received. And this essay is also memorable for the express
+declaration therein contained that Fielding had "formed his stile"
+upon that of Lucian; and, again, as betraying a note of
+disappointment, an acknowledgment that worldly fortune had indeed
+treated him somewhat harshly, such as Fielding's sanguine courage
+very seldom permits him to utter. The concluding words, written on
+his own behalf and on that of Mr Young, are words of gentle protest
+to the public for their lack of support to "two gentlemen who have
+hitherto in their several capacities endeavoured to be serviceable
+to them without deriving any great Emolument to themselves from
+their Labours." And when he tells us how that 'glory of human
+Nature, Marcus Aurelius' employed Lucian "in a very considerable
+Post in the Government," since that great emperor "did not, it
+seems, think, that a Man of Humour was below his Notice or unfit
+for Business of the gravest Kind," we cannot but remember that the
+business on which the Government of George II. thought fit to
+employ the inimitable genius of Henry Fielding was that of a Bow
+Street magistrate.</p>
+
+<p>The onerous drudgery of that business, or else lack of response
+from a public deaf to its own interests, seems to have brought to
+nothing the project of this translation; and so English literature
+is the poorer for the loss of the works of the 'Father of Humour'
+translated by the incomparable pen of the 'Father of the English <a
+name="fnref15-6">Novel</a>.' <a class="footnote" href=
+"#fn15-6">6</a></p>
+
+<p>Four months after the publication of the proposals for
+<em>Lucian</em>, Fielding took formal leave of the readers of his
+<em>Covent Garden Journal</em>, telling them that he no longer had
+"Inclination or Leisure," to carry on the paper. His brief farewell
+words contain an assurance very like that solemnly made, we may
+remember, five years before the publication of <em>Tom Jones</em>.
+At present, he declares, he has "No intention to hold any further
+correspondence with the gayer Muses"; just as eight years before he
+had announced that henceforth the 'infamous' Nine should have none
+of his company. To this declaration is added a protest against the
+injustice of attributing abuse to a writer who "never yet was, nor
+ever shall be the author of any, unless to Persons who are or ought
+to be infamous." From the tenor of this parting speech it is clear
+that Fielding was, at the time, feeling keenly the imputation,
+flung by some of his contemporaries, of producing 'scandalous
+Writings'; unmindful for the moment of his own calmer and wiser
+utterance, when he declared that men who engage in an heroic
+attempt to cleanse their age will undoubtedly find some of the dirt
+thereof sticking to their coats. "As he disdained all littleness of
+spirit, where ever he met with it in his dealings with the world,
+his indignation was apt to rise," says his contemporary Murphy; and
+we know from earlier protests how cruelly Fielding suffered from
+the attribution to his pen of writings utterly alien to his
+character. "...really," he cries, in the last words of the
+<em>Journal</em>, "it is hard to hear that scandalous Writings have
+been charged on me for that very Reason which ought to have proved
+the Contrary namely because they have been Scandalous."</p>
+
+<p>The year 1752 closes with the birth of another daughter, born
+presumably in the house in Bow Street, as her baptism under the
+name of Louisa is entered in the registers of St Paul's, Covent
+Garden.</p>
+
+<p>The curtain that, in Fielding's case, hangs so closely over all
+the pleasant intimate details of life, lifts once or twice during
+this year of incessant activity, and discloses just those
+warmhearted acts of kindness that help us to think of Harry
+Fielding with an affection almost as warm and personal as that we
+keep for Dick Steele or Oliver Goldsmith. Fielding, we know, had
+"no other use for money" than to help those even less fortunate
+than himself; and several incidents of this year show how he turned
+his opportunities, both as journalist and magistrate, to like
+generous uses. Thus there is the story of how, one day in March, "A
+poor girl who had come from Wapping to see the new entertainment at
+Covent Garden Theatre had her pocket cut off in the crowd before
+the doors were opened. Tho' she knew not the Pickpocket she came
+immediately to lay her complaint before the Justice and with many
+tears lamented not the loss of her Money, but of her Entertainment.
+At last, having obtained a sufficient Passport to the Gallery she
+departed with great satisfaction, and contented with the loss of
+fourteen shillings, though she declared she had not much more in
+the <a name="fnref15-7">world</a>." <a class="footnote" href=
+"#fn15-7">7</a> Another day, or night rather, it is a poor troup of
+amateur players who had good reason to be grateful to the kindly
+Justice:--"last Monday night an Information was given to Henry
+Fielding Esquire: that a set of Barber's apprentices, Journeymen
+Staymakers, Maidservants &amp;c. had taken a large room at the
+Black House in the Strand, to act the Tragedy of the Orphan; the
+Price of Admittance One shilling. About eight o'clock the said
+Justice issued his Warrant, directed to Mr Welch, High Constable,
+who apprehended the said Actors and brought them before the said
+Justice, who out of compassion to their Youth only bound them over
+to their good behaviour. They were all conducted through the
+streets in their Tragedy Dresses, to the no small diversion of the
+<a name="fnref15-8">Populace</a>." <a class="footnote" href=
+"#fn15-8">8</a> And in May both the ample energies and scanty purse
+of Justice Fielding were occupied in collecting a subscription for
+a young baker and his wife and child, who, by a disastrous fire,
+were suddenly plunged into destitution. For these poor people
+Fielding obtained no less a sum than £57, within a fortnight of his
+announcement of their distress in the columns of the
+<em>Journal</em>. The list of subscribers, published on May 16,
+shows a guinea against his own name, and a like sum, it may be
+noted, from the wealthy Lyttelton.</p>
+
+<p class="centered"><a name="i364"><img src="images/364.jpg" alt=
+"Henry Fielding" width="290" height="500"></a></p>
+
+<p>The splendour of Fielding's genius has shone, as Gibbon
+foretold, throughout the world. His indefatigable labours in
+cleansing England from some of the evils that then oppressed her
+deserve to be remembered, if not by all the world, at least by the
+citizens of that country which, in the decline of 'health and
+life,' he yet strove so eagerly to benefit.</p>
+
+<h2><a name="chapter16">CHAPTER XVI</a><br>
+<br>
+POOR LAW REFORM</h2>
+
+<p class="quoted">"... surely there is some Praise due to the bare
+Design of doing a Service to the Public."<br>
+ &nbsp;&nbsp;--Dedication of the <em>Enquiry</em>.</p>
+
+<p>It is evident that the beginning of the year 1753 found Fielding
+fully conscious that now he could only anticipate a 'short
+remainder of life.' But neither that consciousness, nor the
+increasing burden of ill-health, availed to dull the energies of
+these last years. Scarcely had that indomitable knight, General Sir
+Alexander Drawcansir retired from the active public service of
+conducting the <em>Covent Garden Journal</em> when his creator
+reappeared with an astonishingly comprehensive and detailed plan of
+poor-law reform; a plan adapted to the whole kingdom, and which
+according to a legal comment involved "nothing less than the repeal
+of the Act of Elizabeth and an entire reconstruction of the Poor <a
+name="fnref16-1">Laws</a>." <a class="footnote" href=
+"#fn16-1">1</a> Poor-law reform was at this time occupying the
+attention of the nation, and apparently also of the legislature.
+And we know, from the <em>Enquiry into the Increase of
+Robberies</em>, that the question of lessening both the sufferings
+and the criminality of the poor had for years occupied Fielding's
+warm heart and active intellect. But the extent to which he devoted
+these last months of his life to the cause of the poorest and most
+degraded deserves more than a passing recognition. He tells us, in
+the <em>Introduction</em> to the pamphlet embodying his great
+scheme, that he has applied himself long and constantly to this
+subject; that he has "read over and considered all the Laws, in
+anywise relating to the Poor, with the utmost Care and Attention,"
+in the execution of which, moreover, he has been for "many Years
+very particularly concerned"; and that in addition to this
+exhaustive study of the laws themselves, he has added "a careful
+Perusal of everything which I could find that hath been written on
+this Subject, from the Original Institution in the 43d. of
+<em>Elizabeth</em> to this Day." Such was the laborious
+preparation, extending presumably over many months, which the
+author of <em>Tom Jones</em>, and the first wit of his day, devoted
+to solving this vast problem of social reform.</p>
+
+<p>Fielding was far too well skilled in the art of effective
+construction to present the public with undigested note-books from
+his voluminous reading. His scheme, based on all the laws, and upon
+all the comments on all the laws, regarding the poor, enacted and
+made for two hundred years, is a marvel of conciseness and
+practical detail; and, together with an <em>Introduction</em> and
+an <em>Epilogue</em>, does but occupy the ninety pages of a
+two-shilling pamphlet.</p>
+
+<p>The pamphlet was published at the end of January 1753, with the
+title <em>A Proposal for making an effectual Provision for the
+Poor, for amending their Morals, and for rendering them useful
+Members of the Society. To which is added a Plan of the Buildings
+proposed, with proper Elevations ... By Henry Fielding, Esq.;
+Barrister-at-Law, and one of His Majesty's Justices of the Peace
+for the County of Middlesex</em>. The dedication, dated January 19,
+is to Henry Pelham, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, and from it
+we learn that Fielding had personally mentioned his scheme to this
+Minister. The Introduction presents an eloquent appeal for some
+effectual remedy for the intolerably diseased state of the body
+politic as regarded the distresses and vices of the poor, their
+unseen sufferings no less than their frequent misdeeds. Fielding
+protests against the popular ignorance of these sufferings in words
+that might have been spoken by some pleader for the East End
+'Settlements' of to-day. "If we were," he declares, "to make a
+Progress through the Outskirts of this Town, and look into the
+Habitations of the Poor, we should there behold such Pictures of
+human Misery as must move the Compassion of every Heart that
+deserves the Name of human. What indeed must be his Composition who
+could see whole Families in Want of every Necessary of Life,
+oppressed with Hunger, Cold, Nakedness, and Filth, and with
+Diseases, the certain Consequence of all these; what, I say, must
+be his Composition, who could look into such a Scene as this, and
+be affected only in his Nostrils?" As an instance of Fielding's
+personal knowledge of the London slums of his day, a reference made
+by Mr Saunders Welch to their joint work is of interest. Writing in
+the same year, 1753, he mentions assisting "Mr Henry Fielding in
+taking from under one roof upwards of seventy lodgers of both <a
+name="fnref16-2">sexes</a>." <a class="footnote" href=
+"#fn16-2">2</a></p>
+
+<p>To this little known misery of the poor, who "starve and freeze
+and rot among themselves," was added the problem of streets
+swarming with beggars during the day, and with thieves at night.
+And the nation groaned under yet a third burden, that of the heavy
+taxes levied for the poor, by which says Fielding "as woeful
+experience hath taught us, neither the poor themselves nor the
+public are relieved." To attack such a three-headed monster as this
+was an adventure better fitted, it might seem, for that club which
+"Captain Hercules Vinegar" had wielded thirteen years before, when
+in the full tide of his strength, than for the pen of a man in
+shattered health, and already serving the public in the daily
+labours of a principal magistrate. But nothing could restrain the
+ardour of Fielding's spirit, how frail so ever had become its
+containing 'crust of clay,' when great abuses and great misery made
+their call on his powers; or countervail against the hope, with
+which the <em>Introduction</em> to his plan concludes. If that plan
+fails, he shall indeed, he declares have "lost much Time, and
+misemployed much Pains; and what is above all, shall miss the
+Pleasure of thinking that in the Decline of my Health and Life, I
+have conferred a great and lasting Benefit on my Country."</p>
+
+<p>The <em>Plan</em> is that of the erection of a vast combined
+county workhouse, prison, and infirmary; where the unemployed
+should find, not only work but <em>skilled instruction</em>, the
+poor relief, and the sick a hospital; where discipline and good
+order should be stringently enforced; and where two chaplains
+should labour at that 'correction and amendment' of the mind which
+"in real truth religion is alone capable of effectually executing."
+The entire scheme is worked out with extraordinary detail, in
+fifty-nine clauses; and is preceded by an elaborate architectural
+plan of the proposed institution (which was to house no less than
+five thousand six hundred persons) with its workshops, its men's
+quarters rigorously divided from those for the women, its
+recreation ground, its provision shops, its cells for the
+refractory and for prisoners, and its whipping post. And the
+pamphlet concludes by lengthy arguments in favour of the various
+clauses; and by a personal protest concerning the disinterestedness
+of proposals which "some few enemies" might assert to show signs of
+a design for private profit. Fielding touchingly disavows any
+thought of occupying, officially, the great house raised by his
+imagination. To a man in his state of health such a project would,
+he says, be to fly in the face of the advice of his 'Master,'
+Horace; "it would be indeed <em>struere dotnos immemor
+sepulchri.</em>" And, he adds, those who know him will hardly be so
+deceived "by that Chearfulness which was always natural to me; and
+which, I thank God, my Conscience doth not reprove me for, to
+imagine that I am not sensible of my declining Constitution." The
+concluding words of this, Fielding's last legislative effort,
+betray a like calm assurance that his day's work was drawing to its
+close. He has now, he tells us, "no farther Design than to pass my
+short Remainder of Life in some Degree of Ease, and barely to
+preserve my Family from being the Objects of any such Laws as I
+have here proposed."</p>
+
+<p>It is wholly in keeping with the genius of Henry Fielding that
+almost the last endeavour of his intellect should have been devoted
+to relieving the wretchedness and lessening the vices of the
+poorest and most miserable of his countrymen. The <em>Proposal for
+... the Poor</em> is written by the hand of the accomplished lawyer
+and indefatigable magistrate; but the energy that accomplished so
+great a labour, in spite of broken health and among a thousand
+interruptions, sprang from the heart which had already immortalised
+the ragged postilion of <em>Joseph Andrews</em> and the starving
+highwayman of <em>Tom Jones</em>.</p>
+
+<p>This last January but one of Fielding's life was not only
+occupied by the publication of proposals for an 'entire
+reconstruction of the Poor Laws.' In 1753 a London magistrate, or
+at least Mr Justice Fielding, was at the service of the public on
+Sunday no less than during the week; and on the first Sunday of the
+New Year the Bow Street room echoed to threats that read strangely
+enough when we think of the unknown petty thief, threatening sudden
+death to 'our immortal Fielding.' "Yesterday," says the <em>General
+Advertiser</em> for Monday, January 8, "John Simpson and James
+Ellys were commited to Newgate by Henry Fielding Esq., for
+shop-lifting." The charge was one of stealing five silk
+handkerchiefs, and when the two men "were brought before the
+Justice they behaved in a very impudent saucy manner, and one of
+them said hewished he had a Pistol about him, he would blow the
+Justice's Brains out; upon which a Party of the Guards was sent for
+who conducted them safe to Newgate." The Bow Street house,
+moreover, must have been full not only of prisoners and witnesses
+brought before the Justice, but also of victims of all manner of
+theft. For two comprehensive notices appear in the
+<em>Advertiser</em> for this month, repeating the previous
+invitation accorded to such sufferers in the <em>Covent Garden
+Journal</em>. On January 1, all persons cognizant of any burglary
+robbery or theft are desired to communicate immediately with Mr
+Brogden, clerk to Justice Fielding, "at his office at the said
+Justice's in Bow Street." And again, towards the end of the month,
+"All Persons that have been robbed on the Highway in the County of
+Middlesex within this three months last past, are desired to apply
+to Mr Brogden, at Mr Justice Fielding's in Bow Street, Covent
+Garden." And here, too, came the solicitors that sought counsel's
+opinion on their client's behalf, with their fees; the magistrate
+of this period being under no disability in regard to his private
+practice.</p>
+
+<p>It was to his reputation as an advising barrister, and perhaps a
+little to the kindness of heart that must have been familiar to all
+who knew him, that Fielding owed his connection with that
+extraordinary popular excitement of 1753, the mysterious case of
+the servant girl Elizabeth Canning. On the 29th of January 'Betty
+Canning' presented herself, after a month's disappearance, at the
+door of her mother's house in London, in a deplorable state of
+weakness and distress, and declared that she had been kidnapped by
+two men on New Year's night, taken to a house on the Hertford road,
+and there confined by an old gipsy woman for twenty-eight days, in
+a hay loft, with a pitcher of water and a few pieces of bread for
+sole sustenance. On the twenty ninth day, according to her own
+account, she escaped through a window and made her way back to her
+home. Her neighbours, fired with pity for her sufferings,
+subscribed means for a prosecution; and, says Fielding, in the
+pamphlet which he published two months after these events, "Mr.
+<em>Salt</em>, the Attorney who hath been employed in this Cause,
+... upon this Occasion, as he hath done upon many others, ... fixed
+upon me as the Council to be advised with." Then we have the
+following little domestic sketch, the only picture left to us of
+Henry Fielding as a practising barrister: "Accordingly, upon the
+6<em>th</em> of <em>February</em>, as I was sitting in my Room,
+Counsellor <em>Maden</em> being then with me, my Clerk delivered me
+a Case, which was thus, as I remember, indorsed at the Top, The
+Case of Elizabeth Canning <em>for</em> Mr Fielding's
+<em>opinion</em>, and at the Bottom, <em>Salt</em>, Solr. Upon the
+Receipt of this Case, with my Fee, I bid my Clerk give my Service
+to Mr. <em>Salt</em> and tell him, that I would take the Case with
+me into the Country, whither I intended to go the next Day, and
+desired he would call for it the <em>Friday</em> Morning
+afterwards; after which, without looking into it, I delivered it to
+my Wife, who was then drinking Tea with us, and who laid it
+by."</p>
+
+<p>Mr Brogden however presently returned upstairs, bringing the
+solicitor with him, who earnestly desired his counsel not only to
+read the case at once but also to undertake in his capacity of
+magistrate an examination of the injured girl, and of a supposed
+confederate of the gipsy. This task Fielding at first declined,
+principally on the ground that he had been "almost fatigued to
+death with several tedious examinations" at that time, and had
+intended to refresh himself with a day or two's interval in the
+country, where he had not been "unless on a Sunday, for a long
+time." The persuasions of the solicitor, curiosity as to the
+extrordinary nature of the case, and "a great compassion for the
+dreadful condition of the girl," however induced him to yield; and
+the next day the eighteen year old heroine of a story that was soon
+to set all London quarrelling, was brought in a chair to Bow
+Street, and then led upstairs, supported by two friends, into the
+presence of the Justice. An issue of warrants followed upon her
+examination, and a further examination of a suspected confederate
+of the gipsy; the gipsy herself and her chief abettor having
+already been arrested by another magistrate. Some days later,
+Fielding being then out of town, "several noble Lords" sent to his
+house, desiring to be present while he examined the gipsy woman;
+and the matter being arranged, "Lord Montfort," says Fielding,
+"together with several gentlemen of fashion came at the appointed
+time." The company being in the Justice's room, the prisoners and
+witnesses were brought up; and apparently some charge was
+afterwards brought against Fielding as to the manner of his
+examination, for he here takes occasion to declare, what all who
+knew him must have known to be the truth, "I can truly say, that my
+Memory doth not charge me with having ever insulted the lowest
+Wretch that hath been brought before me." Public opinion became
+hotly divided as to whether Betty Canning had indeed suffered all
+she declared at the hands of the gipsy, Mary Squires, or had
+maliciously endeavoured to perjure away the old woman's life. The
+Lord Mayor, Sir Crisp Gascoyne, and Fielding's old antagonist the
+despicable Dr Hill ardently supported the gipsy; Fielding, in the
+pamphlet already quoted, and which was published in March, as
+warmly espoused the cause of the maid servant whom he calls "a
+poor, honest, innocent, simple Girl, and the most unhappy and most
+injured of all human Beings." The excitement of the Town over this
+melodramatic mystery is reflected in the fact that a second edition
+of Fielding's pamphlet (entitled <em>A clear state of the Case of
+Elizabeth Canning</em>) was advertised within a few days of its
+first <a name="fnref16-3">publication</a>. <a class="footnote"
+href="#fn16-3">3</a> And, also, in the appearance of the sixpenny
+print, here for the first time reproduced, in which occurs the only
+representation of Henry Fielding known to have been drawn during
+his life time. This print, which bears the inscription "drawn from
+the life by the Right Honourable the Lady Fa--y K--w," shows
+Fielding's tall figure, his legs bandaged for gout, the sword of
+Justice in his hand and her scales hanging out of his pocket,
+speaking on behalf of his trembling client Elizabeth Canning; while
+opposed to him are my Lord Mayor, the notorious Dr Hill, and the
+old gipsy. The background is adorned with pictures of the newly
+built Mansion House, and of the College of <a name=
+"fnref16-4">Surgeons</a>. <a class="footnote" href=
+"#fn16-4">4</a></p>
+
+<p class="centered"><a name="i365"><img src="images/365.jpg" alt=
+"Henry Fielding, defending Betty Canning from her accusers, the Lord Mayor, Dr Hill, and the Gipsy"
+ width="610" height="520"></a></p>
+
+<p>But for the glimpses it affords us of Fielding as a barrister,
+and for his characteristic championship of what he was convinced
+was the cause of innocence oppressed, this once famous case might
+have been left undisturbed in the dust of the <em>State
+Trials</em>, had it not incidentally been the means of preserving
+two of the extremely rare letters of the novelist. These <a name=
+"fnref16-5">letters</a>, <a class="footnote" href="#fn16-5">5</a>
+hitherto unpublished, are addressed by Fielding to the Duke of
+Newcastle, and were both written in the month following the
+publication of his pamphlet. The fact that both letters are dated
+from Ealing shows that his connection with what was then a pleasant
+country village was earlier than has been supposed; and the acute
+suggestions in the second letter seem to indicate a suspicion of
+some of Betty Canning's supporters, if his conviction in the girl's
+own innocence still remained unshaken.<br>
+</p>
+
+<p>"My Lord Duke</p>
+
+<p>"I received an order from my Lord Chancellor immediately after
+the breaking up of the Council to lay before your Grace all the
+Affidavits I had taken since the Gipsey's Trial which related to
+that Affair. I then told the Messenger that I had taken none, as
+indeed the fact is the Affidavits of which I gave my Lord
+Chancellor an Abstract having been all sworn before Justices of the
+Peace in the Neighbourhood of Endfield, and remain I believe in the
+Possession of an Attorney in the City.</p>
+
+<p>However in Consequence of the Commands with which your Grace was
+pleased to honour me yesterday, I sent my Clerk immediately to the
+Attorney to acquaint him with these Commands, which I doubt not he
+will instantly obey. This I did from my great Duty to your Grace
+for I have long had no Concern in this Affair, nor have I seen any
+of the Parties lately unless once when I was desired to send for
+the Girl (Canning) to my House that a great Number of Noblemen and
+Gentleman might see her and ask her what Questions they pleased. I
+am, with the highest Duty,</p>
+
+<p>"My Lord,<br>
+"Your Graces most obedient<br>
+"and most humble servant<br>
+"Henry Ffielding.<br>
+"Ealing. April 14, 1753<br>
+"His Grace the<br>
+"Duke of Newcastle."</p>
+
+<p><br>
+</p>
+
+<p>"My Lord Duke,</p>
+
+<p>"I am extremely concerned to see by a Letter which I have just
+received from Mr Jones by Command of your Grace that the Persons
+concerned for the Prosecution have not yet attended your Grace with
+the Affidavits in Canning's Affair. I do assure you upon my Honour
+that I sent to them the Moment I first received your Grace's
+Commands and having after three Messages prevailed with them to
+come to me I desired them to fetch the Affidavits that I might send
+them to your Grace being not able to wait upon you in Person. This
+they said they could not do, but would go to Mr Hume Campbell their
+Council, and prevail with him to attend your Grace with all their
+Affidavits many of which, I found were sworn after the Day
+mentioned in the order of Council. I told them I apprehended the
+latter could not be admitted, but insisted in the strongest terms
+on their laying the others immediately before your Grace, and they
+at last promised me they would, nor have I ever seen them since. I
+have now again ordered my Clerk to go to them to inform them of the
+last Commands I have received, but as I have no Compulsory Power
+over them I can not answer for their Behaviour, which indeed I have
+long disliked, and have therefore long ago declined giving them any
+Advice, nor would I unless in Obedience to your Grace have anything
+to say to a set of the most obstinate Fools I ever saw; and who
+seem to me rather to act from a Spleen against my Lord Mayor, than
+from any Motive of protecting Innocence, tho' that was certainly
+their Motive at first. In Truth, if I am not deceived, I Suspect
+they desire that the Gipsey should be pardoned, and then to
+convince the World that she was guilty in order to cast the greater
+Reflection on him who was principally instrumental in obtaining
+such Pardon. I conclude with assuring your Grace that I have acted
+in this Affair, as I shall on all Occasions with the most dutiful
+Regard to your Commands, and that if my Life had been at Stake, as
+many know, I could have done no more.</p>
+
+<p>"I am, with the highest Respect,<br>
+"My Lord Duke<br>
+"Y Grace's most obedient,<br>
+"and most humble servant,<br>
+"Henry Ffielding.<br>
+"Ealing<br>
+"April 27. 1753.<br>
+"His Grace the Duke of Newcastle."</p>
+
+<p>The dates of these letters show Fielding to have been at Ealing
+in the early spring of this year; and thus afford some confirmation
+of Lysons' remark in his <em>Environs of London</em>, published
+forty years later that "Henry Fielding had a country house at
+Ealing where he resided the year before his <a name=
+"fnref16-6">death</a>." <a class="footnote" href="#fn16-6">6</a> In
+May a connection with Hammersmith is indicated, in the burial there
+of his little daughter Louisa. The entry in the Hammersmith
+Registers is as follows: "May 10th. Louisa, d. of Henry Fielding
+Esqr."</p>
+
+<p>The nearer Fielding's life draws to its premature close, the
+greater his physical suffering, so much the more eager seems his
+desire to leave behind him some practical achievement. We have
+already seen and wondered at his gigantic scheme for poor-law
+reform, published in the beginning of this year of fast declining
+'health and life.' Six months later came the commission in the
+execution of which the remains of that health and life were
+literally sacrificed in the effort to win some provision for his
+family, in the event of his own death. Early in August the
+distinguished Court surgeon John Ranby had persuaded him to go
+immediately to Bath. And he tells us, in that <em>Journal of a
+Voyage to <a name="fnref16-7">Lisbon</a>,</em> <a class="footnote"
+href="#fn16-7">7</a> from which we have, from his own lips, the
+details of these last months, "I accordingly writ that very night
+to Mrs Bowden, who, by the next post, informed me she had taken me
+a lodging for a month certain." At this moment, when preparing for
+his journey, and while "almost fatigued to death with several long
+examinations, relating to five different murders, all committed
+within the space of a week, by different gangs of street robbers,"
+Fielding received what might indeed be called a fatal summons to
+wait on the Duke of Newcastle, at his house in Lincoln's Inn
+Fields, to consult on a means for "putting an immediate end to
+those murders and robberies which were every day committed in the
+streets." This visit cost him a severe cold; but, notwithstanding,
+he produced, in about four days, a scheme for the destruction of
+the "then reigning gangs" of robbers and cut-throats, and for the
+future protection of the public, which was promptly accepted, and
+the execution of which was confided into Fielding's hands. "I had
+delayed my Bath-journey for some time," he proceeds, "contrary to
+the repeated advice of my physical acquaintance, and to the ardent
+desire of my warmest friends, tho' my distemper was now turned to a
+deep jaundice; in which case the Bath-waters are generally reputed
+to be almost infallible. But I had the most eager desire of
+demolishing this gang of villains and cut-throats." After some
+weeks the requisite funds were placed at Fielding's disposal; and
+so successful were his methods, that within a few days, the whole
+gang was dispersed, some in custody, others in flight. His health
+was by this time "reduced to the last extremity"; but still, he
+tells us, he continued to act "with the utmost vigour against these
+villains." And, amid all his 'fatigues and distresses,' the
+satisfaction he so ardently desired came to him. During the
+"remaining part of the month of November and in all December,"
+those darkest of months, not only was there no such thing as a
+murder, but not one street robbery was committed. When we recall
+the amazing condition of London at this time, when street robberies
+and murders were of almost daily occurrence, we realise the
+magnitude of this achievement on the part of a dying man. "Having
+thus fully accomplished my undertaking," Fielding continues, "I
+went into the country in a very weak and deplorable condition, with
+no fewer or less diseases than a jaundice, a dropsy, and an asthma,
+altogether uniting their forces in the destruction of a body so
+entirely emaciated, that it had lost all its muscular flesh." It
+was now too late to apply the Bath treatment; and even had it been
+desirable it was no longer possible, for the sick man's strength
+was so reduced that a ride of six miles fatigued him intolerably.
+The Bath lodgings, which Fielding, surely with his old invincible
+hopefulness, had hitherto kept were accordingly relinquished; and
+even his sanguine nature realised the desperate condition of his
+case. At this point in his narration he breaks off with a
+characteristically frank disclosure of the chief motive which had
+inspired him to the heroic exertions of these later months of 1753.
+At the beginning of the winter his private affairs it seems, "had
+but a gloomy aspect." The aspect of his own tenure of life we know.
+And hence to distress of body was added that keenest of all
+distresses of the mind, the despair of putting his family beyond
+the reach of necessity. It was gladly therefore that Fielding
+offered up the 'poor sacrifice' of his shattered health, in the
+hope of securing a pension for his family, in case his own death
+were hastened by these last labours for the public.</p>
+
+<p>If sickness was not allowed to hinder Fielding's energies for
+the benefit of the public, and for the future provision of his
+family, neither did he permit it to dull the activities of
+friendship. Early in December, when his illness must have been
+acute, he wrote the following hitherto unpublished letter to the
+Lord Chancellor, on behalf of his friend Mr Saunders <a name=
+"fnref16-8">Welch</a>: <a class="footnote" href="#fn16-8">8</a></p>
+
+<p><br>
+</p>
+
+<p>"My Lord,</p>
+
+<p>"As I hear that a new Commission of the Peace is soon to pass
+the Great Seal for Westm'r. give me Leave to recommend the name of
+Saunders Welch, as well as to the next Commission for Middx. Your
+Lordship will, I hope, do me the Honour of believing, I should not
+thus presume, unless I was well satisfied that the Merit of the Man
+would justifie my Presumption. For this besides a universal Good
+Character and the many eminent services he hath done the Public, I
+appeal in particular to Master Lane; and shall only add, as I am
+positive the Truth is, that his Place can be filled with no other
+more acceptable to all the Gentlemen in the Commission, and indeed
+to the Public in general. I am with the highest Duty and
+Respect,</p>
+
+<p>"My Lord,<br>
+"Your Lordship's most obedient<br>
+"and most humble servant,<br>
+"Henry Ffielding."<br>
+"Decr 6. 1753<br>
+"To the Lord High Chancellor"</p>
+
+<h2><a name="chapter17">CHAPTER XVII</a><br>
+<br>
+VOYAGE TO LISBON--DEATH</h2>
+
+<p class="quoted">"satisfied in having finished my life, as I have
+probably lost it in the service of my country."<br>
+ &nbsp;&nbsp;<em>Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon</em>.</p>
+
+<p>To a man dying of a complication of disorders the terrible
+winter of 1753-4 brought added danger; a winter which, says
+Fielding, "put a lucky end, if they had known their own interests,
+to such numbers of aged and infirm valetudinarians." But this, too,
+his splendid constitution struggled through; and in February 1754,
+he was back in town, in a condition less despaired of, he tells us,
+by himself than by any of his friends.</p>
+
+<p>And if he did not allow himself to despair, neither did he, even
+now, relinquish all his magistrate's work. On the 26th of February
+cases are actually recorded as brought before <a name=
+"fnref17-1">him</a>. <a class="footnote" href="#fn17-1">1</a> But
+within a few days, apparently, of this date treatment employed on
+the advice of Dr Joshua Ward, so weakened a body already 'enervate'
+and emaciated, that at first the patient "was thought to be falling
+into the agonies of death." On March 6, he was, he tells us, at his
+worst--that "memorable day when the public lost Mr Pelham. From
+that day I began slowly, as it were, to draw my feet out of the
+grave; till in two months time I had again acquired some little
+degree of strength."</p>
+
+<p>Before the expiration of these two months that 'little degree of
+strength' was again being expended in the drudgery of the Bow
+Street court-room. "Yesterday," states the <em>Public
+Advertiser</em> of April 17, "Elizabeth Smith was committed to
+Newgate by Henry Fielding Esqre; being charged with stealing a
+great quantity of <a name="fnref17-2">Linnen</a>." <a class=
+"footnote" href="#fn17-2">2</a> And five days later, on April 22, a
+committal is recorded in the Middlesex <em>Sessions <a name=
+"fnref17-3">Book</a></em>. <a class="footnote" href=
+"#fn17-3">3</a></p>
+
+<p>Although Fielding could now leave his sickroom, when called
+thence to commit a thief to Newgate, a newspaper paragraph, dated a
+little earlier in this same month of April, shows that the public
+were apprehensive that the protection afforded them by their
+indefatigable magistrate was now of a very precarious duration. The
+writer refers to the complete success of Mr Fielding's
+<em>Plan</em> for the subjugation of criminals, executed the
+previous winter, pointing out that "the Public who had such Reason
+to suspect the contrary have suffered fewer Outrages than have
+happened any Winter this Twenty years." And without making any
+direct statement as to the fast failing strength of the author and
+executor of that <em>Plan</em>, he continues in words that plainly
+indicate the abdication of those zealous energies: "The whole Plan
+we are assured is communicated to Justice John Fielding and Mr
+Welch who are determined to bring it to that perfection of which it
+is capable." This 'assurance' of the <em>Advertiser</em> is
+confirmed by Fielding's own words in the <em>Voyage to Lisbon</em>.
+"I therefore" he says, speaking clearly of the winter or spring of
+1753-4, "resigned the office [of principal Justice of the Peace in
+Westminster] and the farther execution of my plan to my brother,
+who had long been my assistant."</p>
+
+<p>This blind brother, who in his turn became famous as a London
+magistrate, was now a Justice of the Peace for <a name=
+"fnref17-4">Middlesex</a> <a class="footnote" href="#fn17-4">4</a>
+as well as for Westminster; and was at this time living in the
+Strand, as the Resident <a name="fnref17-5">Proprietor</a> <a
+class="footnote" href="#fn17-5">5</a> of that enterprising
+<em>Universal Register Office</em> which has won incidental
+immortality in his brother's pages, and which combined such
+heterogeneous activities as those of an Estate Office, Registry for
+servants of good character, Lost Property Office, Curiosity Shop
+and General Agency.</p>
+
+<p>Another announcement in the columns of the <em>Advertiser</em>
+links this last Spring of Fielding's life with that earlier Spring
+of 1743, when as a popular play-wright and a struggling barrister,
+absorbed in anxiety for the health of a beloved wife and with his
+own health already attacked, he published that masterpiece of irony
+<em>Jonathan Wild</em>. Now, while he was still slowly drawing his
+'feet out of the grave,' after those critical first days of March,
+a new edition of the <em>History</em> of that "Great Man," with
+"considerable Corrections and Additions," was advertised; the
+actual date of publication being, apparently, about March 19. The
+new edition appeared with a prefatory note, "from the Publisher to
+the Reader," which although it bears no signature conveys,
+undoubtedly, Fielding's intention, if not his actual words. There
+is the familiar protest against the "scurrility of others," the
+odium of which had fallen on the innocent shoulders of "the author
+of our little book"; and there is a solemn declaration that the
+said little book shows no reason for supposing any 'personal
+application' to be meant in its pages "unless we will agree that
+there are without those Walls [i.e. of Newgate], some other bodies
+of men of worse morals than those within; and who have
+consequently, a right to change places with its present
+inhabitants." Then follows an explicit reference to a chapter in
+the <em>History</em> of the arch-villain Wild, which is obviously
+designed to satirise the condition of English politics, if not the
+person of any one politician. The disclaimer, seems on the whole,
+to partake very properly of the ironic nature of the ensuing pages;
+although it recalls that youthful declaration of the young
+dramatist, prefixed to his first comedy acted nearly thirty years
+before, that no private character was the target of his pen.</p>
+
+<p>At the end of these two months of March and April, spent as we
+have seen in acquiring some little degree of strength, and in at
+least attempting to expend the same on the consignment of petty
+thieves to Newgate, Fielding again submitted his dropsy to the
+surgeon, the consequences of which he now bore much better. This
+improvement, he tells us, he attributed greatly to "a dose of
+laudanum prescribed by my surgeon. It first gave me the most
+delicious flow of spirits, and afterwards as comfortable a nap."
+Lady Mary Wortley Montagu has recorded how her cousin's 'happy
+constitution,' even when half-demolished, could enjoy, with
+undiminished zest "a venison pasty, or a flask of champagne."
+Surely none other than Henry Fielding could have recorded with like
+zest this 'delicious flow of spirits' and 'comfortable nap' derived
+from a dose of laudanum.</p>
+
+<p>The month of May, with its promise of relief from the still
+lingering winter, had now begun. Fielding therefore resolved, he
+says, to visit a little country house of his "which stands at
+Ealing, in the county of Middlesex, in the best air, I believe, in
+the whole <a name="fnref17-6">kingdom</a>." <a class="footnote"
+href="#fn17-6">6</a> Towards the end of the month, he had resort to
+a long forgotten eighteenth century panacea, the tar-water
+discovered by Bishop Berkeley; and very soon experienced effects
+far beyond his "most sanguine hopes." Success beyond Fielding's
+most sanguine hopes must have been great indeed; and accordingly we
+hear how this tar-water, from the very first, lessened his illness,
+increased his appetite, and very slowly added to his bodily
+strength. By the end of the month a third application by his
+surgeon revealed distinctly favourable symptoms; but still both the
+dropsy and the asthma were becoming more serious; and the summer,
+which the doctors seemed to think the sick man's 'only chance of
+life' seemed scarce likely to visit England at all in that sunless
+year. "In the whole month of May the sun scarce appeared three
+times" we learn, from the <em>Voyage</em>. Fearing therefore the
+renewed assaults of winter, before he had recruited his forces so
+as "to be in anywise able to withstand them," Fielding resolved,
+with the approval of a very eminent physician, to put an already
+formed project into immediate execution. This was to seek further
+recovery in some warmer climate. At first Aix was thought of, but
+here the difficulties of travel in the reign of George II. for
+invalids of slender means, proved insuperable. The journey by land,
+"beside the expense of it," Fielding found to be "infinitely too
+long and fatiguing"; and no ship was announced as sailing within
+'any reasonable time' for that part of the Mediterranean. Lisbon
+accordingly was decided upon; and John Fielding soon discovered a
+ship with excellent passenger accommodation, and which was due to
+sail in three days. "I eagerly embraced the offer," writes
+Fielding, as though he were starting on a pleasure cruise, instead
+of facing all the miseries of travel, when unable to make the least
+use of his limbs, and when his very appearance "presented a
+spectacle of the highest horror"; and he adds "I began to prepare
+my family for the voyage with the utmost expedition." Twice,
+however, the captain put off his sailing, and at length his
+passenger invited him to dinner at Ealing, a full week after the
+declared date of departure. Meanwhile Fielding's condition seems at
+least to have become no worse, for the <em>Public Advertiser</em>
+of June 22 has "the pleasure to assure the Publick that the Report
+of the Death of Henry Fielding Esquire; inserted in an Evening
+paper of Thursday is not true, that Gentleman's Health being better
+than it has been for some Month's past."</p>
+
+<p class="centered"><a name="i366"><img src="images/366.jpg" alt=
+"Justice Saunders Welch" width="332" height="500"></a></p>
+
+<p>It was not till the 26th of June that, in the memorable opening
+words of the <em>Voyage</em>, "the most melancholy sun I had ever
+beheld arose, and found me awake at my house at Fordhook. By the
+light of this sun, I was, in my own opinion, last to behold and
+take leave of some of those creatures on whom I doated with a
+mother-like fondness, guided by nature and passion, and uncured and
+unhardened by all the doctrine of that philosophical school where I
+had learnt to bear pains and to despise death." The morning was
+spent with his children, the eldest of whom was then a boy of six;
+and "I doubt not," he writes, "whether, in that time, I did not
+undergo more than in all my distemper." At noon his coach was at
+the door, and this "was no sooner told me than I kiss'd my children
+round, and went into it with some little resolution." His wife,
+behaving "more like a heroine and philosopher, tho' at the same
+time the tenderest mother in the world," and his eldest daughter,
+followed him; and the invalid was swiftly driven the twelve miles
+to Rotherhithe. Here the task of embarking a man quite bereft of
+the use of his limbs had to be accomplished. This difficulty was
+overcome with the aid of Saunders Welch, the friend of whom
+Fielding says "I never think or speak of but with love and <a name=
+"fnref17-7">esteem</a>" <a class="footnote" href="#fn17-7">7</a>;
+and, at last, the traveller was "seated in a great chair in the
+cabin," after fatigues, the most cruel of which he declares to have
+been the inhuman jests made upon his wasted and helpless condition
+by the rows of sailors and watermen through whom he had been
+compelled to pass.</p>
+
+<p>From this moment we may read of the pleasures and thoughts, the
+experiences and meditations, but scarcely ever of the sufferings of
+the dying novelist, in the pages of what has been well called "one
+of the most unfeigned and touching little tracts in our own or any
+other <a name="fnref17-8">literature</a>" <a class="footnote" href=
+"#fn17-8">8</a> Confined for six weeks in the narrow prison of an
+eighteenth century trading vessel; unable to move save when lifted
+by unskilled hands; with food often intolerable to the healthiest
+appetite; with no relaxation save the company of the rough old
+sea-dog who commanded the <em>Queen of Portugal;</em> and fully
+conscious that his was a mortal illness,--the inexhaustible
+courage, the delight in man and in nature, the genius of Henry
+Fielding still triumphed over every external circumstance.
+Throughout the voyage, fortune, moreover, seemed determined to heap
+on the unhappy traveller all manner of additional discomforts; and
+yet when we lay down this little volume "begun in pain, and
+finished almost at the same period with <a name=
+"fnref17-9">life</a>," <a class="footnote" href="#fn17-9">9</a> the
+pictures left on the mind glow almost as brightly as those which
+fill the pages written in the full vigour of Fielding's manhood,
+and which, as Coleridge said, breathe the air of a spring
+morning.</p>
+
+<p>First came a delay of three days off the squalid shores of
+Wapping and Rotherhithe, whereby opportunity was afforded of
+"tasting a delicious mixture of the air of both these sweet
+places," and of enjoying such a concord of the voices of seamen,
+watermen, fishwomen, oyster women and their like as Hogarth
+indicated "in that print of his which is enough to make a man deaf
+to look at." This delay, moreover, threatened to bring Fielding
+within need of a surgeon when none should be procurable. His friend
+Mr William Hunter of Covent Garden, brother of the more famous John
+Hunter, relieved this apprehension; but now fresh trouble occurred
+in the torments of toothache which befell Mrs Fielding. A servant
+was despatched in haste to Wapping, but the desired 'toothdrawer,'
+arrived after the ship had at last, on Sunday morning, the 30th of
+June, left her unsavoury moorings. That Sunday morning "was fair
+and bright," and the diarist records how, dropping down to
+Gravesend, "we had a passage thither I think as pleasant as can be
+conceiv'd." The yards of Deptford and Woolwich were 'noble sights';
+the Thames with its splendid shipping excelled all the rivers of
+the world; and the men of war, the unrivalled Indiamen, the other
+traders, and even the colliers and small craft, all combined to
+form "a most pleasing object to the eye, as well as highly warming
+to the heart of an Englishman, who has any degree of love for his
+country, or can recognise any effect of the patriot in his
+constitution." And here Fielding gives us a notable example of his
+own healthy taste in recreation; a taste agreeing very ill with the
+scurrilous popular myths concerning him, but entirely consonant
+with the manifest atmosphere of his genius. He deplores the general
+neglect of "what seems to me the highest degree of amusement: that
+is, the sailing ourselves in little vessels of our own"; an
+amusement which need not "exceed the reach of a moderate fortune,
+and would fall very short of the prices which are daily paid for
+pleasures of a far inferior rate."</p>
+
+<p>Fortune, as we have said, seemed to grudge every little pleasure
+that could have alleviated the condition of the helpless invalid on
+board the <em>Queen of Portugal.</em> The relief obtained from Mr
+Hunter, he tells us, "the gaiety of the morning, the pleasant
+sailing with wind and tide, and the many agreeable objects with
+which I was constantly entertained during the whole way, were all
+suppressed and overcome by the single consideration of my wife's
+pain, which continued incessantly to torment her." The second
+despatch of a messenger, in great haste to bring the best reputed
+operator in Gravesend recalls Murphy's words: "Of sickness and
+poverty he was singularly patient and under pressure of those evils
+he could quietly read <em>Cicero de Consolatione;</em> but if
+either of them threatened his wife he was impetuous for her
+relief." The remedies both of the Gravesend 'surgeon of some
+eminence,' and of yet another practitioner, who was sent for from
+Deal, were ineffectual; but about eight in the evening of the
+following day, when the ship under contrary winds, was at anchor in
+the Downs, Mrs Fielding fell asleep; and to that accident we owe
+one of the most characteristic passages in the <em>Voyage.</em> His
+wife's relief from pain would, Fielding tells us, "have given me
+some happiness, could I have known how to employ those spirits
+which were raised by it: but unfortunately for me, I was left in a
+disposition of enjoying an agreeable hour, without the assistance
+of a companion, which has always appeared to me necessary to such
+enjoyment; my daughter and her companion were both retired sea-sick
+to bed; the other passengers were a rude school boy of fourteen
+years old, and an illiterate Portuguese friar, who understood no
+language but his own, in which I had not the least smattering. The
+captain was the only person left, in whose conversation I might
+indulge myself; but unluckily for me, besides his knowledge being
+chiefly confined to his profession, he had the misfortune of being
+so deaf, that to make him hear my words, I must run the risque of
+conveying them to the ears of my wife, who, tho' in another room
+(called, I think, the state-room; being indeed a most stately
+apartment capable of containing one human body in length, if not
+very tall, and three bodies in breadth) lay asleep within a yard of
+me. In this situation necessity and choice were one and the same
+thing; the captain and I sat down together to a small bowl of
+punch, over which we both soon fell fast asleep, and so concluded
+the evening." In the record of the previous day, while sketching
+the humours of Jacks in office, Fielding incidentally shows himself
+as no less careful of the respect due to his wife than he was
+solicitous for her comfort. A ruffianly custom-house officer had
+appeared in their cabin, wearing a hat adorned with broad gold
+lace, and 'cocked with much military fierceness.' On eliciting the
+information that 'the gentleman' was a riding surveyor, "I
+replied," says Fielding, "that he might be a riding surveyor, but
+could be no gentleman, for that none who had any title to that
+denomination, would break into the presence of a lady, without any
+apology or even moving his hat. He then took his covering from his
+head, and laid it on the table, saying he asked pardon." To this
+'riding surveyor' we owe also an indication that Fielding found
+room in the narrow confines of a cabin for his Plato; for the rude
+insolence of that functionary recalls to his mind the Platonic
+theory of the divine original of rulers, and he proceeds to quote a
+long passage from the <em>Laws</em>, which even his ready
+scholarship could scarce have had by heart.</p>
+
+<p>Contrary winds continued to baffle all Captain Veal's
+seamanship, and afforded his passenger opportunities for a spirited
+protest concerning the need of some regulation both of the charges
+of long-shore boatmen, and of the manners of captains in the Royal
+Navy. On the evening of July 8 the <em>Voyage</em> records that "we
+beat the sea off Sussex, in sight of Dungeness, with much more
+pleasure than progress; for the weather was almost a perfect calm,
+and the moon, which was almost at the full, scarce suffered a
+single cloud to veil her from our sight"; and on the 18th of the
+month the <em>Queen of Portugal</em> put in to Ryde, at which place
+she remained wind-bound for no less than eleven days.</p>
+
+<p>These eleven days Fielding spent, by his wife's persuasions, on
+shore, at the poor village inn which, together with a little church
+and some thirty houses, then constituted the village of Ryde. Of
+the hardships and humours of that sojourn the <em>Voyage</em>
+affords an account worthy of a place among the pages of either of
+the three great novels. The landlady, an incredibly mean and
+heartless shrew, inflicted daily annoyances and extortions on her
+wind-bound victims. The squalid building, partly constructed of
+wreck-wood, could scarce house the party. The food supplies, other
+than those the visitors brought with them, were chiefly 'rusty
+bacon, and worse cheese,' with very bad ale to drink. And on the
+first afternoon, the house was found to be so damp from recent
+scrubbing that Mrs Fielding, who "besides discharging excellently
+well her own, and all the tender offices becoming the female
+character; who besides being a faithful friend, an amiable
+companion, and a tender nurse, could likewise supply the wants of a
+decrepit husband, and occasionally perform his part," hastily
+snatched the invalid from "worse perils by water than the common
+dangers of the sea," and ordered dinner to be laid in a dry and
+commodious barn. So seated, "in one of the most pleasant spots, I
+believe, in the kingdom," and regaled on bacon, beans, and fish,
+"we completed," says Fielding, "the best, the pleasantest, and the
+merriest meal, with more appetite, more real, solid luxury, and
+more festivity, than was ever seen in an entertainment at
+White's."</p>
+
+<p class="centered"><a name="i367"><img src="images/367.jpg" alt=
+"Ryde--1795" width="642" height="500"></a></p>
+
+<p>On Sunday the three ladies went to church, "attended by the
+captain in a most military attire, with his cockade in his hat, and
+his sword by his side" (Captain Veal had commanded a privateer);
+and Fielding, while left alone, pursued those researches into human
+nature of which he never wearied by conversation with the landlord,
+a fine example of henpecked humanity. On the following day the
+ladies, again attended by Captain Veal, enjoyed a four mile walk,
+professing themselves greatly charmed with the scenery, and with
+the courtesy of a lady who owned a great house on this part of the
+coast, and who "had slipt out of the way, that my wife and her
+company might refresh themselves with the flowers and fruits with
+which her garden abounded." Within twenty four hours this generous
+householder had sent a message to the inn, placing all that her
+garden or house afforded at the disposal of the travellers.
+Fielding's man-servant was despatched with proper acknowledgements,
+and returned "in company with the gardener, both richly laden with
+almost every particular which a garden at this most fruitful season
+of the year produces."</p>
+
+<p>That evening, on a change of wind, Captain Veal came to demand
+his passengers' instant return. This would have been "a terrible
+circumstance to me, in my decayed condition," admits Fielding,
+"especially as very heavy showers of rain, attended with a high
+wind, continued to fall incessantly; the being carried thro' which
+two miles in the dark, in a wet and open boat, seemed little less
+than certain death." Happily the wind again veered till the
+following morning, when Fielding and the three ladies, together
+with their manservant and maid, were safely re-embarked, not
+however without much agitation over the temporary loss of their
+tea-chest. This calamity was first compensated by the prompt aid of
+the hospitable lady aforementioned, and then averted by the
+diligent search of William the footman who at last discovered the
+hiding place of the missing 'sovereign cordial,' and thus,
+concludes his master, "ended this scene, which begun with such
+appearance of distress, and ended with becoming the subject of
+mirth and laughter." Once more on board, Ryde and its beautiful
+prospect, its verdant elms, its green meadows, and shady lanes all
+combining in Fielding's opinion to make a most delightful
+habitation, faded from view. And, by seven o'clock, "we sat down"
+he says, "to regale ourselves with some roasted venison, which was
+much better drest than we imagined it would be, and an excellent
+cold pasty which my wife had made at Ryde, and which we had
+reserved uncut to eat on board our ship, whither we all cheerfully
+exulted in being returned from the presence of Mrs Humphreys, [the
+landlady] who by the exact resemblance she bore to a fury, seemed
+to have been with no great propriety settled in Paradise."</p>
+
+<p>It is while commenting on the charm of the view from Ryde,--"I
+confess myself so entirely fond of a sea prospect, that I think
+nothing on the land can equal it,"--that Fielding incidentally
+utters that extraordinary reference to Sir Robert Walpole as "one
+of the best of men and of ministers." The only explanation of these
+words at all consonant with what we know of Fielding's life seems
+to be that here he adopts once more his familiar use of irony.</p>
+
+<p>The cheerfulness of spirit with which the invalid encountered
+every fresh distress, and 'exulted' in every pleasant sight and
+trifling pleasure, during those days at Ryde, is very fully
+reflected in the following letter, happily preserved from the
+untoward fate which has apparently befallen every other intimate
+word from his pen. It was written to his brother John, on the first
+day of anchorage off Ryde.</p>
+
+<p><br>
+</p>
+
+<p>"On board the Queen of Portugal, Richd. Veal at anchor on the
+Mother Bank, off Ryde, to the care of the Post Master of
+Portsmouth--this is my Date and y'r Direction.</p>
+
+<p>"July 12 1754</p>
+
+<p>"Dear Jack, After receiving that agreeable Lre from Mess'rs.
+Fielding &amp; Co., we weighed on monday morning and sailed from
+Deal to the Westward Four Days long but inconceivably pleasant
+passage brought us yesterday to an Anchor on the Mother Bank, on
+the Back of the Isle of Wight, where we had last Night in Safety
+the Pleasure of hearing the Winds roar over our Heads in as violent
+a Tempest as I have known, and where my only Consideration were the
+Fears which must possess any Friend of ours (if there is happily
+any such), who really makes our Well being the Object of his
+Concern especially if such Friend should be totally inexperienced
+in Sea Affairs. I therefore beg that on the Day you receive this
+Mrs Daniel may know that we are just risen from Breakfast in Health
+and Spirits this twelfth Instant at 9 in the morning. Our Voyage
+hath proved fruitful in Adventures all which being to be written in
+the Book you must postpone yr. Curiosity. As the Incidents which
+fall under yr Cognizance will possibly be consigned to Oblivion, do
+give them to us as they pass. Tell yr Neighbour I am much obliged
+to him for recommending me to the care of a most able and
+experienced Seaman to whom other Captains seem to pay such
+Deference that they attend and watch his Motions, and think
+themselves only safe when they act under his Direction and Example.
+Our Ship in Truth seems to give Laws on the Water with as much
+Authority and Superiority as you Dispense Laws to the Public and
+Examples to yr Brethern in Commission, Please to direct yr Answer
+to me on Board as in the Date, if gone to be returned, and then
+send it by the Post and Pacquet to Lisbon to</p>
+
+<p>"Y'r affec't. Brother<br>
+"H. <a name="fnref17-10">Fielding</a> <a class="footnote" href=
+"#fn17-10">10</a><br>
+"To John Fielding Esq. at his House in Bow Street Cov. Garden
+London."</p>
+
+<p>It is probable, as Mr Austin Dobson has pointed out, that the
+Mrs Daniel, whose anxieties Fielding here shows himself anxious to
+relieve, was his second wife's mother. And by this time his brother
+was doubtless occupying that house in Bow Street so frequently
+advertised to the public, when any work was on foot for their
+protection, as the residence of 'Henry Fielding, Esqre.'</p>
+
+<p>The almost diabolic figure of the Ryde landlady had scarcely
+left his pages, when Fielding found a new subject for his
+portraiture, in the pretentious ill-bred follies of a young
+officer, a nephew of the captain, who arrived on board to visit his
+uncle, and who serves as an excellent foil for the simple-hearted
+merits of the elder man. A rising wind, however, cut short the
+Lieutenant's stories, and two nights later blew a hurricane which
+Fielding declares, "would have given no small alarm to a man, who
+had either not learnt what it is to die, or known what it is to be
+miserable"; continuing, in words that need no comment, "my dear
+wife and child must pardon me, if what I did not conceive to be any
+great evil to myself, I was not much terrified with the thoughts of
+happening to them: in truth, I have often thought they are both too
+good, and too gentle, to be trusted to the power of any man." The
+sea he loved so well was not to be Fielding's grave. Early the next
+morning the <em>Queen of Portugal</em> was at anchor in Torbay; and
+the whole party sat down "to a very chearful breakfast."</p>
+
+<p>For a whole week the travellers were kept wind-bound off the
+Devon coast, now at anchor, now making vain efforts to proceed. We
+hear of the 'fine clouted cream,' and the delicious cyder of the
+county (two hogsheads of which latter Fielding purchased as
+presents for his friends); of the excellence of the local fish
+named 'john dóree,' of the scandalous need of legislation for the
+protection of sea-men when ashore from land-sharks, a digression
+which includes a pleasant interpretation of the myth of Ulysses and
+Circe as none other than the dilemma of a Homeric merchant skipper
+whose crew Circe "some good ale-wife," had made drunk "with the
+spirituous liquors of those days"; of the difficulty with which
+Fielding could persuade his wife "whom it was no easy matter for me
+to force from my side" to take a walk on shore; and of the
+captain's grievous lamentations, which "seemed to have some mixture
+of the Irish howl in <a name="fnref17-11">them</a>," <a class=
+"footnote" href="#fn17-11">11</a> when his cat was accidentally
+suffocated. Also, to these last wind-bound days belongs that famous
+incident which does perhaps no less honour to the hot tempered
+tyrannical old skipper than to his illustrious passenger.</p>
+
+<p class="centered"><a name="i368"><img src="images/368.jpg" alt=
+"Lisbon--1793" width="660" height="500"></a></p>
+
+<p>Fielding, having just finished dinner, was enjoying some good
+claret in the cabin, with his wife and her friend--a cheerful
+moment, when conversation 'is most agreeable,' when Tom, the
+captain's general factotum, burst in on them and began, without
+saying a 'by your leave', to bottle half a hogshead of small beer.
+After requests and protests, equally unavailing, this functionary
+found himself, says Fielding, threatened "with having one bottle to
+pack more than his number, which then happened to stand empty
+within my reach." Thereupon Tom reported his version of the matter
+to the captain, who came thundering down to the cabin in a rage
+that knew no bounds of language or civility. This behaviour from a
+man who had received not only liberal payment from his passenger
+for accommodation, but also such frequent stores of fresh
+provisions that Fielding's private purse had indeed gone some way
+in maintaining the ship's crew, that passenger justly resented, and
+to a hasty resolve of quitting the ship by a hoy that should carry
+him to Dartmouth, he added threats of legal action. The 'most
+distant sound of law,' however, he tells us, "frightened a man, who
+had often, I am convinced, heard numbers of cannon roar round him
+with intrepidity. Nor did he sooner see the hoy approaching the
+vessel, than he ran down again into the cabin, and his rage being
+perfectly subsided, he tumbled on his knees, and a little too
+abjectly implored for mercy. I did not suffer a brave man and an
+old man, to remain a moment in this posture; but I immediately
+forgave him." It is this incident that Thackeray chooses to
+complete his picture of the great novelist; adding that memorable
+comparison between the "noble spirit and unconquerable generosity"
+of Fielding, and the lives of many unknown heroes of the sea: "Such
+a brave and gentle heart, such an intrepid and courageous spirit I
+love to recognise in the manly the English Harry Fielding."</p>
+
+<p>Within a week of this reconciliation the ship had made such
+progress southward that the captain 'in the redundancy of his good
+humour, declared he would go to church at Lisbon on Sunday next'
+(not the least pleasant of the pictures which Fielding gives us of
+the privateer is that of his summoning all hands on deck on a
+Sunday morning and then reading prayers 'with an audible voice');
+but again the wind played him false, becalming him near Cape
+Finisterre. This last calm, however, brought with it sufficient
+compensation: "tho' our voyage was retarded, we were entertained
+with a scene which as no one can behold without going to sea, so no
+one can form an idea of anything equal to it on shore. We were
+seated on the deck, women and all, in the serenest evening that can
+be imagined. Not a single cloud presented itself to our view, and
+the sun himself was the only object which engrossed our whole
+attention. He did indeed set with a majesty which is incapable of
+description, with which, while the horizon was yet blazing with
+glory, our eyes were called off to the opposite part to survey the
+moon, which was then at full, and which in rising presented us with
+the second object that this world hath offered to our vision.
+Compared to these the pageantry of theatres, or splendor of courts,
+are sights almost below the regard of children."</p>
+
+<p>Four days later, at midnight, the anchor was cast off Lisbon,
+after a calm and moonlit passage up the Tagus, a passage, Fielding
+writes, "incredibly pleasant to the women, who remained three hours
+enjoying it, while I was left to the cooler transports of enjoying
+their pleasures at second-hand; and yet, cooler as they may be,
+whoever is totally ignorant of such sensation, is, at the same
+time, void of all ideas of friendship."</p>
+
+<p>On the day following, the 24th of June, he landed, and that
+evening enjoyed the long unknown luxury of a good supper, in a kind
+of coffee-house "very pleasantly situated on the brow of a hill,
+about a mile from the city, [which] hath a very fine prospect of
+the River Tajo from Lisbon to the sea." With that pleasant prospect
+the Voyage closes. Begun as it was to while away the enforced
+solitude of his cabin, a condition, which no man, he tells us,
+disliked more than himself and which mortal sickness rendered
+especially irksome, these pages, some of which "were possibly the
+production of the most disagreeable hours which ever haunted the
+author," reveal Fielding to us if not as Mr Lowell has said "with
+artless inadvertence" at least with perfect fullness. The undimmed
+gaiety of spirit, the tender affection, the constant desire to
+remove those evils which he found oppressing his country-men by sea
+not less than on land, the 'enthusiasm for righteousnes,' the
+humour of the first of English novelists, burn here as brightly as
+though the writer were but midway in his life's voyage. The hand
+that exposed evil in its native loathsomeness in a Blifil and a
+Wild has not lost its cunning in depicting Mrs Humphreys; the eye
+that delighted in the green fields of England saw in the southern
+sunset that which made human creations 'almost below the regard of
+children.' And to the last the patriotic energies of the author of
+<em>Pasquin</em> and of the <em>Champion</em>, of the whole hearted
+social reformer, of the tireless magistrate, knew no relaxation.
+Page after page of the <em>Voyage</em> justify the passage in which
+he tells us how "I would indeed have this work, which, if I live to
+finish it (a matter of no great certainty, if indeed of any great
+hope to me), will be probably the last I shall ever undertake, to
+produce some better end than the mere diversion of the reader"; and
+manifest his desire, here explicitly stated, to finish life "as I
+have probably lost it, in the service of my country."</p>
+
+<p>We have no knowledge concerning the four months following the
+last entry in the pages of the <em>Voyage to Lisbon</em>. On
+October 8, 1754, the end so calmly expected came; and in the
+beautiful English cemetery, facing the great Basilica of the Heart
+of Jesus, was laid to rest all that an alien soil could claim of
+'our immortal Fielding.'</p>
+
+<h2>APPENDIX<br>
+<a name="appendixa">A</a></h2>
+
+<p><em>The Hapsburg genealogy</em></p>
+
+<p>It appears that the Hapsburg descent, formerly claimed by the
+Denbigh family, must now be abandoned. The arguments against this
+descent, published by Mr Horace Round, have been accepted by Burke.
+Further, Dr G. F. Warner permits me to publish his statement that
+"I have myself seen the documents upon which it [the claim] rests,
+and found them to be unmistakeable forgeries."</p>
+
+<p>As regards Henry Fielding's family it is interesting to find
+that his grandfather the Rev. and Hon. John Fielding was not only
+Canon of Salisbury, and a Doctor of Divinity, but also Archdeacon
+of Dorsetshire. Canon John Fielding was buried at Salisbury. His
+son George (Henry Fielding's uncle) was Lt. Colonel of the "Royal
+Regiment of the Blues," and Groom of the Bed-chamber to Queen Anne
+and to George II. He is buried in St George's Chapel, Windsor. (J.
+Nichols. <em>History and Antiquities of Leicestershire</em>. 1810.
+Vol. iv. pt. i. p. 394.)</p>
+
+<p><a href="#fn1-2">Back to Chapter 1, footnote 2.</a></p>
+
+<h2>APPENDIX<br>
+<a name="appendixb">B</a></h2>
+
+<p><em>Receipt and Assignment of "Tom Jones"</em></p>
+
+<p>The following documents are in the possession of Alfred Huth
+Esq., and are now first published</p>
+
+<p><br>
+June 11 1748. Rec'd. of Mr. Andrew Millar Six hundred Pounds being
+in full for the sole Copy Right of a Book called the History of a
+Foundling in Eighteen Books. And in Consideration of the said Six
+Hundred Pounds I promise to asign over the said Book to the said
+Andrew Millar his Executors and assigns for ever when I shall be
+thereto demanded.</p>
+
+<table summary="Table: 600 pounds">
+<tr>
+<td>£</td>
+<td>s</td>
+<td>d</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td>£600,</td>
+<td>00,</td>
+<td>00.</td>
+<td>Hen. Ffielding</td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+
+<p>The said Work to contain Six Volumes in Duodecimo.</p>
+
+<p>Know all Men by these Presents that I Henry Fielding of St.
+Paul's Covent Garden in the County of Middlesex Esq'r. for &amp; in
+consideration of the Sum of Six hundred Pounds of lawful Money of
+Great Britain to me in hand paid by Andrew Millar of St. Mary le
+Strand in the County afores'd. Bookseller the Receipt whereof is
+hereby acknowledged and of which I do Acquit the s'd. Andrew Millar
+his Executors &amp; Assigns, have bargained sold delivered assigned
+&amp; set over all that my Title Right and Property in &amp; to a
+certain Book printed in Six Volumes, known &amp; called by the Name
+&amp; Title of The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, inv'd.
+written by me the s'd. Henry Fielding, with all Improvements,
+Additions or Alterations whatsoever which now are or hereafter
+shall at any time be made by me the s'd. Henry Fielding, or any one
+else by my authority to the s'd. Book To Have and to Hold the s'd.
+bargained Premises unto the s'd. Andrew Millar, his Ex'ors Adm'ors
+or Assigns for ever And I do hereby covenant to &amp; with the s'd.
+Andrew Millar his Ex'ors Adm'ors &amp; Assigns that I the s'd.
+Henry Fielding the Author of the s'd. bargained Premises have not
+at any time heretofore done committed or suffered any Act or thing
+whatsoever by means whereof the s'd bargained Premises or any part
+thereof is or shall be impeached or encumbered in any wise And I
+the s'd Henry Fielding for myself my Ex'ors Adm'ors &amp; Assigns
+shall warrant &amp; defend the s'd bargained Premises for ever
+against all Persons whatsoever claiming under me my Ex'ors Adm'ors
+or Assigns.</p>
+
+<p>In Witness whereof I have hereunto set my hand &amp; seal this
+twenty fifth day of March One thousand seven hundred &amp; forty
+nine.</p>
+
+<table summary="Table: H Ffielding and Seal">
+<tr>
+<td>H Ffielding</td>
+<td><img src="images/seal.gif" alt="Seal" width="140" height="137"> </td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+
+<p>Signed sealed &amp; delivered<br>
+by the within named Henry<br>
+Fielding the day and year within<br>
+mentioned, in the presence of<br>
+Jos. Brogden</p>
+
+<p><a href="#fn11-5">Back to Chapter 11, footnote 5.</a></p>
+
+<h2>APPENDIX<br>
+<a name="appendixc">C</a></h2>
+
+<p>"<em>Pasquin turned Drawcansir</em>"</p>
+
+<p>The <em>General Advertiser</em> for March 13, 1752, Page 3,
+advertises, as for Macklin's Benefit, at the Theatre Royal, Covent
+Garden,</p>
+
+<p>"A New Dramatic Satire of Two Acts, call'd Covent Garden
+Theatre; or Pasquin turned Drawcansir Censor of Great Britain</p>
+
+<p>Written on the Model of the Comedies of Aristophanes and the
+Pasquinades of the Italian Theatre in Paris; With Chorusses of the
+People after the manner of the Greek Drama. The Parts of the Pit,
+and Boxes, the Stage, and the Town to be performed by themselves
+for their Diversion; the Part of several dull disorderly Characters
+in and about St. James, to be performed by certain Persons for
+Example; and the Part of Pasquin-Drawcansir to be performed by his
+Censorial Highness, for his Interest.</p>
+
+<p>The Satire to be introduced by an Oration, and to conclude by a
+Peroration: Both to be spoken from the Rostrum, in the Manner of
+certain Orators by Signer Pasquin."</p>
+
+<p>This advertisement is also in the <em>Covent Garden
+Journal</em>, with the addition of "galleries" after the word
+<em>Boxes</em>. According to Dibdin, <em>History of the Stage</em>,
+Vol. V. (preface dated 1800) p. 156, this satire was <em>by</em>
+Macklin.</p>
+
+<p><a href="#fn15-2">Back to Chapter 15, footnote 1.</a></p>
+
+<h2>APPENDIX<br>
+<a name="appendixd">D</a></h2>
+
+<p><em>The Walpole 'anecdote'</em></p>
+
+<p>The following reference to Fielding occurs in a letter by Horace
+Walpole, to George Montagu, dated May 18, 1749. It may be prefaced
+by the statement that Fielding's strenuous opposition to Sir Robert
+Walpole was not likely to be overlooked by Sir Robert's son; and by
+Mr Austin Dobson's comment "his [Horace Walpole's] absolute
+injustice, when his partisan spirit was uppermost, is everywhere
+patent to readers of his Letters ... the story no doubt exaggerated
+when it reached him, loses nothing under his transforming and
+malicious pen." Walpole writes: "He [Rigby] and Peter Bathurst
+t'other night carried a servant of the latter's, who had attempted
+to shoot him, before Fielding; who, to all his other vocations,
+has, by the grace of Mr Lyttelton, added that of Middlesex justice.
+He sent them word he was at supper, that they must come next
+morning. They did not understand that freedom, and ran up, where
+they found him banqueting with a blind man, a whore, and three
+Irishmen, on some cold mutton and a bone of ham, both in one dish,
+and the dirtiest cloth. He never stirred nor asked them to sit.
+Rigby, who had seen him so often come to beg a guinea of Sir C.
+Williams, and Bathurst, at whose father's he had lived for
+victuals, understood that dignity as little, and pulled themselves
+chairs; on which he civilised."</p>
+
+<p>The 'blind man' was doubtless the half brother later to be
+knighted for his distinguished public services, Sir John Fielding;
+and, adds Mr Austin Dobson, "it is extremely unlikely the lady so
+discourteously characterised could have been any other than his
+wife, who Lady Stuart tells us 'had few personal charms.' There
+remain the 'three Irishmen' who may, or may not, have been
+perfectly presentable members of society. At all events, their mere
+nationality, so rapidly decided upon, cannot be regarded as a
+stigma." Bearing in mind, on the one hand, our knowledge of
+Fielding as he reveals himself in his own pages, and in his
+friendships, and on the other the character earned by Horace
+Walpole's pen, it seems matter for doubt whether this 'anecdote'
+deserves even a place in an appendix.</p>
+
+<p><a href="#fn13-2">Back to Chapter 13, footnote 2.</a></p>
+
+<h2>APPENDIX<br>
+<a name="appendixe">E</a></h2>
+
+<p><em>Fielding's Will</em></p>
+
+<p>Fielding's will was discovered in the Prerogative Court of
+Canterbury, by Mr G. A. Aitken. It is undated:--</p>
+
+<p>IN THE NAME OF GOD AMEN--I HENRY FIELDING of the parish of
+Ealing in the County of Middlesex do hereby give and bequeath unto
+Ralph Allen of Prior Park in the County of Somerset Esqr and to his
+heirs executors administrators and assigns for ever to the use of
+the said Ralph his heirs &amp;c all my Estate real and personal
+wheresoever and whatsoever and do appoint him sole EXECUTOR of this
+my last Will--Beseeching him that the whole (except my shares in
+the Register Office) may be sold and forthwith converted into Money
+and Annuities purchased thereout for the lives of my dear Wife Mary
+and my daughters Harriet and Sophia and what proportions my said
+Executor shall please to reserve to my sons William and Allen shall
+be paid them severally as they shall attain the age of twenty and
+three And as for my Shares in the Register or Universal Register
+Office I give ten thereof to my aforesaid Wife seven to my Daughter
+Harriet and three to my daughter Sophia my Wife to be put in
+immediate possession of her shares and my Daughters of theirs as
+they shall severally arrive at the Age of 21 the immediate Profits
+to be then likewise paid to my two Daughters by my Executor who is
+desired to retain the same in his Hands until that time--Witness my
+Hand--HENRY FIELDING--Signed and acknowledged as his last Will and
+Testament by the within named Testator in the presence of--MARGARET
+COLLIER--RICHD BOOR--ISABELLA ASH--</p>
+
+<p>Proved 14th November 1754.</p>
+
+<p>Extracted from the Principal Registry of the Probate Divorce and
+Admiralty Division of the High Court of Justice</p>
+
+<p>In the Prerogative Court of Canterbury</p>
+
+<p>November 1754</p>
+
+<p>HENRY FIELDING Esquire--On the fourteenth day Administration
+(with the Will annexed) of the Goods Chattels and Credits of Henry
+Fielding late of Ealing in the County of Middlesex but at Lisbon in
+the Kingdom of Portugal Esquire deceased was granted to John
+Fielding Esquire the Uncle and Curator or Guardian lawfully
+assigned to Harriet Fielding Spinster a Minor and Sophia Fielding
+an Infant the natural and lawfull Daughters of the said Deceased
+and two of the Residuary Legatees named in the said Will for the
+use and benefit of the said Minor and Infant and until one of them
+shall attain the age of twenty one years for that Ralph Allen
+Esquire the sole Executor and Residuary Legatee in Trust named in
+the said Will hath renounced as well the Execution thereof as
+Letters of Administration (with the said Will annexed) of the Goods
+Chattels and Credits of the said deceased and Mary Fielding Widow
+the Relict of the said deceased and the other Residuary Legatee
+named in the said Will hath also renounced Letters of
+Administration (with the said Will annexed) of the Goods Chattels
+and Credits of the said deceased--the said John Fielding having
+been first sworn duly to administer.</p>
+
+<p>In addition to the property mentioned here, Fielding possessed a
+library, as Mr Austin Dobson <a name="fnrefa-1">discovered</a>, <a
+class="footnote" href="#fna-1">1</a> which when sold six months
+after his death, "for the Benefit of his Wife and Family," realised
+£364, 7s. 1d. or "about £100 more than the public gave in 1785 for
+the books of <a name="fnrefa-2">Johnson</a>." <a class="footnote"
+href="#fna-2">2</a> Also according to the <em>Recollections of the
+Late John Adolphus</em>, by Henderson, Fielding purchased a 90
+years' lease of a house near Canterbury, for one of his
+daughters.</p>
+
+<p>Of the children mentioned in this will, William became, a
+contemporary writer tells us, "an eminent barrister at law and
+inherits the integrity of his father and a large share of his
+brilliant <a name="fnrefa-3">talents</a>." <a class="footnote"
+href="#fna-3">3</a> Mr Austin Dobson refers to William Fielding as
+being like his father "a strenuous advocate of the poor and
+unfortunate," and adds that the obituary notice in the
+<em>Gentleman's Magazine</em> records his worth and <a name=
+"fnrefa-4">piety</a>. <a class="footnote" href="#fna-4">4</a>
+Harriet Fielding is said to have been of "a sweet temper and great
+<a name="fnrefa-5">understanding</a>." <a class="footnote" href=
+"#fna-5">5</a> Allen Fielding became Vicar of St. Stephens
+Canterbury, and was "greatly beloved by all, especially the little
+children," writes a descendant. Allen Fielding's four sons all took
+Orders, and of the second, Charles, it was written on his death,
+that "he had not only a heart that could feel for others, but a
+heart that lived in <a name="fnrefa-6">giving</a>." <a class=
+"footnote" href="#fna-6">6</a> The noble qualities of Henry
+Fielding found their echo in his descendants.</p>
+
+<h2>APPENDIX<br>
+<a name="appendixf">F</a></h2>
+
+<p><em>Fielding's Tomb and Epitaph</em></p>
+
+<p>Fielding's present tomb, in the beautiful English cemetery at
+Lisbon, was erected in 1830. On one side is inscribed:</p>
+
+<p>LUGET BRITANNIA GREMIO NON DARI<br>
+FOVERE NATUM</p>
+
+<p>On the other side are the following lines:</p>
+
+<p class="centered">Henrici Fielding<br>
+A Somersetensibus apud Glastoniam oriundi<br>
+Viri summo ingenio<br>
+en quae restant:<br>
+Stylo quo non alius unquam<br>
+Intima qui potuit cordis reserare mores hominum excolendos<br>
+suscepit<br>
+Virtuti decorum, vitio foeditatem asseruit, suum cuique
+tribuens;<br>
+Non quin ipse subinde irritaretur evitandis<br>
+Ardensin amicitia, in miseria sublevanda effusus<br>
+Hilaris urbanus et conjux et pater adamantus.<br>
+Aliis non sibi vixit<br>
+Vixit sed mortem victricem vincit dum natura durat dum saecula<br>
+currunt<br>
+Naturae prolem scriptis prae se ferens<br>
+Suam et sua genlis extendet <a name="fnrefa-7">famam</a>. <a class=
+"footnote" href="#fna-7">7</a></p>
+
+<h2>APPENDIX<br>
+<a name="appendixg">G</a></h2>
+
+<p><em>Fielding's posthumous play "The Fathers"</em></p>
+
+<p>Fielding's play <em>The Fathers</em> or <em>The Good-natured
+Man</em> seems to have been lost (apparently after being submitted
+to Sir Charles Hanbury Williams) till twenty years after Fielding's
+death. It was discovered by M'r Johnes, M.P. for Cardigan, in 1775,
+or 1776, who sent it to Garrick. Garrick recognised it as "Harry
+Fielding's Comedy"; and, after revision, it was produced at Drury
+Lane on November 30, 1778. Garrick not only appeared in the cast,
+but also wrote both prologue and epilogue. A note, in the Morrison
+Manuscripts, from Garrick to D'r John Hoadley, dated January 3,
+1776, concludes thus "We have found the lost sheep, Henry
+Fielding's Good Natured Man which was mislaid near twenty <a name=
+"fnrefa-8">years</a>." <a class="footnote" href="#fna-8">8</a> In
+the following pleasant letter Sir John Fielding commends Mrs
+Fielding's Benefit night to Dr Hunter.</p>
+
+<p>"Sir John Fielding presents his compliments to Dr. Hunter, and
+acquaints him that the Comedy of 'The Good-natured Man' written by
+the late Mr. Henry Fielding will be performed at Drury Lane next
+Monday being the Author's Widow's night.</p>
+
+<p>"He was your old and sincere friend. There are no other of his
+Works left unpublished. This is the last opportunity you will have
+of shewing any respect to his Memory as a Genius, so that I hope
+you will send all your Pupils, all your Patients, all your Friends,
+&amp; everybody else to the Play that Night, by which Means you
+will indulge your benevolent feelings and your Sentiments of <a
+name="fnrefa-9">Friendship</a>. <a class="footnote" href=
+"#fna-9">9</a></p>
+
+<p>"Bow Street, Dec'r 4, 1778."</p>
+
+<h2>APPENDIX<br>
+<a name="appendixh">H</a></h2>
+
+<p><em>Undated Accounts of Fielding at Salisbury and at
+Barnes</em></p>
+
+<p>Research has so far failed to identify the period of Fielding's
+traditional residence in Salisbury. According to the following
+passage in <em>Old and New Sarum or Salisbury</em>, by R. Benson
+and H. Hatcher, 1843, he occupied three houses in or near
+Salisbury. "It is well known that Fielding the Novelist married a
+lady of Salisbury named Craddock [sic] and was for a time resident
+in our City. From tradition we learn that he first occupied the
+house in the Close at the south side of St Anne's Gate. He
+afterwards removed to that in St Anne's Street next to the Friary;
+and finally established himself in the Mansion at the foot of
+Milford Hill, where he wrote a considerable portion of his <em>Tom
+<a name="fnrefa-10">Jones</a></em>." <a class="footnote" href=
+"#fna-10">10</a></p>
+
+<p>Fielding's residence in Barnes is no less illusive. The
+following passage occurs in the edition of 1795 of <em>Lyson's
+Environs of London</em>: "Henry Fielding, the celebrated Novelist,
+resided at Barnes, in the house which is now the property of Mr <a
+name="fnrefa-11">Partington</a>." <a class="footnote" href=
+"#fna-11">11</a> In the edition of 1811 the house is described as
+"now the property of Mrs Stanton, widow of the late Admiral <a
+name="fnrefa-12">Stanton</a>." <a class="footnote" href=
+"#fna-12">12</a> In Manning and Bray's <em>Surrey</em> the name of
+the house is given: "On Barnes Green is a very old house called
+Milbourne House.... It was once the residence of Henry Fielding the
+celebrated novel writer. The widow of Admiral Stanton is the
+present owner of this <a name="fnrefa-13">house</a>." <a class=
+"footnote" href="#fna-13">13</a> The Barnes Rate-books appear to
+throw no light on the date of Fielding's residence at Milbourne
+House. It is noteworthy that both the Barnes and Salisbury
+statements indicate a man of some means, living as befitted a
+Fielding.</p>
+
+<h2>APPENDIX<br>
+<a name="appendixi">I</a></h2>
+
+<p><em>An undated letter of Fieldings to Lady Mary Wortley
+Montagu</em></p>
+
+<p>The following undated letter is printed in <em>The Letters and
+Works of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu</em> edited by Lord Wharncliffe
+and W. M. Thomas. Lord Wharncliffe includes it with the letters
+from originals among the Wortley <a name="fnrefa-14">papers</a>. <a
+class="footnote" href="#fna-14">14</a></p>
+
+<p><br>
+</p>
+
+<p>Wednesday evening</p>
+
+<p>Madam,--I have presumed to send your ladyship a copy of the play
+which you did me the honour of reading three acts of last spring,
+and hope it may meet as light a censure from your ladyship's
+judgment as then; for while your goodness permits me (what I esteem
+the greatest, and indeed only happiness of my life) to offer my
+unworthy performances to your perusal, it will be entirely from
+your sentence that they will be regarded, or disesteemed by me. I
+shall do myself the honour of calling at your ladyship's door
+to-morrow at eleven, which, if it be an improper hour, I beg to
+know from your servant what other time will be more convenient. I
+am with the greatest respect and gratitude, madam,</p>
+
+<p>Your ladyship's most obedient, most devoted humble servant.</p>
+
+<h2>APPENDIX<br>
+<a name="appendixj">J</a></h2>
+
+<p>FIELDING'S <em>Tom Thumb</em></p>
+
+<p>This play appears to have carried some political significance in
+Fielding's day; if it was not, indeed, written with a political
+intention. This may be gathered from an article in the <em>Daily
+Post</em> of March 29, 1742, apropos of a performance of the
+<em>Tragedy of Tragedies</em>, that night, at Drury Lane. The
+article attributes, in detail, political intentions to the
+<em>Tragedy</em>--"a Piece at first calculated to ridicule some
+particular Persons and Affairs in Europe (at the Time it was writ)
+but more especially in this Island."</p>
+
+<h3>Footnotes for Chapter 1</h3>
+
+<p><a name="fn1-1">1</a>. Chancery Proceedings 1720 sqq.
+<em>Fielding</em> v. <em>Fielding</em>. From the records of this
+Chancery suit, instituted on behalf of Henry Fielding and his
+brother and sisters, as minors, by their grandmother Lady Gould,
+are taken the hitherto unpublished facts concerning the novelist's
+boyhood, contained in this chapter. The original documents are
+preserved in the Record Office. <a class="footnote" href=
+"#fnref1-1">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn1-2">2</a>. See <a href="#appendixa">Appendix A</a>.
+<a class="footnote" href="#fnref1-2">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn1-3">3</a>. By means of a legacy of £3000 left by her
+father for his daughter's sole use, "her husband having nothing to
+doe with it." <a class="footnote" href="#fnref1-3">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn1-4">4</a>. <em>History and Antiquities of
+Leicestershire</em>. J. Nichols. 1810. Vol. iv. Part i. p. 292.
+Nichols does not state his authority for this statement, and it is
+not confirmed by local records. See Hutchins' <em>History of
+Dorset</em> for the list of Stour Provost rectors. <a class=
+"footnote" href="#fnref1-4">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn1-5">5</a>. Chancery Proceedings, 1722.
+<em>Fielding</em> v. <em>Midford</em>. Record Office. <a class=
+"footnote" href="#fnref1-5">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn1-6">6</a>. Edmund's name was added in October
+following. <a class="footnote" href="#fnref1-6">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn1-7">7</a>. <em>Chancery Decrees and Order
+Books</em>. Record Office. <a class="footnote" href=
+"#fnref1-7">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn1-8">8</a>. Tom Jones, Book xiii. Introduction. <a
+class="footnote" href="#fnref1-8">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn1-9">9</a>. Ibid., Book viii., ch. xiii. <a class=
+"footnote" href="#fnref1-9">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn1-10">10</a>. <em>Tom Jones</em>, Book ix.
+Introduction. <a class="footnote" href="#fnref1-10">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn1-11">11</a>. See <em>infra</em>, chap. xi. <a class=
+"footnote" href="#fnref1-11">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn1-12">12</a>. Fifty years ago a portrait of the
+beautiful heiress, in the character of Sophia Western, was still
+preserved at the house of Bellairs, near Exeter, then the property
+of the Rhodes family. The present ownership of the picture has, so
+far, eluded inquiry. <a class="footnote" href=
+"#fnref1-12">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn1-13">13</a>. <em>Fielding</em>, Austin Dobson, p.
+202. <a class="footnote" href="#fnref1-13">Back</a></p>
+
+<h3>Footnotes for Chapter 2</h3>
+
+<p><a name="fn2-1">1</a>. <em>Joseph Andrews</em>, Book iii. Chap.
+iii. <a class="footnote" href="#fnref2-1">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn2-2">2</a>. <em>Miscellanies</em>,ed. 1743, vol. ii.
+p. 62. <a class="footnote" href="#fnref2-2">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn2-3">3</a>. In the <em>Miscellanies</em> of 1743. <a
+class="footnote" href="#fnref2-3">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn2-4">4</a>. <em>Fielding</em>, Austin Dobson, 1907.
+App. iv. <a class="footnote" href="#fnref2-4">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn2-5">5</a>. What appears to be the original autograph
+of the above letter is now (1909) in the library of the Boston
+Athenaeum, having been presented by Mr C. P. Greenough. <a class=
+"footnote" href="#fnref2-5">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn2-6">6</a>. <em>Notitia Dramatica</em> (British
+Museum. MSS. Dept.) and Genest give 1734 as the date of Don
+Quixote; Murphy, edition of 1766, vol. iii p. 249, gives 1733. <a
+class="footnote" href="#fnref2-6">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn2-7">7</a>. For the refutation of Genest's confusion
+of Timothy Fielding, a strolling player, with Henry Fielding, see
+Austin Dobson, <em>Fielding</em>, pp. 28, 29. <a class="footnote"
+href="#fnref2-7">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn2-8">8</a>. The <em>Miscellanies</em>. Edition 1743.
+<a class="footnote" href="#fnref2-8">Back</a></p>
+
+<h3>Footnotes for Chapter 3</h3>
+
+<p><a name="fn3-1">1</a>. <em>Tom Jones</em>. Book xiii.
+Introduction. <a class="footnote" href="#fnref3-1">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn3-2">2</a>. See the registers of St Mary Charlcombe.
+As Sarah Fielding, the novelist's sister, was buried in the
+entrance to the chancel of this church, it would appear that some
+connection existed between Charlcombe and the Fielding family. <a
+class="footnote" href="#fnref3-2">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn3-3">3</a>. <em>Seasonable Reproof--a Satire in the
+manner of Horace</em>, 1735. <a class="footnote" href=
+"#fnref3-3">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn3-4">4</a>. The entry in the East Stour Registers is
+"W'm. Young, Curate 1731-1740." <a class="footnote" href=
+"#fnref3-4">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn3-5">5</a>. <em>Voyage to Lisbon</em>. <a class=
+"footnote" href="#fnref3-5">Back</a></p>
+
+<h3>Footnotes for chapter 4</h3>
+
+<p><a name="fn4-1">1</a>. <em>Works of Henry Fielding</em>, Edited
+by Edmund Gosse. Introduction, p. xxi. <a class="footnote" href=
+"#fnref4-1">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn4-2">2</a>. <em>Life of Garrick</em>. T. Davies.
+1780, vol. i. p. 223. <a class="footnote" href=
+"#fnref4-2">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn4-3">3</a>. <em>Notitia Dramatica</em>, MSS. Dept.
+British Museum, speaks of <em>Pasquin</em> as performed for the
+fortieth time on April 21, 1736: and quotes an advertisement of the
+play for March 5. There seems to be no record of the actual first
+night. <a class="footnote" href="#fnref4-3">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn4-4">4</a>. Rich appears to have been the manager at
+Covent Garden from 1733 to 1761. <a class="footnote" href=
+"#fnref4-4">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn4-5">5</a>. <em>Autobiography of Mrs Delany.</em>
+1861. Vol I. p. 554. <a class="footnote" href=
+"#fnref4-5">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn4-6">6</a>. See Fielding's ironic reference to such
+"iniquitous surmises" in the Dedication to the <em>Historical
+Register</em>. <a class="footnote" href="#fnref4-6">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn4-7">7</a>. The earliest newspaper reference, so far
+available, is that of the <em>Daily Journal</em> for April 6 1737,
+which speaks of April 11 as the ninth day of the <em>Register</em>.
+<a class="footnote" href="#fnref4-7">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn4-8">8</a>. In the succeeding Epilogue of
+<em>Eurydice Hiss'd</em> it must be admitted that Sir Robert's love
+of the bottle is broadly satirised. <a class="footnote" href=
+"#fnref4-8">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn4-9">9</a>. <em>Daily Advertiser</em>, April 29.
+1737. <a class="footnote" href="#fnref4-9">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn4-10">10</a>. <em>Life of Garrick</em>, T. Davies,
+vol. ii. p. 206. <a class="footnote" href="#fnref4-10">Back</a></p>
+
+<h3>Footnotes for Chapter 5</h3>
+
+<p><a name="fn5-1">1</a>. <em>Life of Garrick</em>. T. Davies, vol.
+ii. <a class="footnote" href="#fnref5-1">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn5-2">2</a>. <em>Works of Henry Fielding</em>, edited
+by Edmund Gosse. Introduction, p. xxix. <a class="footnote" href=
+"#fnref5-2">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn5-3">3</a>. <em>The Works of Mr George Lillo, with
+some Account of his Life</em>, T. Davies. <a class="footnote" href=
+"#fnref5-3">Back</a></p>
+
+<h3>Footnotes for Chapter 6</h3>
+
+<p><a name="fn6-1">1</a>. The fullest newspaper for theatrical
+notices at this date, preserved in the British Museum, the
+<em>London Daily Post</em>, is unfortunately missing for this year.
+<a class="footnote" href="#fnref6-1">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn6-2">2</a>. Now first printed, from documents at the
+Record Office. <a class="footnote" href="#fnref6-2">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn6-3">3</a>. A table inscribed by a former owner as
+having belonged to Henry Fielding, Esq., novelist, is now in the
+possession of the Somersetshire Archaeological Society. The
+inscription adds that Fielding "hunted from East Stour Farm in
+1718." He would then be eleven years old! <a class="footnote" href=
+"#fnref6-3">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn6-4">4</a>. From the hitherto unpublished original,
+in the library of Alfred Huth, Esq. <a class="footnote" href=
+"#fnref6-4">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn6-5">5</a>. "Cro: Eliz." is the legal abbreviation
+for Justice Croke's law reports for the reign of Elizabeth. <a
+class="footnote" href="#fnref6-5">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn6-6">6</a>. <em>Champion</em>, February 26, 1740. <a
+class="footnote" href="#fnref6-6">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn6-7">7</a>. <em>The Tryal of Colley Cibber, Comedian
+etc.</em> 1740. <a class="footnote" href="#fnref6-7">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn6-8">8</a>. Those of April 22, and April 29, 1740. <a
+class="footnote" href="#fnref6-8">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn6-9">9</a>. And see <em>Daily Gazeteer</em>, Oct. 9,
+1740. <a class="footnote" href="#fnref6-9">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn6-10">10</a>. <em>Champion</em>, December 22, 1739.
+<a class="footnote" href="#fnref6-10">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn6-11">11</a>. For April 22, April 29, May 6, and May
+17. <a class="footnote" href="#fnref6-11">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn6-12">12</a>. Boswell's <em>Johnson</em>, edited by
+Birkbeck Hill. Vol. i. p. 169. n. 2: "Ralph ... as appears from the
+minutes of the partners of the <em>Champion</em> in the possession
+of Mr Reed of Staple Inn, succeeded Fielding in his share of the
+paper before the date of that eulogium [1744]." <a class="footnote"
+href="#fnref6-12">Back</a></p>
+
+<h3>Footnotes for Chapter 7</h3>
+
+<p><a name="fn7-1">1</a>. A tantalising reference to one such
+acquaintance occurs in Lord Campbell's <em>Lives of the
+Chancellors</em>. Vol. v. p. 357. In notes made by Lord Camden's
+nephew, George Hardinge, for a proposed Life of the Lord Chancellor
+there is this entry: "formed an acquaintance ... with Henry
+Fielding ... called to the Bar." <a class="footnote" href=
+"#fnref7-1">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn7-2">2</a>. Now in the possession of W. K. Bixby,
+Esq., of St Louis, U.S.A. <a class="footnote" href=
+"#fnref7-2">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn7-3">3</a>. In a manuscript copy of the Minutes, in
+the possession of the present writer. <a class="footnote" href=
+"#fnref7-3">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn7-4">4</a>. <em>London Daily Post</em>, June 18-26,
+1741. <a class="footnote" href="#fnref7-4">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn7-5">5</a>. The hard frost would be the terrible
+preceding winter of 1739-40, a winter long remembered for the
+severity of the cold, the cost of provisions, and the suffering of
+the poor. <a class="footnote" href="#fnref7-5">Back</a></p>
+
+<h3>Footnotes for Chapter 8</h3>
+
+<p><a name="fn8-1">1</a>. <em>Cleopatra and Octavia</em>. Sarah
+Fielding. Introduction. <a class="footnote" href=
+"#fnref8-1">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn8-2">2</a>. See the ledgers of Woodfall, the printer,
+quoted in <em>Notes and Queries</em>, Series vi. p. 186.<a class=
+"footnote" href="#fnref8-2">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn8-3">3</a>. It is interesting to note that Samuel
+Rogers was heard to speak with great admiration of chapter xiii. of
+Book iii., entitled "A curious Dialogue which passed between Mr
+Abraham Adams and Mr Peter Pounce." (MS. note by Dyce, in a copy of
+<em>Joseph Andrews</em>, now in the South Kensington Museum.) <a
+class="footnote" href="#fnref8-3">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn8-4">4</a>. This copy, published in Amsterdam in
+1775, is now in the possession of Mr Pierpont Morgan. <a class=
+"footnote" href="#fnref8-4">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn8-5">5</a>. Letters and Works of Lady Mary Wortley
+Montagu. Vol. ii. p. 194. <a class="footnote" href=
+"#fnref8-5">Back</a></p>
+
+<h3>Footnotes for Chapter 9</h3>
+
+<p><a name="fn9-1">1</a>. <em>Daily Post</em>, June 5, 1742. <a
+class="footnote" href="#fnref9-1">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn9-2">2</a>. MS. copy of the Minutes of the Meetings
+of the Partners in the <em>Champion</em>, in the possession of the
+present writer. <a class="footnote" href="#fnref9-2">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn9-3">3</a>. See <em>Daily Post</em>. May 29, 1742. <a
+class="footnote" href="#fnref9-3">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn9-4">4</a>. Preface to the <em>Miscellanies</em>. <a
+class="footnote" href="#fnref9-4">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn9-5">5</a>. Such as the inscription on some verses,
+published in the <em>Miscellanies</em>, as "Written
+<em>Extempore</em> in the Pump-room" at Bath, in 1742. <a class=
+"footnote" href="#fnref9-5">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn9-6">6</a>. Preface to <em>David Simple</em>. <a
+class="footnote" href="#fnref9-6">Back</a></p>
+
+<h3>Footnotes for Chapter 10</h3>
+
+<p><a name="fn10-1">1</a>. These are in the Burney Collection, and
+are inscribed "These papers are by the celebrated Henry Fielding
+Esqre." <a class="footnote" href="#fnref10-1">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn10-2">2</a>. See the <em>Gentleman's Magazine</em>.
+Dec. 1747. <a class="footnote" href="#fnref10-2">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn10-3">3</a>. <em>A Free Comment on the Late Mr.
+W-G-N's Apology ... By a Lady ...</em> 1748. <a class="footnote"
+href="#fnref10-3">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn10-4">4</a>. <em>The Patriot Analized</em>. 1748. <a
+class="footnote" href="#fnref10-4">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn10-5">5</a>. <em>True Patriot No. 14</em>. <a class=
+"footnote" href="#fnref10-5">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn10-6">6</a>. <em>True Patriot</em>. No. 29. May 20,
+1746. <a class="footnote" href="#fnref10-6">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn10-7">7</a>. R. Cobbett. <em>Memorials of
+Twickenham</em>, 1872. <a class="footnote" href=
+"#fnref10-7">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn10-8">8</a>. The <em>Journal's</em> epitaph was
+promptly written by a scurrilous opponent in lines showing that the
+prominences of Fielding's profile were well-known:</p>
+
+<p>Beneath this stone<br>
+ Lies <em>Trott Plaid John</em><br>
+ His length of chin and nose.</p>
+
+<p>See the <em>Gentleman's Magazine</em>, November 1748. <a class=
+"footnote" href="#fnref10-8">Back</a></p>
+
+<div class="footnotes">
+<h3>Footnotes for Chapter 11</h3>
+
+<p><a name="fn11-1">1</a>. The Fiat appointing Fielding as
+Magistrate for the City and Borough of Westminster, now in the
+House of Lords, is dated July 30, 1748. <a class="footnote" href=
+"#fnref11-1">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn11-2">2</a>. On the house identified with Mr Graves'
+description, and now known as "Fielding's Lodge," a tablet has
+recently been placed, through the energy of Mr R. G. Naish of
+Twerton. <a class="footnote" href="#fnref11-2">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn11-3">3</a>. See <em>Life of the Earl of
+Hardwicke</em>. G. Harris. 1847. Vol. II. pp. 456-7. <a class=
+"footnote" href="#fnref11-3">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn11-4">4</a>. <em>Tom Jones</em>. Dedication. <a
+class="footnote" href="#fnref11-4">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn11-5">5</a>. See <a href="#appendixb">Appendix</a>
+for this, hitherto unpublished, receipt. <a class="footnote" href=
+"#fnref11-5">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn11-6">6</a>. <em>London Magazine.</em> Feb. 1749. <a
+class="footnote" href="#fnref11-6">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn11-7">7</a>. In Germany an edition of 1771 was
+followed by a second in 1780, and a third in 1786. In 1765 a
+lyrical comedy founded on the famous novel was acted in Paris; and
+the same year it was transformed into a German comedy by J.H.
+Steffens. <a class="footnote" href="#fnref11-7">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn11-8">8</a>. S. T. Coleridge. Manuscript notes in a
+copy of <em>Tom Jones</em>, now in the British Museum. <a class=
+"footnote" href="#fnref11-8">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn11-9">9</a>. Ibid. <a class="footnote" href=
+"#fnref11-9">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn11-10">10</a>. J. T. Smith. <em>Nollekens and his
+Times</em>. Vol. i. pp. 124-5. <a class="footnote" href=
+"#fnref11-10">Back</a></p>
+
+<h3>Footnotes for Chapter 12</h3>
+
+<p><a name="fn12-1">1</a>. His Commission in the Peace for
+Westminster bears date October 25. 1748. <a class="footnote" href=
+"#fnref12-1">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn12-2">2</a>. An application is reported for the 2nd
+of December before "Justice Fielding" of Meards Court, St. Anne's,
+but for reasons given below this <em>may</em> refer to John
+Fielding. <a class="footnote" href="#fnref12-2">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn12-3">3</a>. From the autograph now at Woburn Abbey,
+and printed in the <em>Correspondence of John Fourth Duke of
+Bedford</em>. Vol. i. p. 589. <a class="footnote" href=
+"#fnref12-3">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn12-4">4</a>. Middlesex Records. Volume of
+<em>Qualification Oaths for Justices of the Peace</em>. 1749. From
+an entry dated July 13, 1749, in the same volume, Fielding appears
+to have then owned leases in the three first named parishes only.
+<a class="footnote" href="#fnref12-4">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn12-5">5</a>. See the King's Writ, now preserved in
+the Record Office. <a class="footnote" href=
+"#fnref12-5">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn12-6">6</a>. Middlesex Records. <em>Sacramental
+Certificates.</em> <a class="footnote" href=
+"#fnref12-6">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn12-7">7</a>. Middlesex Records. <em>Oath Rolls.</em>
+<a class="footnote" href="#fnref12-7">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn12-8">8</a>. <em>Amelia.</em> Book i. Chapter ii. <a
+class="footnote" href="#fnref12-8">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn12-9">9</a>. The Westminster <em>Session Rolls</em>,
+preserved among the Middlesex Records, contain many recognizances
+all signed by Fielding. <a class="footnote" href=
+"#fnref12-9">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn12-10">10</a>. "On Friday last," announces the
+General Advertiser for May 17, "Counsellor Fielding, one of his
+Majesty's Justices of the Peace was chosen Chairman of the Sessions
+at Hicks Hall for the County of Middlesex"; a statement not very
+compatible with the incontestable evidence preserved in the
+<em>General Orders Books</em> of the Middlesex Records, by which it
+appears that John Lane Esq're was elected Chairman of the Middlesex
+General Sessions and General Quarter Session from Ladyday 1749 to
+September 1752. The personal paragraphist of 1749 was perhaps no
+less inaccurate than his descendant of to-day. But a few weeks
+later this honour of chairmanship was certainly accorded to
+Fielding by his brethren of the Bench for Westminster. An entry in
+the <em>Sessions Book</em> of Westminster, 1749 runs as follows:
+"May. 1749, Mr Fielding elected chairman of this present Session
+and to continue untill the 2nd day of the next." <em>MSS Sessions
+Books for Westminster. Vol. 1749.</em> Middlesex Records. <a class=
+"footnote" href="#fnref12-10">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn12-11">11</a>. From the autograph now at Woburn
+Abbey, and printed in the <em>Correspondence of John, Fourth Duke
+of Bedford</em>, vol. ii. p. 35. <a class="footnote" href=
+"#fnref12-11">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn12-12">12</a>. From the hitherto unpublished
+autograph now in the British Museum. <a class="footnote" href=
+"#fnref12-12">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn12-13">13</a>. This letter is now in the Dreer
+Collection of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia,
+U.S.A. <a class="footnote" href="#fnref12-13">Back</a></p>
+
+<h3>Footnotes for Chapter 13</h3>
+
+<p><a name="fn13-1">1</a>. Doubtless faithfully rendered in the old
+print, here reproduced, of Fielding's blind half-brother,
+assistant, and successor, Sir John Fielding, hearing a Bow Street
+case. <a class="footnote" href="#fnref13-1">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn13-2">2</a>. See <a href="#appendixd">Appendix</a>.
+<a class="footnote" href="#fnref13-2">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn13-3">3</a>. Middlesex Records. <em>MSS. Sessions
+Books</em>. 1750. <a class="footnote" href=
+"#fnref13-3">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn13-4">4</a>. From the hitherto unpublished autograph,
+now at Woburn Abbey. <a class="footnote" href=
+"#fnref13-4">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn13-5">5</a>. This hitherto unpublished letter is now
+in the British Museum. It is addressed to "--Perkins, Esq. at his
+Chambers No. 7, in Lincolns Inn Square," and is sealed with
+Fielding's seal, a facsimile of which appears on the cover of the
+present volume. <a class="footnote" href="#fnref13-5">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn13-6">6</a>. <em>Fielding</em>. Austin Dobson. p.
+156. <a class="footnote" href="#fnref13-6">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn13-7">7</a>. <em>The General Advertiser</em>. March
+7, 1751. <a class="footnote" href="#fnref13-7">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn13-8">8</a>. The <em>London Magazine</em> for
+February devoted five columns to an "Abstract of Mr Fielding's
+Enquiry"; and in the following month the <em>Magazine</em> again
+noticed the book, by printing a long anonymous letter in which
+Fielding is attacked as a 'trading author' and a 'trading justice,'
+and in which the writer shows his intellectual grasp by advocating
+in all seriousness a law prohibiting the sovereign from gambling!
+<a class="footnote" href="#fnref13-8">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn13-9">9</a>. See <em>Journals of the House of
+Commons</em>. Vol. xxii. p. 27, and the <em>London Magazine</em>.
+Vol. xx. p. 82. The <em>Catalogue of Printed Papers. House of
+Commons</em>, 1750-51, includes "A Bill for the more effectual
+preventing Robberies Burglaries and other Outrages within the City
+and Liberty of Westminster--" &amp;c. <a class="footnote" href=
+"#fnref13-9">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn13-10">10</a>. This hitherto unpublished letter is
+now in the British Museum. It is endorsed "Jan. 15, 1750(1)." <a
+class="footnote" href="#fnref13-10">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn13-11">11</a>. 24 George II. c. 40. June 1751. <a
+class="footnote" href="#fnref13-11">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn13-12">12</a>. Middlesex Records. <em>Sessions
+Book</em>. 1751. <a class="footnote" href=
+"#fnref13-12">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn13-13">13</a>. <em>General Advertiser</em>. Sept. 9.
+1751. <a class="footnote" href="#fnref13-13">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn13-14">14</a>. Middlesex Records. <em>Sessions
+Book</em>. October, 1751. <a class="footnote" href=
+"#fnref13-14">Back</a></p>
+
+<h3>Footnotes for Chapter 14</h3>
+
+<p><a name="fn14-1">1</a>. <em>Anecdotes</em>. Mrs Piozzi. p. 221.
+<a class="footnote" href="#fnref14-1">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn14-2">2</a>. Letters and Works of Lady Mary Wortley
+Montagu. Introductory Anecdotes, p. cxxiii. <a class="footnote"
+href="#fnref14-2">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn14-3">3</a>. Ibid. Vol. ii. p. 289. <a class=
+"footnote" href="#fnref14-3">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn14-4">4</a>. It is curious that to this unlucky
+incident, based according to Lady Louisa Stuart, Lady Mary Wortley
+Montagu's grand-daughter, on a real accident to Mrs Fielding, Dr
+Johnson attributed the failure of the book with the public: "that
+vile broken nose ruined the sale," he declared. Early in January
+Fielding himself protests in his <em>Covent Garden Journal</em>
+that every reader of any intelligence would have discovered that
+the effects of Amelia's terrible carriage accident had been wholly
+remedied by "a famous Surgeon"; and that "the Author of her
+History, in a hurry, forgot to inform his Readers of that
+Particular." The particular has by now fallen into its due
+insignificance, and, save for Johnson's explanation therein of the
+poor sale of the book, is scarce worth recalling. <a class=
+"footnote" href="#fnref14-4">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn14-5">5</a>. <em>London Magazine</em>. December 1751.
+p. 531 and Appendix. <a class="footnote" href=
+"#fnref14-5">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn14-6">6</a>. <em>Fielding</em>. Austin Dobson. p.
+161. <a class="footnote" href="#fnref14-6">Back</a></p>
+
+<h3>Footnotes for Chapter 15</h3>
+
+<p><a name="fn15-1">1</a>. A dramatic satire, advertised in March
+at Covent Garden Theatre and written (as stated by Dibdin,
+<em>History of the Stage</em>. Vol. v. p. 156), by the actor
+Macklin, bore for sub-title <em>Pasquin turned Drawcansir, Censor
+of Great Britain</em>. The name, and the further details of the
+advertisement, recall Fielding's early success with his political
+<em>Pasquin</em>: but all further trace of this 'Satire' seems
+lost. See <a href="#appendixc">Appendix C</a>. <a class="footnote"
+href="#fnref15-1">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn15-2">2</a> <em>A faithful Narrative....</em> By
+Drawcansir.... Alexander. 1752. <a class="footnote" href=
+"#fnref15-2">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn15-3">3</a>. 25. G II. cap 36. <a class="footnote"
+href="#fnref15-3">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn15-4">4</a>. All trace seems now lost of the actual
+part Fielding may have taken in the drafting of this Act. <a class=
+"footnote" href="#fnref15-4">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn15-5">5</a>. 25. G. II. c. 37. <a class="footnote"
+href="#fnref15-5">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn15-6">6</a>. It would seem, from the following
+advertisement, that Fielding's inexhaustible pen published, about
+this time, a sixpenny pamphlet on 'a late Act of Parliament'; but
+all trace of it has been lost:--"A speech made in the Censorial
+Court of Alexander Drawcansir, Monday, 6th June, 1752, concerning a
+late Act of Parliament. Printed for the Author. Price 6d." <em>The
+General Advertiser</em>, June 27, 1752. <a class="footnote" href=
+"#fnref15-6">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn15-7">7</a>. The <em>General Advertiser</em> March 4.
+1752. <a class="footnote" href="#fnref15-7">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn15-8">8</a>. The <em>General Advertiser</em>, April
+15, 1752. <a class="footnote" href="#fnref15-8">Back</a></p>
+
+<h3>Footnotes for Chapter 16</h3>
+
+<p><a name="fn16-1">1</a>. <em>Life of Henry Fielding</em>.
+Frederick Lawrence, p. 138. <a class="footnote" href=
+"#fnref16-1">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn16-2">2</a>. Saunders Welch. <em>A Letter on the
+subject of Robberies, wrote in the year 1753</em>. <a class=
+"footnote" href="#fnref16-2">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn16-3">3</a>. See the <em>Public Advertiser</em> 1753
+March 17, 20, 24 &amp;c. <a class="footnote" href=
+"#fnref16-3">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn16-4">4</a>. This unique contemporary print of
+Fielding may be seen in the British Museum, Print Room, <em>Social
+Satires</em>, No. 3213. <a class="footnote" href=
+"#fnref16-4">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn16-5">5</a>. Record Office. <em>State Papers.
+Domestic</em> G. II., 127, no. 24. <a class="footnote" href=
+"#fnref16-5">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn16-6">6</a>. Lysons. <em>Environs of London</em>.
+1795. Vol. ii. p. 229. <a class="footnote" href=
+"#fnref16-6">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn16-7">7</a>. The quotations from the <em>Voyage to
+Lisbon</em> are from the edition recently prepared by Mr Austin
+Dobson, for the 'World's Classics.' <a class="footnote" href=
+"#fnref16-7">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn16-8">8</a>. This letter is now in the British
+Museum. The endorsement on the back is: "Dec. 6, 1753 from Mr
+Fielding recommending Mr. Saunders Welch to be in the Com. of ye
+Peace for Westmr and Middx." <a class="footnote" href=
+"#fnref16-8">Back</a></p>
+
+<h3>Footnotes for Chapter 17</h3>
+
+<p><a name="fn17-1">1</a>. The <em>Public Advertiser</em>, 1754,
+February 26. <a class="footnote" href="#fnref17-1">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn17-2">2</a>. The <em>Public Advertiser</em> 1754,
+April 17. <a class="footnote" href="#fnref17-2">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn17-3">3</a>. Middlesex Records. <em>Sessions
+Book</em>. 1754. <a class="footnote" href="#fnref17-3">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn17-4">4</a>. See the Middlesex Records. <a class=
+"footnote" href="#fnref17-4">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn17-5">5</a>. See the <em>Public Advertiser</em>.
+February, 1754. <a class="footnote" href="#fnref17-5">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn17-6">6</a>. This little house was apparently
+replaced by a larger house; and it is probably this second building
+of which a sketch is inserted in a copy of Lysons'
+<em>Environs</em> to be seen in the Guildhall Library. It is now
+pulled down. <a class="footnote" href="#fnref17-6">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn17-7">7</a>. Dr Johnson spoke of Saunders Welch as
+"one of my best and dearest friends." <a class="footnote" href=
+"#fnref17-7">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn17-8">8</a>. Austin Dobson. <em>Fielding</em>, p.
+170. <a class="footnote" href="#fnref17-8">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn17-9">9</a>. "Dedication" of the <em>Voyage</em>,
+written possibly by John Fielding. <a class="footnote" href=
+"#fnref17-9">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn17-10">10</a>. Austin Dobson. <em>Fielding</em>, p.
+179. From the autograph in the possession of Mr Frederick Locker.
+<a class="footnote" href="#fnref17-10">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fn17-11">11</a>. This and the following passage occur
+in the second version of the <em>Voyage to Lisbon.</em> <a class=
+"footnote" href="#fnref17-11">Back</a></p>
+
+<h3>Footnotes for Appendices</h3>
+
+<p><a name="fna-1">1</a>. Austin Dobson. <em>Fielding</em>.
+Appendix IV. p. 212-13; <em>and Eighteenth Century Vignettes</em>,
+1896, pp. 164-178. <a class="footnote" href=
+"#fnrefa-1">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fna-2">2</a>. Austin Dobson. <em>Fielding</em>.
+Appendix IV. p. 212-13; <em>and Eighteenth Century Vignettes</em>,
+1896, pp. 164-178. <a class="footnote" href=
+"#fnrefa-2">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fna-3">3</a>. J. Nichols. <em>History and Antiquities
+of Leicestershire</em>. 1810. Vol. iv. Pt. I. p. 594. <a class=
+"footnote" href="#fnrefa-3">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fna-4">4</a>. Austin Dobson. <em>Fielding</em>, p. 192.
+<a class="footnote" href="#fnrefa-4">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fna-5">5</a>. T. Whitehead. <em>Original Anecdotes of
+the late Duke of Kingston</em>, 1795. p. 95. <a class="footnote"
+href="#fnrefa-5">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fna-6">6</a>. <em>Some Hapsburghs, Fieldings, Denbighs
+and Desmonds</em>, by J. E. M. F. <a class="footnote" href=
+"#fnrefa-6">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fna-7">7</a>. <em>Somerset and Dorset Notes and
+Queries</em>. Vol. viii. p. 353. <a class="footnote" href=
+"#fnrefa-7">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fna-8">8</a>. Morrison Manuscripts. Catalogue. <a
+class="footnote" href="#fnrefa-8">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fna-9">9</a>. <em>The Athenaeum</em>. February 1. 1890.
+<a class="footnote" href="#fnrefa-9">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fna-10">10</a>. <em>History of Wiltshire</em>. Sir R.
+C. Hoare; volume entitled "Old and New Sarum or Salisbury," by R.
+Benson and H. Hatcher, 1843. p 602. <a class="footnote" href=
+"#fnrefa-10">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fna-11">11</a>. Lysons. <em>Environs of London</em>,
+edition of 1795. Vol. i. part iii. p. 544. <a class="footnote"
+href="#fnrefa-11">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fna-12">12</a>. <em>Ibid</em>. Edition 1811. Vol. i. p.
+10. <a class="footnote" href="#fnrefa-12">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fna-13">13</a>. Manning and Bray. <em>History of
+Surrey</em>, 1814, vol. iii. p. 316. <a class="footnote" href=
+"#fnrefa-13">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="fna-14">14</a>. Letters and Works of Lady Mary Wortley
+Montagu, edited by Lord Wharncliffe and W. M. Thomas. Vol. ii. p.
+3, note I, and p. 22. <a class="footnote" href=
+"#fnrefa-14">Back</a></p>
+
+<p><strong>Links to Appendices</strong></p>
+
+<p><a href="#appendixa">A</a> <a href="#appendixb">B</a> <a href=
+"#appendixc">C</a> <a href="#appendixd">D</a> <a href=
+"#appendixe">E</a> <a href="#appendixf">F</a> <a href=
+"#appendixg">G</a> <a href="#appendixh">H</a> <a href=
+"#appendixi">I</a> <a href="#appendixj">J</a></p>
+</div>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Henry Fielding: A Memoir, by G. M. Godden
+
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Henry Fielding: A Memoir, by G. M. Godden
+
+Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the
+copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing
+this or any other Project Gutenberg eBook.
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+**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts**
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+**eBooks Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971**
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+*****These eBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers!*****
+
+
+Title: Henry Fielding: A Memoir
+
+Author: G. M. Godden
+
+Release Date: May, 2005 [EBook #8136]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on June 17, 2003]
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+Edition: 10
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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HENRY FIELDING: A MEMOIR ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Charles Aldarondo, Tiffany Vergon, Robert Connal
+and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
+
+
+
+
+HENRY FIELDING
+
+_A MEMOIR_
+INCLUDING NEWLY DISCOVERED LETTERS
+AND RECORDS WITH ILLUSTRATIONS
+FROM CONTEMPORARY PRINTS
+
+BY
+
+G. M. GODDEN
+
+
+
+
+"I am a man myself, and my heart is interested in whatever can befall the
+rest of mankind."
+
+JOSEPH ANDREWS.
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+New material alone could justify any attempt to supplement the _Fielding_
+of Mr Austin Dobson. Such material has now come to light, and together
+with reliable facts collected by previous biographers, forms the subject
+matter of the present volume. As these pages are concerned with Fielding
+the man, and not only with Fielding the most original if not the greatest
+of English novelists, literary criticism has been avoided; but all
+incidents, disclosed by hitherto unpublished documents, or found hidden in
+the columns of contemporary newspapers, which add to our knowledge of
+Fielding's personality, have been given.
+
+The new material includes records of Fielding's childhood; documents
+concerning his estate in Dorsetshire; the date and place, hitherto
+undiscovered, of that central event in his life, the death of his beloved
+wife, whose memorial was to be the imperishable figure of "Sophia
+Western"; letters, now first published, adding to our knowledge of his
+energies in social and legislative reform, and of the circumstances of his
+life; many extracts from the columns of the daily press of the period;
+notices, hitherto overlooked, from his contemporaries; and details from
+the unexplored archives of the Middlesex Records concerning his strenuous
+work as a London magistrate. The few letters by Fielding already known to
+exist have been doubled in number; and a reason for the extraordinary
+rarity of these letters has been found in the unfortunate destruction,
+many years ago, of much of his correspondence. The charm of the one
+intimate letter that we possess from the pen of the 'Father of the English
+Novel,' that written to his brother John, during the voyage to Lisbon,
+enhances regret at the loss of these letters.
+
+Among the contemporary prints now first reproduced that entitled the
+_Conjurors_ is of special interest, as being the only sketch of Fielding,
+drawn during his lifetime, known to exist. Rough as it is, the
+characteristic figure of the man, as described by his contemporaries and
+drawn from memory in Hogarth's familiar plate, is perfectly apparent. The
+same characteristics may be distinguished in a small figure of the
+novelist introduced into the still earlier political cartoon, entitled the
+_Funeral of Faction_.
+
+Such in brief are the reasons for the existence of this volume. It remains
+to express my warmest acknowledgment of Mr Austin Dobson's unfailing
+counsel and assistance. My thanks are also due to Mr Ernest Fielding for
+permission to reproduce the miniature which appears as the frontispiece;
+to Mr Aubrey Court, of the House of Lords; to Mr E. S. W. Hart, for his
+help throughout the necessary researches among the Middlesex Records; to
+Mrs Deane of Gillingham; and to Mr Frederick Shum of Bath. And I am
+indebted to Mr Sidney Colvin, Keeper of the Department of Prints and
+Drawings in the British Museum, in regard to almost every one of the
+thirty-two rare prints and cartoons now reproduced.
+
+G. M. GODDEN.
+
+_October_ 26, 1909.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+YOUTH
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+PLAY-HOUSE BARD
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+MARRIAGE
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+POLITICAL PLAYS
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+HOMESPUN DRAMA
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+BAR STUDENT--JOURNALIST
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+COUNSELLOR FIELDING
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+_Joseph Andrews_
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+THE _Miscellanies_ AND _Jonathan Wild_
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+PATRIOTIC JOURNALISM
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+_Tom Jones_
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+MR JUSTICE FIELDING
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+FIELDING AND LEGISLATION
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+_Amelia_
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+JOURNALIST AND MAGISTRATE
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+POOR LAW REFORM
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+VOYAGE TO LISBON--DEATH
+
+
+
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
+_From photographs by Marie Leon_.
+
+Henry Fielding
+_From a miniature now in the possession of Mr Ernest Fielding._
+
+Sharpham House, showing the room in which Fielding was born
+_from a print published in 1826_.
+
+Sir Henry Gould
+_From a mezzotint by J. Hardy_.
+
+Eton--1742
+_From an engraving of a drawing by Cozens_.
+
+Anne Oldfield
+_From a mezzotint of a painting by J. Richardson_.
+
+Leyden--1727
+_From an engraving of a drawing by C. Pronk_.
+
+Kitty Clive as Philida
+_From a mezzotint of a painting by Veter van Bleeck, junr. 1735._
+
+Frontispiece to Fielding's "Tom Thumb"
+_By Hogarth_.
+
+The Close, Salisbury--1798
+_From an acquatint of a drawing by E. Dayes_.
+
+Charlcombe Church, near Bath
+_From an engraving of a drawing made in 1784_.
+
+Fielding's house, East Stour, Dorsetshire
+_From a print published in Hutchins' "History of Dorsetshire," 1813_.
+
+Sir Robert Walpole--1740
+_From a contemporary cartoon_.
+
+"Pasquin"
+_From a cartoon depicting a scene in "Pasquin" in which Harlequinades,
+etc., triumph aver legitimate drama. Pope is leaving a box. The Signature
+"W. Hogarth" is doubtful_.
+
+Cartoon celebrating the success of "Pasquin"
+_From a contemporary cartoon showing Fielding, supported by
+Shakespeare, receiving an ample reward, while to Harlequin and his other
+opponents is accorded a halter_.
+
+The Little Theatre in the Haymarket
+_From an engraving by Dale, showing the demolition of the Little
+Theatre in 1821_.
+
+The Green Room, Drury Lane
+_From the painting by Hogarth, in the possession of Sir Edward
+Tennant_.
+
+The Temple--1738
+_From an engraving of a drawing by J. Nicholas_.
+
+Henry Fielding holding the Banner of the "Champion" newspaper
+_From a contemporary cartoon showing Sir Robert Walpole laughing at the
+"Funeral" of an Opposition Motion in Parliament_.
+
+Cartoon showing Fielding, in Wig and Gown, as a supporter of the
+Opposition
+_From a print of 1741_.
+
+Henry Fielding reading at the Bedford Arms
+_From the frontispiece to Sir John Fielding's "Jests."_
+
+Assignment for "Joseph Andrews"
+_From the autograph now in the South Kensington Museum_.
+
+Beaufort Buildings, Strand, in 1725
+_From a watercolour drawing by Paul Sandby, 1725_.
+
+Prior Park, near Bath, the seat of Ralph Allen, 1750
+_From an engraving of a contemporary drawing_.
+
+George, First Baron Lyttelton
+_From a portrait by an unknown artist_.
+
+Theatre Ticket for Fielding's "Mock Doctor"
+_The signature "W. Hogarth" is doubtful_.
+
+Lady Mary Wortley Montagu--1710
+_From an engraving by Caroline Watson, from a miniature in the
+possession of the Marquis of Bute_.
+
+The Bow Street Police Court, Sir John Fielding presiding
+_From the "Newgate Calendar"_, 1795.
+
+Edward Moore
+_From a frontispiece in Chalmers' "British Essayists"_ 1817.
+
+Sir John Fielding
+_From a mezzotint of a painting by Nathaniel Hone, R.A._
+
+Ralph Allen
+_From a chalk drawing by W. Hoare, R.A._
+
+Henry Fielding
+_From an engraving of a pen and ink sketch, made by Hogarth after
+Fielding's death_.
+
+Henry Fielding, defending Betty Canning from her accusers, the Lord
+Mayor, Dr Hill, and the Gipsy
+_From a contemporary print, now first reproduced, and the only known
+sketch of Fielding made during his lifetime_.
+
+Justice Saunders Welch
+_From an engraving of a sketch by Hogarth_.
+
+Ryde--1795
+_From an engraving of a drawing by Charles Tomkins_.
+
+Lisbon--1793
+_From a mezzotint of a drawing by Noel_.
+
+The design on the cover is a copy, slightly enlarged, of an impression of
+Fielding's seal, attached to an autograph letter in the British Museum.
+
+
+
+
+HENRY FIELDING
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+YOUTH
+
+    "I shall always be so great a pedant as to call a man of no
+    learning a man of no education."--_Amelia_.
+
+
+Henry Fielding was born at Sharpham Park, near Glastonbury, on the 22nd
+of April 1707. His birth-room, a room known as the Harlequin Chamber,
+looked out over the roof of a building which once was the private chapel
+of the abbots of Glastonbury; for Sharpham Park possessed no mean
+history. Built in the sixteenth century by that distinguished prelate,
+scholar, and courtier Abbot Richard Beere, the house had boasted its
+chapel, hall, parlour, chambers, storehouses and offices; its fishponds
+and orchards; and a park in which might be kept some four hundred head of
+deer. It was in this fair demesne that the aged, pious, and benevolent
+Abbot Whiting, Abbot Richard's successor, was seized by the king's
+commissioners, and summarily hung, drawn, and quartered on the top of the
+neighbouring Tor Hill. Sharpham thereupon "devolved" upon the crown; but
+the old house remained, standing in peaceful seclusion where the pleasant
+slope of Polden Hill overlooks the Somersetshire moors, till the birth of
+the 'father of the English Novel' brought a lasting distinction to the
+domestic buildings of Abbot Beere. In the accompanying print, published
+in 1826, the little window of the Harlequin Chamber may be seen, above
+the low roofs of the abbots' chapel.
+
+That Henry Fielding should have been born among buildings raised by
+Benedictine hands is not incongruous; for no man ever more heartily
+preached and practised the virtue of open-handed charity; none was more
+ready to scourge the vices of arrogance, cruelty and avarice; no English
+novelist has left us brighter pictures of innocence and goodness. And it
+was surely a happy stroke of that capricious Fortune to whom Fielding so
+often refers, to allot a Harlequin Chamber for the birth of the author of
+nineteen comedies; and yet more appropriate to the robust genius of the
+Comic Epic was the accident that placed on the wall, beneath the window
+of his birth-room, a jovial jest in stone. For here some
+sixteenth-century humorist had displayed the arms of Abbot Beere in the
+form of a convivial rebus or riddle--to wit, a cross and two beer flagons.
+
+Soon after the Civil Wars, Sharpham passed into the hands of the
+'respectable family' of Gould. By the Goulds the house was considerably
+enlarged; and, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, was in the
+possession of a distinguished member of the family, Sir Henry Gould,
+Knight, and Judge of the King's Bench. Sir Henry had but two children, a
+son Davidge Gould, and a daughter Sarah. This only daughter married a
+well-born young soldier, the Hon. Edmund Fielding; a marriage which,
+according to family assertions, was without the consent of her parents and
+"contrary to their good likeing." [1] And it was in the old home of the
+Somersetshire Goulds that the eldest son of this marriage, Henry Fielding,
+was born.
+
+Thus on the side of his mother, Sarah Gould, Fielding belonged to just
+that class of well-established country squires whom later he was to
+immortalise in the beautiful and benevolent figure of Squire Allworthy,
+and in the boisterous, brutal, honest Western. And the description of
+Squire Allworthy's "venerable" house, with its air of grandeur "that
+struck you with awe," its position on the sheltered slope of a hill
+enjoying "a most charming prospect of the valley beneath," its
+surroundings of a wild and beautiful park, well-watered meadows fed with
+sheep, the ivy-grown ruins of an old abbey, and far-off hills and sea,
+preserves, doubtless, the features of the ancient and stately domain
+owned by the novelist's grandfather.
+
+If it was to the 'respectable' Goulds that Fielding owed many of his
+rural and administrative characteristics, such as that practical zeal and
+ability which made him so excellent a magistrate, it is in the family of
+his father that we find indications of those especial qualities of
+vigour, of courage, of the generous and tolerant outlook of the well-born
+man of the world, that characterise Henry Fielding. And it is also in
+these Fielding ancestors that something of the reputed wildness of their
+brilliant kinsman may be detected.
+
+For in her wilful choice of Edmund Fielding for a husband, Sir Henry
+Gould's only daughter brought, assuredly, a disturbing element into the
+quiet Somersetshire home. The young man was of distinguished birth, even
+if he was not, as once asserted, of the blood royal of the Hapsburgs.
+[2] His ancestor, Sir John Fielding, had received a knighthood for bravery
+in the French wars of the fourteenth century. A Sir Everard Fielding led a
+Lancastrian army during the Wars of the Roses. Sir William, created Earl
+of Denbigh, fell fighting for the king in the Civil Wars, where, says
+Clarendon, "he engaged with singular courage in all enterprises of
+danger"; a phrase which recalls the description of Henry Fielding "that
+difficulties only roused him to struggle through them with a peculiar
+spirit and magnanimity." Lord Denbigh fell, covered with wounds, when
+fighting as a volunteer in Prince Rupert's troop; while his eldest son,
+Basil, then a mere youth, fought as hotly for the Parliament. Lord
+Denbigh's second son, who like his father was a devoted loyalist, received
+a peerage, being created Earl of Desmond; and two of his sons figure in a
+wild and tragic story preserved by Pepys. "In our street," says the
+Diarist, writing in 1667, "at the Three Tuns Tavern I find a great hubbub;
+and what was it but two brothers had fallen out and one killed the other.
+And who s'd. they be but the two Fieldings; one whereof, Bazill, was page
+to my Lady Sandwich; and he hath killed the other, himself being very
+drunk, and so is sent to Newgate." It was a brother of these unhappy
+youths, John Fielding, a royal chaplain and Canon of Salisbury, who by his
+marriage with a Somersetshire lady, became father of Edmund Fielding.
+
+Such was Henry Fielding's ancestry, and it cannot be too much insisted on
+that, throughout all the vicissitudes of his life, he was ever a man of
+breeding, no less than a man of wit. "His manners were so gentlemanly,"
+said his friend Mrs Hussey, "that even with the lower classes with which
+he frequently condescended to chat, such as Sir Roger de Coverley's old
+friends, the Vauxhall watermen, they seldom outstepped the limits of
+propriety." And a similar recognition comes from the hand of a great, and
+not too friendly, critic. To "the very last days of his life," wrote
+Thackeray, "he retained a grandeur of air, and although worn down by
+disease his aspect and presence imposed respect on the people around him."
+
+This Denbigh ancestry recalls a pleasant example of Fielding's wit,
+preserved in a story told by his son, and recorded in the pages of that
+voluminous eighteenth-century anecdotist, John Nichols. "Henry Fielding,"
+says Nichols, "being once in company with the Earl of Denbigh, and the
+conversation's turning on Fielding's being of the Denbigh family, the
+Earl asked the reason why they spelt their names differently; the Earl's
+family doing it with the E first (Feilding), and Mr Henry Fielding with
+the I first (Fielding). 'I cannot tell, my Lord,' answered Harry, 'except
+it be that my branch of the family were the first that knew how to
+spell.'"
+
+In accordance with the fighting traditions of his race, Edmund Fielding
+went into the army; his name appearing as an ensign in the 1st Foot
+Guards. Also, as became a Fielding, he distinguished himself, we are
+told, in the "Wars against France with much Bravery and Reputation"; and
+it was probably owing to active service abroad that the birth of his
+eldest son took place in his wife's old Somersetshire home. The date fits
+in well enough with the campaigns of Ramilies, Oudennarde and Malplaquet.
+Soon after Henry's birth, however, his father had doubtless left the Low
+Countries, for, about 1709, he appears as purchasing the colonelcy of an
+Irish Regiment. This regiment was ordered, in 1710, to Spain; but before
+that year the colonel and his wife and son had a separate home provided
+for them, by the care of Sir Henry Gould. At what precise date is
+uncertain, but some time before 1710, Sir Henry had purchased an estate
+at East Stour in Dorsetshire, consisting of farms and lands of the value
+of L4750, intending to settle some or the whole of the same on his
+daughter and her children. And already, according to a statement by the
+colonel, the old judge had placed his son-in-law in possession of some or
+all of this purchase, sending him oxen to plough his ground, and
+promising him a "Dairye of Cows." Sir Henry moreover had, said his
+son-in-law, declared his intention "to spend the vacant Remainder of his
+life," sometimes with his daughter, her husband, and children at Stour,
+and sometimes with his son Davidge, presumably at Sharpham. But in March,
+1710, Sir Henry's death frustrated his planned retirement in the Vale of
+Stour; although three years later, in 1713, his intentions regarding a
+Dorsetshire home for his daughter were carried out by the conveyance to
+her [3] and her children of the Stour estate, for her sole enjoyment. The
+legal documents are careful to recite that the rents and profits should be
+paid to Mrs Fielding or her children, and her receipt given, and that the
+said Edmund "should have nothing to do nor intermeddle therewith."
+
+In this settlement of the East Stour farms, to the greater part of which
+Henry Fielding, then six years old, would be joint heir with his sisters,
+Colonel Fielding himself seems to have had to pay no less than L1750,
+receiving therefor "a portion of the said lands." So by 1713 both Edmund
+Fielding and his wife were settled, as no inconsiderable landowners,
+among the pleasant meadows of Stour; and there for the next five years
+Henry's early childhood was passed. Indeed, Mrs Fielding must have been
+at Stour when her eldest son was but three years old, for the baptism of
+a daughter, Sarah, appears in the Stour registers in November 1710. This
+entry is followed by the baptism of Anne in 1713, of Beatrice in 1714, of
+Edmund in 1716, and by the death of Anne in the last-named year, Henry
+being then nine years old.
+
+According to Arthur Murphy, Fielding's earliest and too often inaccurate
+biographer, the boy received "the first rudiments of his education at
+home, under the care of the Revd. Mr Oliver." Mr Oliver was the curate of
+Motcombe, a neighbouring village; and we have the authority of Murphy and
+of Hutchins, the historian of Dorset, for finding 'a very humorous and
+striking portrait' of this pedagogue in the Rev. Mr Trulliber, the
+pig-breeding parson of _Joseph Andrews_. If this be so, Harry Fielding's
+first tutor at Stour was of a figure eminently calculated to foster the
+comic genius of his pupil. "He" (Trulliber), wrote that pupil, some thirty
+years later, "was indeed one of the largest Men you should see, and could
+have acted the part of Sir _John Falstaff_ without stuffing. Add to this,
+that the Rotundity of his Belly was considerably increased by the
+shortness of his Stature, his shadow ascending very near as far in height
+when he lay on his Back, as when he stood on his Legs. His Voice was loud
+and hoarse, and his Accents extremely broad; to complete the whole he had
+a Stateliness in his Gait when he walked, not unlike that of a Goose, only
+he stalked slower." It appears that the widow of the Motcombe curate
+denied the alleged portrait; but the house where Mr Oliver lived, "seemed
+to accord with Fielding's description ... and an old woman who remembered
+him observed that 'he dearly loved a bit of good victuals, and a drop of
+drink.'" Bearing in mind the great novelist's own earnest declaration that
+he painted "not men but manners," we may fairly assume that his
+Dorsetshire tutor belonged to that class of coarse farmer-parson so justly
+satirised in the person of Trulliber. According to another sketch of
+Fielding's life, his early education was also directed by the rector of
+Stour Provost, "his Parson Adams." [4]
+
+While Harry Fielding was thus learning his first rudiments, his father,
+the colonel, seems to have been engaged in less useful pursuits in
+London. The nature of these pursuits appears from a _Bill of Complaint_,
+which by a happy chance has been preserved, between "Edmund Fielding of
+East Stour, Dorsetshire," and one Robert Midford, pretending to be a
+captain of the army. In this _Bill_ [5] the said Edmund declares that in
+1716, being then resident in London, he often frequented Princes
+Coffee-house in the Parish of St James. At Princes he found his company
+sought by the reputed Captain Robert Midford, who "prevailed upon him to
+play a game called 'Faro' for a small matter of diversion, but by degrees
+drew him on to play for larger sums, and by secret and fraudulent means
+obtained very large sums, in particular notes and bonds for L500."
+Further, the colonel entered into a bond of L200 to one Mrs Barbara
+Midford, "sister or pretended sister of the said Robert"; and so finally
+was threatened with outlawry by 'Captain' Midford for, presumably, payment
+of these debts. How Colonel Edmund finally escaped from the clutches of
+these rogues does not appear; but it is clear enough that his Dorsetshire
+meadows were a safer place than Princes Coffee-house for a gentleman who
+could lose L500 at faro to a masquerading army captain. Also Sir Henry
+Gould's wisdom becomes apparent, in bequeathing his daughter an
+inheritance with which her husband was to have "nothing to doe."
+
+In 1718, two years after Colonel Fielding's experience at Princes, Mrs
+Fielding died, leaving six young children to her husband's care, two sons
+and four daughters, Henry, the eldest being but eleven years old. Her
+death is recorded in the East Stour registers as follows:--"Sarah, Wife
+of the Hon. Edmund Fielding Esqre. and daughter of Sir Henry Gould Kt.
+April 18 1718."
+
+About this time (the dates vary between 1716 and 1719) Edmund Fielding
+was appointed Colonel of the Invalids, an appointment which he appears to
+have held until his death. And within two years of the death of his first
+wife, Colonel Fielding must have married again, for in 1720 we find him
+and his then wife, _Anne_, selling some 153 acres with messuages,
+barns and gardens, in East and West Stour, to one Awnsham Churchill,
+Esquire. What relation, if any, this land had to the property of the
+colonel's late wife and her children does not appear.
+
+Some time in 1719, the year after his mother's death, or early in 1720,
+Henry was sent to Eton, as appears from his father's statement, made in
+February 1721, that his eldest son "who is now upwards of thirteen yeares
+old is and for more than a yeare last past hath been maintained ... at
+Eaton schoole, the yearely expence whereof costs ... upwards of L60." And
+the boy must have been well away from the atmosphere of his home, in
+these first years after his mother's death, if the allegations of his
+grandmother, old Lady Gould, may be believed.
+
+These hitherto unknown records of Henry Fielding's boyhood are to be
+found in the proceedings of a Chancery suit begun by Lady Gould, on
+behalf of her six grandchildren, Henry, Edmund, [6] Katherine, Ursula,
+Sarah and Beatrice, three years after the death of their mother--namely,
+on the 10th of February 1721, and instituted in the name of Henry Fielding
+as complainant. Lady Gould opens her grandchildren's case with a
+comprehensive indictment of her son-in-law. After reciting that her
+daughter Sarah had married Edmund Fielding "without the consent of her
+Father or Mother and contrary to their good likeing," Lady Gould mentions
+her husband's bequest to their daughter, Sarah Fielding, of L3000 in trust
+to be laid out in the purchase of lands for the benefit of her and her
+children "with direction that the said Edmund Fielding should have nothing
+to do nor intermeddle therewith." And how Sir Henry did in his lifetime
+purchase "Eastover" estate for his daughter, but died before the trust was
+completed; and that in 1713 his trustees, Edmund Fielding consenting,
+settled the said estate upon trust for Sarah Fielding and her children
+after her, the rents and profits to be paid for her, and acknowledged by
+her receipt "without her Husband." And that if Sarah Fielding died
+intestate the estate be divided among her children. The bill then shows
+that Sarah Fielding did die intestate; and that then Henry and his sisters
+and brother "being all Infants of tender years and uncapable of managing
+their own affairs and to take Care thereof, well hoped that ... their
+Trustees would have taken Care to receive the Rents of the said premises,"
+and have applied the same for their maintenance and education. One of
+these trustees, we may note, was Henry Fielding's uncle, Davidge Gould.
+This reasonable hope of the six "Infants" was however, according to their
+grandmother, wholly disappointed. For their uncle Davidge and his
+co-trustee, one William Day, allowed Edmund Fielding to receive the rents,
+nay "entered into a Combination and Confederacy to and with the said
+Edmund Fielding," refusing to intermeddle with the said trust, whereby the
+children were in great danger of losing their means of maintenance and
+education. And this was by no means all. Lady Gould proceeds to point out
+that her son-in-law had, since his wife's death, "intermarried with
+one ... Rapha ... Widow an Italian a Person of the Roman Catholick
+Profession who has severall children of her own and one who kept an eating
+House in London, and not at all fitt to have the care of [the
+complainants'] Education and has now two daughters in a Monastery beyond
+Sea." It is not difficult to conceive the attitude of Lady Gould of
+Sharpham Park to an Italian widow who kept an eating-house; but worse yet,
+in the view of those 'No Popery' days, was to follow. "Not only so," says
+her ladyship, "the said Edmund Fielding ... threatens to take your
+[complainants] from school into his own custody altho' [their] said
+Grandmother has taken a House in the City of New Sarum with an intent to
+have [her granddaughters] under her Inspection and where ... Katherine,
+Ursula and Sarah are now at school"; and "the said Mr Fielding doth give
+out in speeches that he will do with [the complainants] what he thinks
+fitt, and has openly commended the Manner of Education of young persons in
+Monasteryes."
+
+This comprehensive indictment against Colonel Fielding received a prompt
+counter, the "Severall Answere of Edmund Fielding Esqre ... to the Bill
+of Complaint of Henry Fielding, Katherine Fielding, Ursula Fielding,
+Sarah Fielding, and Beatrice Fielding, Infants, by Dame Sarah Gould,
+their Grandmother and next Friend," being dated February 23 1721, but
+thirteen days after Lady Gould had opened her attack. Out of "a dutiful
+Regard to the said Lady Gould his Mother-in-Law," Colonel Fielding
+declares himself unwilling to "Controvert anything with her further than
+of necessity." But he submits that, in the matter of his marriage, he was
+"afterwards well approved of and received" by Sir Henry Gould and his
+family; that he was also so happy as to be in favour with Lady Gould
+"till he marryed with his now wife"; which he believes "has Occasioned
+some Jealosye and Displeasure in the Lady Gould, tho' without Just
+Grounds." Edmund Fielding then draws a pastoral picture of himself in
+occupation of the East Stour estate, placed there by his father-in-law;
+of his oxen and dairy; and of the judge's intention of spending half the
+remainder of his days with his son-in-law on this Dorsetshire farm. He
+admits his share in the trust settlement after Sir Henry's death; and
+points out that his brother-in-law, Davidge Gould, made him pay heavily
+on a portion of the estate. And he believes that, as his wife died
+intestate, all his children are "Intituled to the said Estate in Equall
+proportions."
+
+Then follows the colonel's main defence. His eldest son Henry not being
+yet fourteen years of age, he has, ever since the death of his wife,
+continued in possession of the premises, taking the rents and profits
+thereof, which amount to about L150; and he positively declares that he
+has expended more annually on the maintenance and education of the said
+complainants, ever since the death of their mother, than the clear income
+of the said estate amounts to, and that he shall continue to take "a
+Tender and affectionate care of all his said Children." Further, he
+professes himself a "protestant of the Communion of the Church of
+England," and asserts that he shall and will breed his said children
+Protestants of that communion. He protests that his second wife is not an
+Italian; nor did she keep an eating-house. He suggests that Lady Gould
+took her house at Salisbury "as well with an Intent to convenience
+herselfe by liveing in a Towne" as for the inspection of his children. He
+"denyeth that he ever Comended the Manner of Education of young persons
+in monasterys if it be meant in Respect of Religion." Finally, he says
+that he has spent much money on improving the estate; that the income
+from the estate is hardly sufficient to maintain his children according
+to their station in the world since he is "nearly related to many Noble
+Familys"; and he "veryly believes in his conscience he can better provide
+for his said Children by reason of his relation to and Interest in the
+said noble Familys than their said Grandmother (who is now in an advanced
+age, being seventy yeares old or thereabouts)."
+
+Here, it is plain, was a very pretty family quarrel. No man likes his
+mother-in-law to say that he has married the keeper of an Italian
+eating-house, especially if the fact is correct; or that he is perverting
+his young children's trust money. Neither was Lady Gould likely to be
+pacified by her son-in-law's remark that she was now "in an advanced
+age"; while his suggestion that his "noble" family would be of far more
+advantage to his children than that of the respectable Goulds would have
+the added sting of undeniable truth.
+
+The next extant move in the fray bears date five months later, July 18
+1721, and includes a petition by 'Dame Sarah Gould' that the children be
+not removed from the places where they then were until the case be heard;
+and Lady Gould adds that if the children's persons or estates be "under
+ye management or power of ye said Mr Fielding and his now wife ye Estate
+would not be managed to ye best advantage and their Education would not
+be taken care of and there would be a great hazard that ye children might
+be perverted to ye Romish Religion." Then follows an order in Chancery,
+under the same date, "that ye eldest son of ye Defend't. Fielding ... be
+continued at Eaton School where he now is and that ye rest of ye children
+be continued where they now are."
+
+The next document merely records the inclusion of Henry's five-year-old
+brother Edmund among the plaintiffs. And this is followed by a brief
+Chancery order of November 30 1721, that "ye, plaintiff Henry Fielding
+who is not [_sic_] at Eaton Schoole be at liberty to go to ye said Dame
+Sarah Gould, his Grandmother and next friend during ye usual time of
+recess from School at Xmas."
+
+After these Christmas holidays spent by Henry Fielding with Lady Gould,
+doubtless at her house in Salisbury, the Chancery records pass on to the
+April following, 1722, when the boy's uncle and trustee Davidge Gould
+makes a statement "sworn at Sharpham Park," which concludes that the
+witness hears and believes that Edmund Fielding "has already three
+children by his present wife who is reputed to be of the Romish church."
+In this same month comes another order from the court that Henry be at
+liberty to leave Eton for the Whitsun holidays 1722, and to go to Lady
+Gould's house. In May Edmund Fielding appears as "of the Parish of Saint
+James, in the County of Middlesex," and also as his children's "next
+Friend and Guardian." But two days later the long suit is concluded by
+the decision of the court, and here Colonel Fielding is, as heretofore,
+defendant, Lady Gould being the children's "next friend."
+
+The case came before the Lord Chancellor on the 28th of May 1722, and was
+"debated in the presence of learned Counsels." The trust was upheld, and
+Edmund Fielding was required to deliver possession of the estate,
+rendering account of the rents and profits thereof since the death of his
+first wife; but he was to have "any and what" allowance for improvements,
+and for the children's maintenance and education. And it was further
+ordered that the children then at school continue at such schools till
+further order, and that "upon any breaking up at ye usuall times they do
+go and reside with ye Lady Gould their Grandmother that they may not be
+under the influence of ye Defendant Fielding's Wife, who appeared to be a
+papist." [7]
+
+So Lady Gould, for all her seventy years, won her case at every point.
+And Colonel Edmund Fielding did not only lose the guardianship of his six
+children, and the administration of their estate. For there was, we
+learn, in court, during the hearing, one Mrs Cottington, the plaintiffs
+aunt, "alleadging that there was a debt of L700 due from ye Defendant
+Fielding to her"; which debt she offered should be applied for the
+benefit of her nephews and nieces. Whereupon the court ordered that if
+Mrs Cottington proved the same, a Master in Chancery should purchase
+therewith lands to be settled for the "Infants" in like manner as the
+trust estate.
+
+It may be only a coincidence, but L700 is the sum specifically mentioned
+in the proceedings brought by Colonel Fielding in October 1722, five
+months after the loss of his Chancery suit, against the cardsharper,
+Robert Midford, who was then apparently threatening him with outlawry for
+the recovery of the gambling debt begun, as we have seen, at Princes'
+Coffee-house six years before. Had the colonel borrowed the L700 from Mrs
+Cottington, with intent to discharge those debts; and, on being brought
+to law by her (on her nephews' and nieces' behalf) for that debt, did it
+occur to him to escape from the clutches of the psuedo "Captain" Midford
+by pleading, as he now does in this Bill of 1722, that he "was tricked,"
+and also "that gaming is illegal"? The latter plea has something of
+unconscious humour in the mouth of a gentleman who had lately lost L500
+at faro. With this last echo of the coffee-house of St James's, and of
+the colonel's financial difficulties, that brave soldier, if somewhat
+reckless gambler, the Hon. Edmund Fielding vanishes from sight, as far as
+the life of his eldest son is concerned.
+
+At the triumphant conclusion of his grandmother's suit Henry Fielding
+would be just fifteen years of age, and it is impossible not to wonder
+what side he took in these spirited family conflicts. No evidence,
+however, on such points appears in the dry legal documents; and all that
+we have for guide as to the effect in this impressionable time of his
+boyhood of the long months of contest, and of his strictly ordered
+holidays with his grandmother, is the declaration on the one hand that
+"filial piety ... his nearest relations agree was a shining part of his
+character," and on the other, the undeniably strong Protestant bias that
+appears in his writing. Of his aunt, Mrs Cottington, we get one later
+glimpse, when in 1723 she is made his trustee, in place of his uncle,
+Davidge Gould, Mrs Cottington being then resident in Salisbury. At the
+end of the following year, however, in December 1724, Davidge Gould
+resumes his trusteeship, and with the record of that fact the disclosures
+yielded by these ancient parchments as to Henry Fielding's stormy boyhood
+come to an end.
+
+From these records it becomes possible to gain some idea of the
+surroundings of the great novelist's early youth. Before his mother's
+death, indeed, when he was a boy of eleven, we already knew him as
+suffering the rough jurisdiction of his Trulliberian tutor, Parson Oliver
+of Motcombe village, and perhaps as under the wise and kindly guidance of
+the good scholar-parson, who was later to win the affection and respect
+of thousands of readers under the name of "Parson Adams." But now, for
+the first time, we learn of the disastrous second marriage by which
+Colonel Fielding, within two years of his first wife's death, placed a
+lady of at least disputable social standing at the head of his household,
+and one, moreover, whose Faith roused the bitter religious animosities of
+that day. What wonder that the old Lady Gould strove fiercely to remove
+Henry Fielding, and his sisters and young brother, from East Stour, when
+a Madame Rasa was installed in her daughter's place. And accordingly, as
+we have seen, even before the conclusion of the suit, Henry was
+provisionally ordered by the Court of Chancery to spend his holidays with
+his grandmother. Fielding would then be fourteen years old; and the
+judge's decision six months later that future holidays should be passed
+with Lady Gould, away from the influence of the second Mrs Fielding,
+doubtless severed the lad's connection with his dubious stepmother for
+the next six years. His home life, then, during the latter part of his
+Eton schooling would be under Lady Gould's care; and was probably spent
+at Salisbury.
+
+Of his Eton life, from his entrance at the school, when twelve years old,
+we know practically nothing. From the absence of his name on the college
+lists, it may be inferred that he was an Oppidan. It is said that he gave
+"distinguished proofs of strong and peculiar parts"; and that he left the
+school with a good reputation as a classical scholar. And it is not
+surprising to learn that here, as he himself tells us, his vigorous
+energies made acquaintance with that 'birchen altar' at which most of the
+best blood in England has been disciplined. "And thou," he cries, "O
+Learning (for without thy Assistance nothing pure, nothing correct, can
+Genius produce) do thou guide my Pen. Thee, in thy favourite Fields,
+where the limpid gently rolling _Thames_ washes thy _Etonian_ banks, in
+early Youth I have worshipped. To thee at thy birchen Altar, with true
+_Spartan_ Devotion, I have sacrificed my Blood." [8] That the sacrifice
+was not made in vain appears from the reputation with which Fielding left
+Eton of being "uncommonly versed in the Greek authors and an early master
+of the Latin classics"; and also from the yet better evidence of his own
+pages. Long after these boyish days we find him, in the words of "The man
+of the Hill," thus eloquently acknowledging the debt of humanity, and
+doubtless his own, to those inestimable treasures bequeathed to the world
+by ancient Greece: "These Authors, though they instructed me in no Science
+by which Men may promise to themselves to acquire the least Riches, or
+worldly Power, taught me, however, the Art of despising the highest
+Acquisitions of both. They elevate the Mind, and steel and harden it
+against the capricious Invasions of Fortune. They not only instruct in the
+Knowledge of Wisdom, but confirm Men in her Habits, and demonstrate
+plainly, that this must be our Guide, if we propose ever to arrive at the
+greatest worldly Happiness; or to defend ourselves, with any tolerable
+Security, against the Misery which everywhere surrounds and invests us."
+[9] And that this was no mere figure of speech appears from that touching
+picture which Murphy has left us of the brilliant wit, the 'wild' Harry
+Fielding, when under the pressure of sickness and poverty, quietly reading
+the _De Consolations_ of Cicero. His Plato accompanied him on the last sad
+voyage to Lisbon; and his library, when catalogued for sale on behalf of
+his widow and children, contained over one hundred and forty volumes of
+the Greek and Latin classics.
+
+Thus, supreme student and master as he was of "the vast authentic book of
+nature," there is abundant proof that Fielding fulfilled his own axiom
+that a "good share of learning" is necessary to the equipment of a
+novelist. Let the romance writer's natural parts be what they may,
+learning, he declared, "must fit them for use, must direct them in it,
+lastly must contribute part at least of the materials." [10] Looking back
+on such utterances by the 'father of the English Novel,' written at the
+full height of his power, it is but natural to wonder if the boy's eager
+application to Greek and Latin drudgery had in it something of
+half-conscious preparation for the great part he was destined to play in
+the history of English literature.
+
+It is clear that Henry Fielding flung his characteristic energies
+zealously into the acquirement of the classical learning proffered him at
+Eton; but a fine scholarship, great possession though it be, was not the
+only gain of his Eton years. Here, says Murphy in his formal
+eighteenth-century phrasing, young Fielding had "the advantage of being
+early known to many of the first people in the kingdom, namely Lord
+Lyttelton, Mr Fox, Mr Pitt, Sir Charles Hanbury Williams, and the late Mr
+Winnington, etc."
+
+Of these companions at Eton, George Lyttelton, afterwards known as the
+"good Lord Lyttelton," statesman and orator, stands foremost by virtue of
+the generous warmth of a friendship continued throughout the novelist's
+chequered life. To Lyttelton _Tom Jones_ was dedicated; it was his
+generosity, as generously acknowledged, that supplied Fielding, for a
+time, with the very means of subsistence; and to him was due the
+appointment, subsequently discharged with so much zealous labour, of
+Magistrate for Westminster and Middlesex. It is recorded that George
+Lyttelton's school exercises "were recommended as models to his
+schoolfellows." Another Eton friend, Thomas Winnington, made some figure
+in the Whig political world of the day; he was accredited by Horace
+Walpole with having an inexhaustible good humour, and "infinitely more wit
+than any man I ever knew." Of the friendship with Sir Charles Hanbury
+Williams, of which we first hear at Eton, little is known, save the
+curious episode of the recovery, many years after its author's death, of
+Fielding's lost play _The Good-Natured Man>_, which had apparently been
+submitted to Sir Charles, whose celebrity was great as a brilliant
+political lampoonist. Of the acquaintance with Henry Fox, first Baron
+Holland, we hear nothing in later life; but the name of the greatest of
+all these Eton contemporaries, that of the elder Pitt, recurs in after
+years as one of the party at Radway Grange, in Warwickshire, to whom
+Fielding, after dinner, read aloud the manuscript of _Tom Jones_.
+[11] A reference to his fellow-Etonian may be found in one of the
+introductory chapters of that masterpiece, where Fielding, while again
+advocating the claims of learning, takes occasion to pay this sonorous
+tribute to Pitt's oratory: "Nor do I believe that all the imagination,
+fire, and judgment of Pitt, could have produced those orations that have
+made the senate of England in these our times a rival in eloquence to
+Greece and Rome, if he had not been so well read in the writings of
+Demosthenes and Cicero, as to have transferred their whole spirit into his
+speeches and, with their spirit, their knowledge too."
+
+However excellent a knowledge of the classics the youthful scholar took
+away with him from Eton, the rigours of his studies do not appear to have
+diminished that zest for life with which the very name of Henry Fielding
+is invested. For the obscurity of these early years is for a moment
+lifted to disclose the young genius as having already, before he was
+nineteen, fallen desperately in love with a beautiful heiress in
+Dorsetshire; and, moreover, as threatening bodily force to accomplish his
+suit. The story, as indicated in the surviving outlines, might be the
+draft for a chapter of _Tom Jones_. The scene is Lyme Regis. The chief
+actors are Harry Fielding, scarce more than a schoolboy; a beautiful
+heiress, Miss Sarah Andrew; [12] and her uncle, one Mr Andrew Tucker, a
+timorous and crafty member of the local corporation. The handsome Etonian,
+who had been for some time resident in the old town, fell madly in love,
+it seems, with the lady, who is stated to have been his cousin on his
+mother's side. The views of her guardian were, however, opposed to the
+young man's suit, Mr Andrew Tucker mercenarily designing to secure the
+heiress for his own son. Thereupon Harry Fielding is said to have made a
+desperate attempt to carry the lady off by force, and that, moreover, "on
+a Sunday, when she was on her way to Church." Further, the efforts of the
+impetuous youth would seem to have extended to threatened assaults on the
+person of his fair cousin's guardian, Mr Tucker; for we find that
+affrighted worthy flying for protection to the arm of the law, as recorded
+in the _Register Book_ of Lyme Regis, under date of the 14th November
+1725:--"... Andrew Tucker, Gent., one of the Corporation, caused Henry
+Fielding, Gent., and his servant or companion, Joseph Lewis--both now for
+some time past residing in the borough--to be bound over to keep the
+peace, as he was in fear of his life or some bodily hurt to be done or to
+be procured to be done to him by H. Fielding and his man. Mr A. Tucker
+feared that the man would beat, maim, or kill him." No words could more
+aptly sum up this delightful story than those of Mr Austin Dobson: "a
+charming girl, who is also an heiress; a pusillanimous guardian, with
+ulterior views of his own; a handsome and high-spirited young suitor; a
+faithful attendant ready to 'beat, maim or kill' on his master's behalf; a
+frustrated elopement and a compulsory visit to the mayor--all these with
+the picturesque old town of Lyme for a background, suggest a most
+appropriate first act to Harry Fielding's biographical tragi-comedy."
+[13] It is possible that Fielding's own pen supplied the conclusion to
+this first act. For he tells us, in the preface to the _Miscellanies_,
+that a version, in burlesque verse, of part of Juvenal's sixth satire was
+originally sketched out before he was twenty, and that it was "all the
+Revenge taken by an injured Lover." The story loses none of its zest,
+moreover, when we remember that Harry Fielding was at this time still a
+Ward of Chancery.
+
+[1] Chancery Proceedings 1720 sqq. _Fielding_ v. _Fielding_. From the
+records of this Chancery suit, instituted on behalf of Henry Fielding and
+his brother and sisters, as minors, by their grandmother Lady Gould, are
+taken the hitherto unpublished facts concerning the novelist's boyhood,
+contained in this chapter. The original documents are preserved in the
+Record Office.
+
+[2] See Appendix A.
+
+[3] By means of a legacy of L3000 left by her father for his daughter's
+sole use, "her husband having nothing to doe with it."
+
+[4] _History and Antiquities of Leicestershire_. J. Nichols. 1810. Vol.
+iv. Part i. p. 292. Nichols does not state his authority for this
+statement, and it is not confirmed by local records. See Hutchins'
+_History of Dorset_ for the list of Stour Provost rectors.
+
+[5] Chancery Proceedings, 1722. _Fielding_ v. _Midford_. Record Office.
+
+[6] Edmund's name was added in October following.
+
+[7] _Chancery Decrees and Order Books_. Record Office.
+
+[8] Tom Jones, Book xiii. Introduction.
+
+[9] Ibid., Book viii., ch. xiii.
+
+[10] _Tom Jones_, Book ix. Introduction.
+
+[11] See _infra_, chap. xi.
+
+[12] Fifty years ago a portrait of the beautiful heiress, in the character
+of Sophia Western, was still preserved at the house of Bellairs, near
+Exeter, then the property of the Rhodes family. The present ownership of
+the picture has, so far, eluded inquiry.
+
+[13] _Fielding_, Austin Dobson, p. 202.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+PLAYHOUSE BARD
+
+    "I could not help reflecting how often the greatest abilities lie
+    wind-bound, as it were, in life; or if they venture out, and
+    attempt to beat the seas, they struggle in vain against wind and
+    tide."--_Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon_.
+
+It was but three years after the Lyme Regis episode that Henry Fielding,
+then a lad of one and twenty, won attention as a successful writer of
+comedy. Of this his first entry into the gay world there are little but
+generalities to record; but, inaccurate as Murphy is in some matters of
+fact, there seems no reason to doubt the truth of the engaging picture
+which he draws of the young man's _debut_ upon the Town. We read of the
+gaiety and quickness of his fancy; the wild flow of his spirits; the
+brilliancy of his wit; the activity of his mind, eager to know the world.
+To the possession of genius allied to the happiest temper, a temper "for
+the most part overflowing into wit, mirth, and good-humour," young
+Fielding added a handsome face, a magnificent physique (he stood over six
+feet high), and the fullest vigour of constitution. "No man," wrote his
+cousin, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, "enjoyed life more than he did." What
+wonder that he was soon "in high request with the men of taste and
+literature," or that report affirms him to have been no less welcome in
+ranks of society not at all distinguished by a literary flavour.
+
+That a youth so gifted, so "formed and disposed for enjoyment," should
+find himself his own master, in London, almost presupposes a too liberal
+indulgence in the follies that must have so easily beset him. When the
+great and cold Mr Secretary Addison, no less than that "very merry
+Spirit," Dick Steele, and the splendid Congreve, drank more than was good
+for them, what chance would there be for a brilliant, ardent lad of
+twenty, suddenly plunged into the robust society of that age? If
+Fielding, like his elders, indisputably loved good wine, let us remember
+that none of the heroes of his three great novels, neither that rural
+innocent Joseph Andrews, nor the exuberant youth Tom Jones, nor erring,
+repentant Captain Booth are immoderate drinkers. The degradation of
+drinking is, in Fielding's pages, accorded to brutalised if honest
+country squires, and cruel and corrupt magistrates; and there is little
+evidence throughout his life to indicate that the great novelist drank
+more freely than did the genial heroes of his pen. As regards Murphy's
+general assertion that, at this his entrance into life, young Fielding
+"launched wildly into a career of dissipation" no other reputable
+contemporary evidence is discoverable of the "wildness" popularly
+attributed to Fielding. That his youth was headlong and undisciplined is
+a plausible surmise; but justice demands that the charge be recognised as
+a surmise and nothing more. How keenly, twenty years later, he could
+appreciate the handicap that such early indulgences impose on a man's
+future life may be gathered from a passage in _Joseph Andrews_ which is
+not without the ring of personal feeling. The speaker is a generous and
+estimable country gentleman, living in Arcadian retirement with his wife
+and children. Descended of a good family and born a gentleman, he narrates
+how his education was acquired at a public school, and extended to a
+mastery of the Latin, and a tolerable knowledge of the Greek, language.
+Becoming his own master at sixteen he soon left school, for, he tells his
+listeners, "being a forward Youth, I was extremely impatient to be in the
+World: For which I thought my Parts, Knowledge, and Manhood thoroughly
+qualified me. And to this early Introduction into Life, without a Guide, I
+impute all my future Misfortunes; for besides the obvious Mischiefs which
+attend this, there is one which hath not been so generally observed. The
+first Impression which Mankind receives of you, will be very difficult to
+eradicate. How unhappy, therefore, must it be to fix your Character in
+Life, before you can possibly know its Value, or weigh the Consequences of
+those Actions which are to establish your future Reputation?" [1] That the
+wise and strenuous Fielding of later years, the energetic student at the
+Bar, the active and patriotic journalist, the merciless exponent of the
+hypocrite, the spendthrift, and the sensualist, the creator of the most
+perfect type of womanhood in English fiction (so said Dr Johnson and
+Thackeray) should look back sadly on his own years of hot-blooded youth is
+entirely natural; but even so this passage and the well-known confession
+placed in the mouth of the supposed writer of the _Journey from this World
+to the Next_, [2] no more constitute direct evidence than do Murphy's
+unattested phrases, or the anonymous scurrilities of eighteenth-century
+pamphleteers.
+
+By birth and education Fielding's natural place was in the costly society
+of those peers and men of wealth and fashion who courted the brilliant
+young wit; but fortune had decreed otherwise, and at this his first
+entrance on the world he found, as he himself said, no choice but to be a
+hackney writer or a hackney coachman. True, his father allowed him a
+nominal L200 a year; but this, to quote another of his son's
+observations, "anybody might pay that would." The fact was that Colonel
+Fielding's marriage with Madame Rasa had resulted in a large and rapidly
+increasing family; and this burden, together with "the necessary demands
+of his station for a genteel and suitable expence," made it impossible
+for him to spare much for the maintenance of his eldest son. Launched
+thus on the Town, with every capacity for spending an income the receipt
+of which was denied to him, the young man flattered himself that he
+should find resources in his wit and invention; and accordingly he
+commenced as writer for the stage. His first play, a comedy entitled
+_Love in Several Masks_, was performed at Drury Lane in February 1728,
+just before the youthful dramatist had attained his twenty-first year. In
+his preface to these 'light scenes' he alludes with some pride to this
+distinction--"I believe I may boast that none ever appeared so early on
+the stage";--and he proceeds to a generous acknowledgment of the aid
+received from those dramatic stars of the eighteenth-century, Colley
+Gibber, Mr Wilks and Mrs Oldfield, all of whom appeared in the cast. Of
+the two former he says, "I cannot sufficiently acknowledge their civil and
+kind behaviour previous to its representation"; from which we may
+conclude, as his biographer Laurence points out, that Harry Fielding was
+already familiar with the society of the green-room. To Mrs
+Oldfield,--that charming actress
+
+  "In publick Life, by all who saw Approv'd
+  In private Life, by all who knew her Lov'd"--
+
+the young man expresses yet warmer acknowledgments. "Lastly," he
+declares, "I can never express my grateful sense of the good nature of
+Mrs Oldfield ... nor do I owe less to her excellent judgment, shown in
+some corrections which I shall for my own sake conceal." The comedy is
+dedicated, with the graceful diction and elaborate courtesies of the
+period, to Fielding's cousin, that notable eighteenth-century wit, the
+Lady Mary Wortley Montagu; and from the dedication we learn that to Lady
+Mary's approval, on her first perusal, the play owed its existence. What
+the approval of a great lady of those times meant for the young writer
+may be measured by the fact that Fielding concludes his dedication by
+solemnly 'informing the world' that the representation of his comedy was
+twice honoured with Her Ladyship's presence.
+
+In view of the frequent accusation of coarseness brought against
+Fielding, we may quote a few lines of the prologue with which he made his
+literary entry into the world. Here his audience are promised
+
+  "Humour, still free from an indecent Flame,
+  Which, should it raise your Mirth, must raise your Shame:
+  Indecency's the Bane to Ridicule,
+  And only charms the Libertine, or Fool:
+  Nought shall offend the Fair One's Ears to-day,
+  Which they might blush to hear, or blush to say.
+  No private Character these Scenes expose,
+  Our Bard, at Vice, not at the Vicious, throws."
+
+Thus it was with an honourable declaration of war against indecency and
+libel that the young wit and man of fashion, began his career as "hackney
+writer." If to modern taste the first promise lacks something of
+fulfilment, it is but just to remember that to other times belong other
+manners.
+
+In the play, rustic and philosophic virtue is prettily rewarded by the
+possession of a beautiful heiress, while certain mercenary fops withdraw
+in signal discomfiture; and that Fielding, at one and twenty, had already
+passed judgment on that glittering 'tinsel' tribe, is clear enough from
+his portrait of the "empty gaudy nameless thing," Lord Formal. Lord
+Formal appears on the stage with a complexion much agitated by a day of
+business spent with "three milleners, two perfumers, my bookseller's and
+a fanshop." In the course of these fatigues he has "rid down two brace of
+chairmen"; and had raised his colour to "that exorbitancy of Vermeille"
+that it will hardly be reduced "under a fortnight's course of acids." It
+is the true spirit of comedy which introduces into this closely perfumed
+atmosphere the bluff country figure of Sir Positive Trap, with his
+exordiums on the rustic ladies, and on "the good old English art of
+clear-starching." Sir Positive hopes "to see the time when a man may
+carry his daughter to market with the same lawful authority as any other
+of his cattle"; and causes Lord Formal some moments' perplexity, his
+lordship being "not perfectly determinate what species of animal to
+assign him to, unless he be one of those barbarous insects the polite
+call country squires." In this production of a youth of twenty we may
+find a foretaste of that keen relish in watching the human comedy, that
+vigorous scorn of avarice, that infectious laughter at pretentious folly,
+which accompanied the novelist throughout his life.
+
+To this same year is attributed a poem called the _Masquerade_, which need
+only be noticed as again emphasising its author's lifelong war against the
+evils of his time. The _Masquerade_ is a satire on the licentious
+gatherings organised by the notorious Count Heidegger, Master of the
+Revels to the Court of George II.
+
+Many years later Fielding reprinted [3] two other poetical effusions
+bearing the date of this his twenty-first year. Of these the first,
+entitled "A Description of U----n G----(alias _New Hog's Norton_) in
+_Com-Hants_" identified by Mr Keightley as Upton Grey in Hampshire, is
+addressed to the fair _Rosalinda,_ by her disconsolate _Alexis_. Alexis
+bewails his exile among
+
+  "Unpolish'd Nymphs and more unpolish'd Swains,"
+
+and describes himself as condemned to live in a dwelling half house, half
+shed, with a garden full of docks and nettles, the fruit-trees bearing
+only snails--
+
+  "Happy for us had Eve's this Garden been
+  She'd found no Fruit, and therefore known no Sin,"--
+
+the dusty meadows innocent of grass, and the company as innocent of wit.
+This sketch of rural enjoyments recalls a later utterance in _Jonathan
+Wild_, concerning the votaries of a country life who, with their trees,
+"enjoy the air and the sun in common and both vegetate with very little
+difference between them." With one or two eloquent exceptions there is
+scarce a page in Fielding's books devoted to any interest other than that
+of human nature.
+
+The second fragment is a graceful little copy of verse addressed to
+_Euthalia_, in which we may note, by the way, that the fair Rosalinda's
+charms are ungallantly made use of as a foil to Euthalia's dazzling
+perfections. As Fielding found these verses not unworthy of a page in his
+later _Miscellanies_ they are here recalled:
+
+  TO EUTHALIA.
+
+  WRITTEN IN THE YEAR 1728.
+
+  "Burning with Love, tormented with Despair,
+  Unable to forget or ease his Care;
+  In vain each practis'd art _Alexis_ tries;
+  In vain to Books, to Wine or Women flies;
+  Each brings _Euthalia's_ Image to his Eyes.
+  In _Lock's_ or _Newton's_ Page her Learning glows;
+  _Dryden_ the Sweetness of her Numbers shews;
+  In all their various Excellence I find
+  The various Beauties of her perfect Mind.
+  How vain in Wine a short Relief I boast!
+  Each sparkling Glass recalls my charming Toast.
+  To Women then successless I repair,
+  Engage the Young, the Witty, and the Fair.
+  When _Sappho's_ Wit each envious Breast alarms,
+  And _Rosalinda_ looks ten thousand Charms;
+  In vain to them my restless Thoughts would run;
+  Like fairest Stars, they show the absent Sun."
+
+_Love in Several Masks_ was produced, as we have seen, in February, 1728;
+and it is a little surprising to find the young dramatist suddenly
+appearing, four weeks later, as a University student. He was entered at
+the University of Leyden, as "Litt. Stud," on the 16th of March 1728. The
+reason of this sudden change from the green-room of Drury Lane to the
+ancient Dutch university must be purely matter of conjecture, as is the
+nature of Fielding's undergraduate studies, Murphy having lately been
+proved to be notably erroneous as to this episode. [4] His name occurs as
+staying, on his entry at Leyden, at the "Casteel von Antwerpen"; and
+again, a year later, in the _recensiones_ of the University for February
+1729, as domiciled with one Jan Oson. As all students were annually
+registered, the omission of any later entry proves that he left Leyden
+before 1730; with which meagre facts and his own incidental remark that
+the comedy of _Don Quixote in England_ was "begun at Leyden in the year
+1728," our knowledge of the two years of Fielding's university career
+concludes. In February 1730 he was presumably back in London, that being
+the date of his next play, the _Temple Beau_, produced by Giffard, the
+actor, at the new theatre in Goodman's Fields.
+
+The prologue to the _Temple Beau_ was written by that man of many parts,
+James Ralph, the hack writer, party journalist and historian, who was in
+after years to collaborate with Fielding, both as a theatrical manager and
+as a journalist. Ralph's opening lines are of interest as bearing on
+Fielding's antagonism to the harlequinades and variety shows, then
+threatening the popularity of legitimate drama:
+
+  "Humour and Wit, in each politer Age,
+  Triumphant, rear'd the Trophies of the Stage:
+  But only Farce, and Shew, will now go down,
+  And HARLEQUIN'S the Darling of the Town."
+
+Ralph bids his audience turn to the 'infant stage' of Goodman's Fields
+for matter more worthy their attention; and his promise that there
+
+  "The Comick Muse, in Smiles severely gay,
+  Shall scoff at Vice, and laugh its Crimes away"
+
+must surely have been inspired by the young genius from whom twenty years
+later came the formal declaration of his endeavour, in _Tom Jones,_
+"to laugh mankind out of their favourite follies and vices."
+
+The special follies of the _Temple Beau_ have, for background, of course,
+those precincts in which Fielding was later to labour so assiduously as a
+student, and as a member of the Middle Temple; but where, as the young
+Templar of the play observes, "dress and the ladies" might also very
+pleasantly employ a man's time. But except for an oblique hit at duelling,
+a custom which Fielding was later to attack with curious warmth, this
+second play seems to yield few passages of biographical interest. Of very
+different value for our purpose is the third play, which within only two
+months appeared from a pen stimulated, presumably, by empty pockets. This
+was the comedy entitled the _Author's Farce_, being the first portion of a
+medley which included the '_Puppet Show call'd the Pleasures of the Town_;
+the whole being acted in the Little Theatre in the Haymarket, long since
+demolished in favour of the present building.
+
+In the person of Harry Luckless, the hero of the _Author's Farce_, it is
+impossible not to surmise the figure of young Fielding himself; a figure
+gay and spirited as those of his first comedy, but, by now, well
+acquainted with the hungers and the straits of a 'hackney writer.' Mr
+Luckless wears a laced-coat and makes a handsome figure (we remember that
+Fielding had always the grand air), whereby his landlady, clamouring for
+her rent, upbraids him for deceiving her: "Cou'd I have guess'd that I had
+a Poet in my House! Cou'd I have look'd for a Poet under lac'd Clothes!"
+The poor author offers her the security of his (as yet unacted) play;
+whereupon Mrs Moneywood (lineal ancestress of Mrs Raddles) pertinently
+cries out: "I would no more depend on a Benefit-Night of an unacted Play,
+than I would on a Benefit-Ticket in an undrawn Lottery." Luckless next
+appeals to what should be his landlady's heart, assuring her that unless
+she be so kind as to invite him "I am afraid I shall scarce prevail on my
+Stomach to dine to-day." To which the enraged lady answers: "O never fear
+that: you will never want a Dinner till you have dined at all the
+Eating-houses round.--No one shuts their Doors against you the first time;
+and I scarce think you are so kind, seldom to trouble them a second." And
+that the good landlady had some grounds for her wrath is but too apparent
+when she announces: "Well, I'm resolv'd when you are gone away (which I
+heartily hope will be very soon) I'll hang over my Door in great red
+Letters, _No Lodging for Poets_ ... My Floor is all spoil'd with Ink, my
+Windows with Verses, and my Door has been almost beat down with Duns.'
+While the landlady is still fuming, enters our author's man, Jack.
+
+    "_Jack_. An't please your Honour, I have been at my Lord's,
+    and his Lordship thanks  you for the Favour you have offer'd of
+    reading your Play to him; but he has such a  prodigious deal of
+    Business he begs to be excus'd. I have been with Mr _Keyber_
+    too: he made no Answer at all...."
+
+    "_Luckless_. Jack.
+
+    "_Jack_. Sir.
+
+    "_Luckless_. Fetch my other Hat hither.  Carry it to the
+    Pawnbroker's.
+
+    "_Jack_. To your Honour's own Pawnbroker.
+
+    "_Luckless_. Ay And in thy way home call at the Cook's Shop.
+    So, one way or other I find, my Head must always provide for my
+    Belly."
+
+At which moment enters the caustic, generous Witmore, belabouring the
+profanity, the scurrility, the immodesty, the stupidity of the age with
+one hand, the while he pays his friend's rent with the other; and who,
+incidentally, is requested by that irascible genius to kick a worthy
+publisher down the stairs, on the latter's refusal to give fifty
+shillings "no, nor fifty farthings" for his play. Once mollified by the
+settlement of her bill, we have the landlady playing advocate for her
+hapless lodger in words that sound very like the apologia of Mr Harry
+Fielding himself: "I have always thought, indeed, Mr _Luckless_ had a
+great deal of Honesty in his Principles; any Man may be unfortunate: but I
+knew when he had Money I should have it...." And the good woman's
+reminiscence that while her lodger had money her doors were thundered at
+every morning between four and five by coachmen and chairmen; and her wish
+that that pleasant humour'd gentleman were "but a little soberer,"
+finishes, we take it, the portrait of the Fielding of 1730. "Jack call a
+coach; and d'ye hear, get up behind it and attend me," cries the
+improvident poet, the moment his generous friend has left him; and so we
+are sure did young Mr Fielding put himself and his laced coat into a
+coach, and mount his man behind it, whenever the exigencies of duns and
+hunger were for a moment abated. And with as gallant a humour as that of
+his own Luckless did he walk afoot, when those "nine ragged jades the
+muses" failed to bring him a competency.
+
+Such failure on the part of the Muses was due to no want of wooing on his
+part. During the six years between Fielding's first appearance as dramatic
+author in 1728, and his marriage in 1734, there stand no fewer than
+thirteen plays to his name. Of these none have won any lasting reputation;
+and to this period of the great novelist's life may doubtless be applied
+Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's description, when lamenting that her kinsman
+should have been "forced by necessity to publish without correction, and
+throw many productions into the world he would have thrown into the fire,
+if meat could have been got without money, and money without scribbling."
+Lady Mary's account moreover is reinforced by Murphy's classical periods:
+"Mr Fielding's case was generally the same with that of the poet described
+by Juvenal; with a great genius, he must have starved if he had not sold
+his performance to a favourite actor. _Esurit, intactam Paridi, nisi
+vendit Agaven_." A complete list of all these ephemera will be found in
+the bibliography at the end of this volume; here we need but notice those
+to which a special interest attaches. Thus, that incomparable comic
+actress, Kitty Clive, was cast for a part in the _Lottery_, a farce
+produced in 1731; and three years later Fielding is adapting for her,
+especially, the _Intriguing Chambermaid_. It was in these two plays, and
+that of the _Virgin Unmasked_, that the town discovered the true comic
+genius of Kitty Clive "the best player I ever saw," in Dr Johnson's
+opinion. For this discovery Fielding takes credit to himself, in the
+dedication addressed to Mrs Clive, which he prefixed to the _Intriguing
+Chambermaid_; and in which he finds opportunity to pay a noble tribute to
+the private life of that inimitable hoyden of the stage. "I cannot help
+reflecting" he writes, "that the Town hath one great obligation to me, who
+made the first discovery of your great capacity, and brought you earlier
+forward on the theatre, than the ignorance of some and the envy of others
+would have otherwise permitted.... But as great a favorite as you at
+present are with the audience you would be much more so were they
+acquainted with your private character ... did they see you, who can charm
+them on the stage with personating the foolish and vicious characters of
+your sex, acting in real life the part of the best Wife, the best
+Daughter, the best Sister, and the best Friend." That this splendid praise
+was as sincere as it was generous need not be doubted. No breath of
+slander, even in that slanderous age, seems ever to have dulled the
+reputation of the queen of comedy, and "better romp than any I ever saw in
+nature"--to quote Dr Johnson again,--Kitty Clive.
+
+So few of Fielding's letters have been, to our knowledge, preserved, that
+the following note addressed to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and concerning
+the _Modern Husband_, a comedy produced in 1731 or 1732, must here be
+given, though containing little beyond the fact that the dramatist of
+three years' standing seems still to have placed as high a value on his
+cousin's judgment, as when recording her approval of his first effort for
+the stage. The play was a piece of admittedly moral purpose, and was
+dedicated to Sir Robert Walpole. The first line of the autograph is,
+apparently, missing.
+
+
+"I hope your Ladyship will honour the Scenes, which I presume to lay
+before you, with your Perusal. As they are written on a Model I never yet
+attempted, I am exceedingly anxious least they should find least Mercy
+from you than my lighter Productions. It will be a slight compensation to
+the modern Husband, that your Ladyship's censure will defend him from the
+Possibility of any other Reproof, since your least Approbation will
+always give me a Pleasure, infinitely superior to the loudest Applauses
+of a Theatre. For whatever has past your judgment, may, I think without
+any Imputation of Immodesty, refer Want of Success to Want of Judgment in
+an Audience. I shall do myself the honour of waiting on your Ladyship at
+Twickenham next Monday to receive my Sentence, and am, Madam, with the
+most devoted Respect
+
+"Your Ladyship's
+"most Obedient most humble Servant
+"Henry Ffielding. [5]
+
+"London 7'br 4."
+
+In 1731-32 the burlesque entitled the _Tragedy of Tragedies; or the Life
+and Death of Tom Thumb the Great_, took the Town. The _Tragedy_ parodies
+the absurdities of tragedians; and so far won immortality that in 1855 it
+was described as still holding the stage. But its chief modern interest
+lies in the tradition that Swift once observed that he "had not laughed
+above twice" in his life,--once at the tricks of a merry-andrew, and again
+when Fielding's Tom Thumb killed the ghost. The design for the
+frontispiece of the edition of 1731, here reproduced, is from the pencil
+of Hogarth; and is the first trace of a connexion between Fielding and the
+painter who was to be honoured so frequently in his pages. An adaptation
+from Moliere, produced in 1733, under the title of the _Miser_, won from
+Voltaire the praise of having added to the original "quelques beautes de
+dialogue particulieres a sa [Fielding's] nation." The leading character in
+the _Miser_, Lovegold, became a stock part, and survived to our own days,
+having been a favourite with Phelps. In _Don Quixote in England_, produced
+in 1733 or 34, [6] Fielding reappears in the character of patriotic censor
+with the design, as appears from the dedication to Lord Chesterfield, of
+representing "the Calamities brought on a Country by general Corruption."
+No less than fifteen songs are interspersed in the play, and it is matter
+for curious conjecture why none of them was chosen for a reprint among the
+collected verses published ten years later in the _Miscellanies_. Time has
+almost failed to preserve even the hunting-song beginning finely--
+
+  "The dusky Night rides down the Sky,
+    And ushers in the Morn;
+  The Hounds all join in glorious Cry,
+    The Huntsman winds his Horn:"
+
+But a happier fate has befallen the fifth song, now familiar as the first
+verse of the _Roast Beef of Old England_. It is eminently appropriate that
+the most distinctly national of English novelists should have written:
+
+  "_When mighty Rost Beef was the_ Englishman's _food,
+  It ennobled our Hearts, and enriched our Blood;
+  Our Soldiers were brave and our Courtiers were good.
+    Oh, the Rost Beef of old England,
+    And old_ England's _Rost Beef!_
+
+  "_Then_, Britons, _from all nice Dainties refrain,
+  Which effeminate_ Italy, France, _and_ Spain;
+  _And mighty Rost Beef shall command on the Main.
+    Oh, the Rost Beef_, etc."
+
+To this truly prolific period of the young 'hackney writer's' pen belongs
+an _Epilogue_, hitherto overlooked, written for Charles Johnson's five-act
+play _Caelia or the Perjur'd Lover_, and spoken by Kitty Clive. The lines,
+which are hardly worth reprinting, consist of an ironic attack on the
+laxity of town morals, where "Miss may take great liberties upon her," and
+each woman is virtuous till she be found out.
+
+An average of two plays a year is a record scarcely conducive to literary
+excellence; any more than is the empty cupboard, and the frequent recourse
+to 'your honour's own pawnbroker,' so often and so honourably familiar to
+struggling genius. "The farces written by Mr Fielding," says Murphy"...
+were generally the production of two or three mornings, so great was his
+facility in writing"; and we have seen Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's
+assertion that much of his work would have been thrown into the fire had
+not his dinner gone with it. Of the struggles of these early years [7]
+(struggles never wholly remitted, for, to quote Lady Mary again, Fielding
+would have wanted money had his hereditary lands been as extensive as his
+imagination) we get further suggestions in the _Poetical Epistle_
+addressed to Sir Robert Walpole when the young poet was but twenty-three.
+The lines go with a gallant spirit, but it is not difficult to detect a
+savour of grim hardship behind the jests:
+
+  "While at the Helm of State you ride,
+  Our Nation's Envy and its Pride;
+  While foreign Courts with Wonder gaze,
+  And curse those Councils which they praise;
+  Would you not wonder, Sir, to view
+  Your Bard a greater Man than you?
+  Which that he, is you cannot doubt,
+  When you have heard the Sequel out.
+  .    .    .    .    .
+  "The Family that dines the latest,
+  Is in our Street esteem'd the greatest;
+  But latest Hours must surely fall
+  Before him who ne'er dines at all.
+
+  Your Taste in Architect, you know,
+  Hath been admir'd by Friend and Foe;
+  But can your earthly Domes compare
+  With all my Castles--in the Air?
+
+  "We're often taught it doth behove us
+  To think those greater who're above us;
+  Another Instance of my Glory,
+  Who live above you, twice two Story,
+  And from my Garret can look down
+  On the whole Street of Arlington." [8]
+
+Not to depend too greatly on Mr Luckless for our picture of Fielding as a
+playwright, we will conclude it with the well-known passage from Murphy:
+"When he had contracted to bring on a play, or a farce, it is well known,
+by many of his friends now living, that he would go home rather late from
+a tavern, and would the next morning deliver a scene to the players,
+written upon the papers which had wrapped the tobacco in which he so much
+delighted." Would that some of those friends had recorded for our delight
+the wit that, alas! has vanished like the smoke through which it was
+engendered. What would we not give for the table-talk of Henry Fielding.
+
+[1] _Joseph Andrews_, Book iii. Chap. iii.
+
+[2] _Miscellanies_, ed. 1743, vol. ii. p. 62.
+
+[3] In the _Miscellanies_ of 1743.
+
+[4] _Fielding_, Austin Dobson, 1907. App. iv.
+
+[5] What appears to be the original autograph of the above letter is now
+(1909) in the library of the Boston Athenaeum, having been presented by Mr
+C. P. Greenough.
+
+[6] _Notitia Dramatica_ (British Museum. MSS. Dept.) and Genest give 1734
+as the date of Don Quixote; Murphy, edition of 1766, vol. iii p. 249,
+gives 1733.
+
+[7] For the refutation of Genest's confusion of Timothy Fielding, a
+strolling player, with Henry Fielding, see Austin Dobson, _Fielding_, pp.
+28, 29.
+
+[8] The _Miscellanies_. Edition 1743.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+MARRIAGE
+
+
+    "What happiness the world affords equal to the possession of such
+    a woman as Sophia I sincerely own I have never yet discovered."
+    --_Tom Jones_.
+
+Out of the paint and powder of the green-room, the tobacco clouds of the
+tavern, the crowded streets where hungry genius went afoot one day, and
+rode in a coach the next--in a word, out of the Town as Harry Fielding
+knew it--we step, in the year 1734, into the idyll of his life, his
+marriage with Charlotte Cradock. For to Fielding the supreme gift was
+accorded of passionate devotion to a woman of whose charm and virtue he
+himself has raised an enduring memorial in the lovely portrait of Sophia
+Western. It is this portrait, explicitly admitted [1], that affords almost
+our only authentic knowledge of Charlotte Cradock, beyond the meagre facts
+that her home was in Salisbury, and that there she and her sisters reigned
+as country belles. For it was not in the gay world of 'Riddoto's, Opera's,
+and Plays,' nor among the humbler scenes of the great city in which he
+delighted to watch the humours of simple folk (the highest life being in
+his opinion 'much the dullest'), that Fielding found his wife. Doubtless
+his six years about town, as hackney author, with his good birth, his
+brilliant wit, and his scanty means, had made him well acquainted with
+every phase of society, "from the Minister at his Levee, to the Bailiff at
+his spunging-house; from the Duchess at her drum, to the Landlady behind
+her bar"; but it was in the rural seclusion of an old cathedral town that
+he wooed and won the beautiful Miss Cradock. Indeed it is impossible to
+conceive of Sophia as for ever domiciled in streets. The very apostrophe
+which heralds her first appearance in _Tom Jones_ is fragrant with
+flower-enamelled meadows, fresh breezes, and the songs of birds "whose
+sweetest notes not even Handel can excel"; and it is thus, with his
+reader's mind attuned to the appropriate key, that Fielding ushers in his
+heroine: "... lo! adorned with all the Charms in which Nature can array
+her; bedecked with Beauty, Youth, Sprightliness, Innocence, Modesty, and
+Tenderness, breathing Sweetness from her rosy Lips, and darting Brightness
+from her sparkling Eyes, the lovely _Sophia_ comes." Of middle size, but
+rather inclining to tall, with dark hair "curled so gracefully on her neck
+that few could believe it to be her own," a forehead rather low, arched
+eyebrows, and lustrous black eyes, a mouth that "exactly answered Sir John
+Suckling's description in those lines
+
+  'Her lips were red and one was thin,
+  Compar'd to that was next her chin.
+    Some bee had stung it newly,'"
+
+with a dimple in the right cheek, and a complexion rather more of the
+lily than the rose unless increased by exercise or modesty when no
+vermilion could equal it--such was the appearance of Sophia, who, most of
+all "resembled one whose image never can depart from my breast."
+
+Nor was the beautiful frame, Fielding hastens to add, disgraced by an
+unworthy inhabitant. He lingers on the sweetness of temper which
+"diffused a glory over her countenance which no regularity of features
+can give"; on her perfect breeding, "though wanting perhaps a little of
+that ease in her behaviour which is to be acquired only by habit, and
+living within what is called the polite circle"; on the "noble, elevated
+qualities" which outshone even her beauty.
+
+The only facts recorded concerning Miss Cradock are that her home was in
+Salisbury, or New Sarum as the city was then called, and that she
+possessed a small fortune. It is said, but on what authority is not
+stated, that she was one of three beautiful sisters, the belles of the
+country town; and it is in accordance with this tradition that Fielding
+should celebrate in some verses "writ when the Author was very young,"
+the beauty and intellectual charm of the Miss Cradocks. When printing
+these verses many years afterwards, in his _Miscellanies_ he describes the
+poem as originally partly filled in with the 'Names of several young
+Ladies,' which part he now omits, "the rather, as some Freedoms, tho'
+gentle ones, were taken with little Foibles in the amiable Sex, whom to
+affront in Print, is, we conceive, mean in any Man, and scandalous in a
+Gentleman." Certainly the Miss Cradocks suffered no affront in the lines
+retained, wherein the young poet affirms that of all the famed nymphs of
+Sarum, that favoured city,
+
+  "Whose Nymphs excel all Beauty's Flowers,
+  As thy high Steeple doth all Towers"
+
+the 'C----cks' were the best and fairest. Nay, has not great Jove himself
+apportioned a 'celestial Dower' to these most favoured of maidens,
+
+  "To form whose lovely Minds and Faces
+  I stript half Heaven of its Graces."
+
+From this charming sisterhood Harry Fielding won his bride, but not until
+four years of waiting had been accomplished. So much may be assumed from
+the early date of the verses entitled "Advice to the Nymphs of _New
+S---m_. Written in the Year 1730." Here the newly returned student from
+Leyden, the successful dramatist from Drury Lane, bids the Salisbury
+beauties cease their vain endeavours to contend with the matchless charms
+of his Celia. And here, in a pretty compliment introduced to the great Mr
+Pope, then at the height of his fame, we are reminded that Celia's lover
+is already a man of letters, for all his mere three and twenty years. When
+Celia meets her equal, then, he declares, farthing candles shall eclipse
+the moon, and "sweet _Pope_ be dull."
+
+It is these youthful love-verses, verses as he himself was the first to
+admit, that were 'indeed Productions of the Heart rather than the Head,'
+that afford our only record of Fielding's wooing. Thus, he sings his
+passion for _Celia_ in the declaration
+
+  "I hate the Town, and all its Ways;
+  Ridotto's, Opera's, and Plays;
+  The Ball, the Ring, the Mall, the Court;
+  Where ever the Beau-Monde resort....
+  All Coffee-houses, and their Praters;
+  All Courts of Justice, and Debaters;
+  All Taverns, and the Sots within 'em;
+  All Bubbles, and the Rogues that skin 'em,"
+
+in short, the whole world 'cram'd all together,' because all his heart is
+engrossed for Celia. Again, Cupid is called to account, in that the
+careless urchin had left Celia's house unguarded from thieves, save for
+an old fellow "who sat up all Night, with a Gun without any Ammunition."
+Celia, it seems, had apprehended robbery, and her poet's rest is troubled:
+
+  "For how should I Repose enjoy,
+  While any fears your Breast annoy?
+  Forbid it Heav'n, that I should be
+  From any of your Troubles free."
+
+
+Cupid explains his desertion by ingeniously declaring that a sigh from
+Celia had blown him away
+
+  "_to Harry Fielding's breast_,"
+
+in which lodging the 'wicked Child' wrought unconscionable havoc. Again,
+Celia wishes to have a "Lilliputian to play with," so she is promptly
+told that her lover would doff five feet of his tall stature, to meet her
+pleasure, and
+
+  "Then when my Celia walks abroad
+  I'd be her pocket's little Load:
+  Or sit astride, to frighten People,
+  Upon her Hat's new fashion'd Steeple."
+
+Nay, to be prized by Celia, who would not even take the form of her
+faithful dog Quadrille.
+
+Jove, we may remember, had dowered the lovely Miss Cradocks with minds as
+fair as their persons; and the excellence of Celia's understanding is
+again celebrated in a neatly turned verse upon her 'having blamed Mr Gay
+for his Severity on her Sex.' Had other women known a tenderness like
+hers, cries the poet, Gay's darts had returned into his own bosom; and
+last of all should such blame come from her
+
+  "in whose accomplish'd Mind
+  The strongest Satire on thy Sex we find."
+
+
+The love story that first ran to such pleasant rhymes, in the old
+cathedral town, was destined to know many a harsh chapter of poverty and
+sickness; but throughout it all the affection of the lovers remained
+true; and there is no reason to doubt that, had it been in Harry
+Fielding's power to achieve it, the promise of perhaps the most charming
+of his love verses would have been fulfilled:
+
+  "Can there on Earth, my _Celia_, be,
+  A Price I would not pay for thee?
+  Yes, one dear precious Tear of thine
+  Should not be shed to make thee mine."
+
+To read Swift's _Journal to Stella_ is almost a sacrilege; the little
+notes that Dick Steele would write to his 'dearest Prue' at all hours of
+day and night, from tavern and printing office, are scarce less private;
+no such seals have been broken, no such records preserved, of the love
+story of Harry Fielding. But to neither Swift nor Steele was it given to
+raise so perfect and imperishable a memorial of the women loved by them,
+as that reared by the passionate affection and grief of Fielding for
+Charlotte Cradock. To this day the beautiful young figure of Sophia
+Western, all charm and goodness, is alive in his immortal pages. And if,
+as her friend Lady Bute asserts, Amelia also is Mrs Fielding's portrait,
+then we know her no less intimately as wife and mother. We watch her brave
+spirit never failing under the most cruel distresses and conflicts; we
+play with her children in their little nursery; we hear her pleasant wit
+with the good parson; we feel her fresh beauty, undimmed in the poor
+remnants of a wardrobe that has gone, with her trinkets, to the
+pawnbroker; we see a hundred examples of her courage and tenderness and
+generosity. There is nothing in Fielding's life that is more to his honour
+than the brief words in which so competent an observer as Lady Bute summed
+up his marriage with Charlotte Cradock, "he loved her passionately and she
+returned his affection."
+
+It was in the little country church of St Mary Charlcombe, a remote
+village some two miles from Bath, that "Henry Fielding, of ye Parish of St
+James in Bath, Esq., and Charlotte Cradock of ye same Parish, spinster"
+were married, on the 28th of November 1734. [2] Fifty years later the
+village was described as containing only nine houses, the church, well
+fitted for the flock, being but eighteen feet wide. The old Somerset
+historian, Collinson, tells us how the hamlet stood on rising ground, in a
+deep retired valley, surrounded by noble hills, and with a little stream
+winding through the vale.
+
+In the January following Fielding and his wife were presumably back in
+town; for in this month he produced, at Drury Lane, the brisk little
+farce called _An Old Man taught Wisdom_, a title afterwards changed to the
+_Virgin Unmasked_. It is probable that this farce was especially written
+to suit Kitty Clive in her excelling character of hoyden; and to it, as we
+have seen, together with two of its predecessors, is assigned the credit
+of having first given that superb comic actress an opportunity of
+revealing her powers. Mrs Clive here played the part of Miss Lucy, a
+forward young lady who after skittishly interviewing a number of suitors
+proposed by her father, finally runs away with Thomas the footman. The
+little piece is said to have achieved success; but scarce had it been
+staged when "the prolific Mr Fielding," as a newspaper of the day styles
+him, brought out a five-act comedy, named the _Universal Gallant: or The
+different Husbands_, which wholly failed to please the audience, and
+indeed ran but for three nights.
+
+The dedication of this play is dated from "Buckingham Street, Feb. 12,"
+and assuming Buckingham Street, Strand, to be the district meant, it is
+probable that the newly married 'poet' and his wife were then living with
+Mrs Fielding's relatives; for although the rate-books for Buckingham
+Street fail to show the name of Fielding, they do show that a Mr Thomas
+Cradock was then a householder in the street. In an _Advertisement_,
+prefixed to the published copies of this ill-fated comedy, the
+disappointed author deprecates the hasty voice of the pit in words that
+suggest the anxiety of a man now responsible for a happiness dearer than
+his own. "I have heard," he writes, "that there are some young Gentlemen
+about this Town who make a Jest of damning Plays--but did they seriously
+consider the Cruelty they are guilty of by such a Practice, I believe it
+would prevent them"; the more, that if the author be "so unfortunate to
+depend on the success of his Labours for his Bread, he must be an inhuman
+Creature indeed, who would out of sport and wantonness prevent a Man from
+getting a Livelihood in an honest and inoffensive Way, and make a jest of
+starving him and his Family." There is other evidence that young men about
+town were wont to amuse themselves by damning plays 'when George was
+King.' In the _Prologue_ to this same condemned play, spoken by the actor
+Quin, and said to have been written after the disastrous first night's
+performance, a more elaborate indictment is laid against the audiences of
+the day. The _Critick_, it seems, is grown so captious that if a poet
+seeks new characters he is denounced for dealing in monsters; if they are
+known and common, then he is a plagiarist; if his scenes are serious they
+are voted dull; if humorous they are 'low' (a true Fielding touch). And
+not only the critic but also the brainless beau stands, as we have seen,
+ready to make sport of the poor author. For such as these
+
+  _"'Tis not the Poet's wit affords the Jest,
+  But who can Cat-call, Hiss, or Whistle best."_
+
+In previous years the brilliant Leyden student might have merely derided
+his enemies; to the Fielding of February 1735, struggling to support
+himself and his beautiful country bride, this 'cruel usage' of his 'poor
+Play' assumed a graver aspect:
+
+  _"Can then another's Anguish give you Joy?
+  Or is it such a Triumph to destroy?
+  We, like the fabled Frogs, consider thus,
+  This may be Sport to you, but it is Death to us."_
+
+This note of personal protest recalls an indisputably reminiscent
+observation in _Amelia_, to the effect that although the kindness of a
+faithful and beloved wife compensates most of the evils of life, it
+"rather serves to aggravate the misfortune of distressed circumstances,
+from the consideration of the share which she is to bear in them." We all
+know how bravely Amelia bore that share; how cheerfully she would cook the
+supper; how firmly she confronted disaster. To realise how deeply Fielding
+felt the pain of such struggles when falling upon "the best, the worthiest
+and the noblest of women" we need but turn again to his own pages. If,
+cries Amelia's husband, when his distresses overwhelm him, "if I was to
+suffer alone, I think I could bear them with some philosophy"; and again
+"this was the first time I had ever felt that distress which arises from
+the want of money; a distress very dreadful indeed in the married state
+for what can be more miserable than to see anything necessary to the
+preservation of the beloved creature and not be able to supply it?"
+
+To supply for his Celia much less than the necessities of life Harry
+Fielding would undoubtedly have stripped his coat, and his shirt with it,
+off his back; but, at the end of this same month of February, fortune
+made the young couple sudden amends for the anxieties that seem to have
+surrounded them. This turn of the wheel is reflected with curious
+accuracy by an anonymous satirist of 1735:
+
+  "F---g, who _Yesterday_ appear'd so rough,
+  Clad in coarse Frize, and plaister'd down with _Snuff_,
+  See how his _Instant_ gaudy _Trappings_ shine;
+  What _Play-house_ Bard was ever seen so fine!
+  But this, not from his _Humour_ glows, you'll say
+  But mere _Necessity_;--for last Night lay
+  In pawn the Velvet which he wears to Day." [3]
+
+This relief, for a time at least, from the pressing anxieties of a
+'play-house bard,' befell by the death of Charlotte Fielding's mother,
+Mrs Elizabeth Cradock of Salisbury, who died in February, but a week or
+two after the execution of a will wholly in favour of that 'dearly
+beloved' daughter. As the details of Mrs Fielding's inheritance have not
+hitherto been known, some portions of her mother's will may be quoted.
+"... I Elizabeth Cradock of Salisbury in the County of Wilts ... do make
+this my last will and testament ... Item I give to my daughter Catherine
+one shilling and all the rest and residue of my ready money plate jewels
+and estate whatsoever and wheresoever after my debts and funeral charges
+are fully paid and satisfied I give devize and bequeath the same unto my
+dearly beloved daughter Charlott Ffeilding wife of Henry Ffeilding of
+East Stour in the County of Dorset Esqre." Mrs Cradock proceeds to revoke
+all former wills; and appoints her said daughter "Charlott Ffeilding" as
+her sole executrix. The will is dated February 8 1734, old style, viz.
+1735; and was proved in London on the 25th of the same month, 'Charlott
+Ffeilding,' as sole executrix, being duly sworn to administer. The
+provision of one shilling for another, and apparently _not_ dearly
+beloved, daughter, Catherine, recalls the wicked sister in _Amelia_ who
+"had some way or other disobliged her mother, a little before the old lady
+died," and who consequently was deprived of that inheritance which
+relieved Amelia and her husband from the direst straits.
+
+As no plays are credited to Fielding's name for the ensuing months of
+1735, it is a reasonable inference that the young Salisbury heiress, whose
+experience of London had, doubtless, included a pretty close acquaintance
+with the hardships of struggling genius, employed some of her inheritance
+to enable her husband to return to the home of his boyhood, on the
+"pleasant Banks of sweetly-winding Stour." There is no record of how the
+Stour estate, settled on Henry Fielding and his brother and sisters, was
+apportioned; but an engraving published in 1813 shows the old stone
+"farmhouse," which Fielding occupied, the kitchen of which then still
+remained as it was in the novelist's time, when it served as a parlour.
+Behind the house stood a famous locust tree; and close by was the village
+church served at this time, as the parish registers show, by the Rev.
+William Young, the original of the immortal Parson Adams of _Joseph
+Andrews_. [4] From a subsequent deed of sale we know that the estate
+consisted of at least three gardens, three orchards, eighty acres of
+meadow, one hundred and forty acres of pasture, ten acres of wood, two
+dove-houses, and "common of pasture for all manner of cattle." To the
+stone farmhouse, and to these orchards and meadows, commons and pastures,
+Fielding brought his wife, probably in this year of 1735; and memories of
+their sojourn at Stour surely inspired those references in _Amelia_ to the
+country life of 'love, health, and tranquillity,' a life resembling a calm
+sea which "must appear dull in description; for who can describe the
+pleasures which the morning air gives to one in perfect health; the flow
+of spirits which springs up from exercise; the delights which parents feel
+from the prattle and innocent follies of their children; the joy with
+which the tender smile of a wife inspires a husband; or lastly the
+cheerful solid comfort which a fond couple enjoy in each others'
+conversation.--All these pleasures, and every other of which our situation
+was capable we tasted in the highest degree."
+
+That a man endowed with Fielding's intense joy in living--he was "so
+formed for happiness," wrote his cousin Lady Mary, "it is a pity he was
+not immortal"--should eagerly taste all the pleasures of life as a country
+gentleman, and that in 'the highest degree,' is entirely consonant with
+his character. At the very end of his life, when dying of a complication
+of diseases, his happy social spirit was still unbroken; for we find him
+even then writing of his inability to enjoy an agreeable hour "without the
+assistance of a companion which has always appeared to me necessary to
+such enjoyment." [5] Nor would the generous temper, which was ever ready
+to share his most needed guinea with a friend scarce poorer than himself,
+be infected with niggardliness by the happy enjoyment of that position to
+which he was by birth entitled. The well-known account therefore, given by
+Murphy, of the East Stour episode is exactly what we might have expected
+of Harry Fielding in the part of country gentleman: "To that place [_i.e._
+his estate of East Stour]," says Murphy, "he retired with his wife, on
+whom he doated, with a resolution to bid adieu to all the follies and
+intemperances to which he had addicted himself in the career of a town
+life. But unfortunately a kind of family pride here gained an ascendant
+over him, and he began immediately to vie in splendour with the
+neighbouring country 'squires. With an estate not much above two hundred
+pounds a year, and his wife's fortune, which did not exceed fifteen
+hundred pounds, he encumbered himself with a large retinue of servants,
+all clad in costly yellow liveries. For their master's honour, these
+people could not descend so low as to be careful of their apparel, but in
+a month or two were unfit to be seen; the 'squire's dignity required that
+they should be new-equipped; and his chief pleasure consisting in society
+and convivial mirth, hospitality threw open his doors, and, in less than
+three years, entertainments, hounds, and horses, entirely devoured a
+little patrimony...." This account is prefaced by gross inaccuracies of
+fact, inexplicable in a biographer writing but ten years after the death
+of his subject; but, as Mr Austin Dobson says, "there can be little doubt
+that the rafters of the old farm by the Stour, with the great locust tree
+at the back, which is figured in Hutchins's _History of Dorset_, rang
+often to hunting choruses, and that not seldom the 'dusky Night rode down
+the Sky' over the prostrate forms of Harry Fielding's guests."
+Petty-minded moralists like Murphy have gravely admonished the great
+novelist's memory for not having safely bestowed his estate in the consols
+of the period; they forget that a spirit of small economy is generally the
+compensation awarded to the poor average of humanity. The genius of
+Fielding knew how to enjoy splendidly, and to give lavishly.
+
+[1] _Tom Jones_. Book xiii. Introduction.
+
+[2] See the registers of St Mary Charlcombe. As Sarah Fielding, the
+novelist's sister, was buried in the entrance to the chancel of this
+church, it would appear that some connection existed between Charlcombe
+and the Fielding family.
+
+[3] _Seasonable Reproof--a Satire in the manner of Horace_, 1735.
+
+[4] The entry in the East Stour Registers is "W'm. Young, Curate
+1731-1740."
+
+[5] _Voyage to Lisbon_.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+POLITICAL PLAYS
+
+    "Whoever attempteth to introduce corruption into any community,
+    doth much the same thing, and ought to be treated in much the
+    same manner with him who poisoneth a fountain."
+    --Dedication of the _Historical Register_.
+
+A prolonged retirement into Dorsetshire, however pleasant were the banks
+of Stour with a beautiful young wife, and a sufficient estate, could
+scarce be expected of Fielding's restless genius. He was now thirty-five;
+his splendid physique was as yet unimpaired by the gout that was so soon
+to attack him; his powers were still hardly revealed; and, as far as we
+can discover, he was, at the moment, under no pressure for money. Still,
+the hunting choruses of the Squire Westerns of Dorsetshire can hardly
+have long sufficed for one whom Lyttelton declared to have had "more wit
+than any man I ever knew"; and the social and political conditions of the
+country were increasingly calculated to inflame into practical activity
+that "enthusiasm for righteousness," which Mr Gosse has so well detected
+in Fielding. [1] The distracted state of the London stage, divided by the
+factions of players and managers, afforded moreover an excellent
+opportunity for a dramatist of some means to essay an independent venture.
+And accordingly, at the beginning of 1736, we find the Harry Fielding of
+the green-room and the poet's garret, the Henry Fielding Esqre of East
+Stour, suddenly throwing the full force of his energies into political
+life, as the manager of, and writer for, a theatre with indisputable
+political aims. For the next eight years of his short life Fielding was
+largely occupied in the lively turmoil of eighteenth-century politics; and
+here, first by means of the stage, and later as journalist, he played a
+part which has perhaps been somewhat unduly overshadowed by the surpassing
+achievements of his genius as father of the English novel. But if we would
+perceive the full figure of the man this time of boisterous political
+warfare is of no mean account. In the dedication of his first party play,
+the amazingly successful _Pasquin_, Fielding subscribes himself as "the
+most devoted Servant of the public"; and no more appropriate keyword could
+be found for the energies which he threw into those envenomed political
+struggles of 1736-41.
+
+At the date of his first plunge into these struggles England stood sorely
+in need of a pen as biting, as witty and as fearless, as that of Henry
+Fielding. For over ten years the country had been ruled by one of those
+"peace at any price" Ministers who have at times so successfully inflamed
+the baser commercial instincts of Englishmen. Sir Robert Walpole, the
+reputed organiser of an unrivalled system of bribery and corruption, the
+Minister of whom a recent apologist frankly declares that to young members
+of Parliament who spoke of public virtue and patriotism he would reply
+"you will soon come off that and grow wiser," the autocrat enamoured of
+power who could brook no colleague within measurable distance, the man of
+coarse habits and illiterate tastes, above all the man who induced his
+countrymen to place money before honour, and whose administration even an
+admirer describes as one of unparalleled stagnation--such a man must have
+roused intense antagonism in Fielding's generous and ardent nature. For,
+from the days of his first boyish satires to the last energetic acts of
+his life as a London magistrate, for Fielding to see an abuse was to set
+about reforming it. To his just sense of the true worth of money, the
+wholesale corruption of English political life accredited to Walpole, the
+poisoning, to adopt his own simile, of the body politic, must have seemed
+the vilest national crime. There could never have been the least sympathy
+between the mercenary and apathetic methods of Walpole and the
+open-hearted genius of Fielding. And, added to such fundamental opposition
+of character, the influence of Fielding's old school friend, George
+Lyttelton, would, at this juncture especially, draw him into the active
+ranks of the Opposition.
+
+Lyttelton was then rising into celebrity as a ready parliamentary speaker;
+a celebrity as yet not wholly eclipsed by the youthful oratory of William
+Pitt, the young cornet of the horse, who also had lately taken his seat on
+the Opposition benches. It was the burning patriotism, the lofty character
+and the towering genius of Pitt, the fluency and personal integrity of
+Lyttelton, that led the younger members of the Opposition in the House of
+Commons; while in the Lords another friend from whom Fielding was to
+receive "princely benefactions," the young Duke of Bedford, a man of
+"inflexible honesty and goodwill to his country," attacked Walpole's
+alleged corrupt practices in the election of Scottish peers. With leaders
+such as William Pitt and Lyttelton on the one hand, and the corrupt figure
+of Walpole on the other, there is no wonder that Fielding flung all his
+generous force into the effort to free England from so degrading a
+domination. Accordingly, in 1736, when the young Pitt's impassioned
+eloquence was soon to alarm the _Great Man_--"we must muzzle that terrible
+Cornet of the Horse," Sir Robert said--and when fierce and riotous
+hostility to the government had broken out in the country over an
+attempted Excise Bill, Fielding appears as a frankly political manager of
+the "New Theatre" in the Haymarket. This small theatre stood precisely
+adjoining the present Palladian structure, as may be seen from a print of
+1820, showing the demolition of the old building and the adjacent facade
+of the modern "Haymarket." According to Tom Davies, who, as an actor in
+Fielding's company and as an author of some pretensions should be
+reliable, Fielding was a managing partner of this "New Theatre," in
+company with James Ralph, "about the year 1735." [2] And apparently early
+in 1736 [3] his political, theatrical, and social satire of _Pasquin_
+appeared on the little stage, and immediately captured the town.
+
+In _Pasquin_ a perfectly outspoken attack on Walpole's corrupt methods is
+united with a comprehensive onslaught on abuses in the stage, law,
+divinity, physic, society, and on the odes of Colley Cibber, sufficient
+one might suppose to satisfy even Fielding's zeal. In an exuberant
+newspaper advertisement of the 5th of March Mr Pasquin is announced as
+intending to "lay about him with great impartiality," and throughout the
+play Fielding's splendid figure may be felt, swinging his satiric club
+with a boisterous enjoyment. The immediate success achieved by the piece
+was certainly not due to any great dramatic excellence; and that so
+loosely knit a medley as _PASQUIN, a Dramatic Satire on the Times: Being
+the Rehearsal of Two Plays, viz. A Comedy call'd THE ELECTION and a
+Tragedy, call'd The Life and Death of COMMON-SENSE_ should have achieved
+almost as long a run as the _Beggars Opera_, shows that the public
+heartily sympathised with the satirist. _Pasquin_ begins with the
+rehearsal of a comedy, called _The Election_, consisting of a series of
+broadly humorous scenes in which the open and diverse bribery at
+elections, the equally open immorality of fashionable town life, the
+connivance of country dames, and the inanity of the beau monde, are
+satirised. The country Mayor, the Ministerial candidates and the
+Opposition squire drink, bribe and are bribed with complete impartiality.
+A scene devoted to the political young lady of the day affords opportunity
+for a hit at the sickly and effeminate Lord 'Fanny' Hervey, that
+politician whom Pope described as a "mere white curd of Asse's milk," and
+of whom Lady Mary Wortley Montagu observed that "the world consisted of
+men, women, and Herveys." Pope had stigmatised Hervey as _Lord Fanny_, and
+Fielding obviously plays on the nickname by references to the value
+attached by certain young ladies to their fans. "Faith," says his comic
+author, "this incident of the fan struck me so strongly that I was once
+going to call this comedy by the name of the Fan." The comedy ends with
+the successful cooking of the election returns by Mr Mayor in favour of
+the Ministerial candidates, for which "return" he is promised a "very good
+turn very soon"; and by the precipitate marriage of one of the said
+candidates to the Mayor's daughter "to strengthen his interest with the
+returning officer."
+
+Having settled the business of the corrupt and corrupting Ministry in his
+comedy, Mr Pasquin proceeds to exhibit the rehearsal of his tragedy, _The
+Life and Death of Common Sense_. Here the satirist, leaving politics,
+applies his cudgel mainly to the prevailing taste for pantomime, a form of
+entertainment introduced it was said some thirty years previously by one
+Weaver, a country dancing master, and already lashed by Sir Richard Steele
+in his couplet:
+
+  "Weaver, corrupter of the present age,
+  Who first taught silent sins upon the stage."
+
+That the Covent Garden manager, John Rich, [4] could engage four French
+dancers, and a German with two dogs, taught to dance the _Louvre_ and the
+_Minuet_, at ten pounds a night, and clear thereby "above 20 good houses,"
+while the Othello of Booth and the Wildair of Wilkes were neglected, was
+sufficient to rouse the indignation alike of moralists, dramatists and
+playgoers. Fielding in turn took the matter up with all his natural
+warmth; and in _Pasquin_ he represents the kingdom of the Queen of Common
+Sense as invaded by a vast army of "singers, fidlers, tumblers, and
+ropedancers," who moreover fix their standard in Covent Garden, the
+headquarters of Rich.
+
+Not content with assailing this public folly, the 'Tragedy' of _Pasquin_
+strikes a higher note by ranging among the foes of Common Sense three
+unworthy professors of Law, Medicine, and Religion; callings, as Fielding
+is careful to point out,
+
+  "in themselves designed
+  To shower the greatest blessings on Mankind."
+
+Queen Common Sense seemingly receives her deathblow; but her ghost finally
+rises victorious, and so justifies the author's contention that his "is
+almost the only play where she has got the better lately." The vigour with
+which Mr Pasquin here 'laid about him,' in such matters as the legal
+abuses relating to imprisonment for debt, may be inferred from the
+following passage. Queen Common Sense is speaking to the representative of
+_bad_ Law, and tells him she has heard that men
+
+  "unable to discharge their debts
+  At a short warning, being sued for them,
+  Have, with both power and will their debts to pay,
+  Lain all their lives in prison, for their costs.
+
+  _Law_. That may perhaps be some poor person's case
+  Too mean to entertain your royal ear.
+
+  _Q.C.S_. My Lord, while I am Queen I shall not think
+  One man too mean, or poor, to be redress'd."
+
+So too, the great genius of Fielding, when in long after years harnessed
+to the drudgery of a London magistrate, held no porter's brawl or beggar's
+quarrel too mean "to be redress'd."
+
+The immediate success of _Pasquin_ attests, as we have said, the readiness
+of London audiences in 1736 to applaud an honest and humorous presentation
+of wicked Ministers, corrupt clergy, lawyers, and doctors, inane
+Laureates, and degrading public entertainments. Mrs Delany, gathering
+London news for Dean Swift, writes on April 22, "When I went out of Town
+last Autumn, the reigning madness was Farinelli; I find it now turned on
+_Pasquin_, a dramatic satire on the times. It has had almost as long a run
+as the Beggar's Opera; but in my opinion not with equal merit, though it
+has humour." [5] We are told how the piece drew numerous enthusiastic
+audiences "from _Grosvenor_, _Cavendish_, _Hanover_, and all the other
+fashionable Squares, as also from _Pall Mall_ and the _Inns of Court_" And
+on the 26th of May a benefit performance for the author was announced as
+the "60th. Day." The vogue of the satire even demanded a key, as may be
+seen in an advertisement in the _London Daily Post_ for May 17: _This Day
+is published, Price Four-Pence. A Key to Pasquin, address'd to Henry
+Fielding Esqre._
+
+Mr Pasquin's own advertisements for his little theatre are not without the
+zest with which our beef-eating ancestors attacked politics, social abuses
+and one another. The announcement for March 5, ran as follows:--
+
+    "_By the_ Great Mogul's _Company of_ English
+    _Comedians, Newly Imported_. At the New Theatre in the
+    Haymarket, this Day, March 5, will be presented
+
+    PASQUIN,
+
+    A Dramatick SATYR on the times.
+
+    Being a Rehearsal of two PLAYS, viz. a Comedy call'd The
+    ELECTION; and a Tragedy, call'd The Life and Death of COMMON
+    SENSE....
+
+    N.B.--Mr Pasquin intending to lay about him with great
+    Impartiality, hopes the Town will all attend, and very civilly
+    give their Neighbours what the find belongs to 'em.
+
+    N.B.--The Cloaths are old, but the Jokes entirely new...."
+
+In the following month the Opposition was busy over the marriage of their
+chief supporter, the Prince of Wales; and Mr Pasquin duly chronicles the
+event in his advertisements of the 28th of April, observing that his
+company "by reason of the Royal Wedding expecting no Company but
+themselves, are obliged to defer Playing till tomorrow." A few days
+later, on the 12th of May, Sir Robert Walpole celebrated the royal
+marriage by a grand evening entertainment given at his house in St James
+Park; and on the same night 'Pasquin' had the audacity to advertise a
+special performance, in the following terms (the "country party," it
+should be understood, was a usual name for Walpole's opponents):--
+
+"For the Benefit of Miss Burgess, who has so zealously espoused the
+Country Interest.... Miss Burgess hopes all Patriots and Lovers of their
+Country will appear in her favour and give all encouragement to one who
+has so early distinguished herself on the side of Liberty." In Pasquin's
+_Election_ scenes, this lady played the part of Miss Stitch, a political
+damsel, opposed to Walpole's candidate. Next day appeared an ironic
+counter-advertisement of a performance for "the Benefit of Miss Jones (the
+Mayor's daughter who hath so furiously espoused the Court [_i.e._
+Walpole's] Interest....) _N.B._--Miss Jones does not doubt that all true
+loyal People will give her all Encouragement in their Power, as she has
+engaged in so unpopular a Side and even given away her FAN (which very few
+young ladies would) for the service of the Country: she hopes the
+Courtiers will not let her be out of pocket by the Bargain." Here, again,
+is doubtless a hit at Lord 'Fanny' Hervey; as well as a plain hint that
+those who espoused Walpole's cause might expect ample payment for their
+trouble.
+
+Is there any wonder that a wrathful and uneasy Minister, not yet
+overthrown, shortly took stringent measures against the 'liberty' of the
+stage; measures by which a political stage censorship was formally
+established, and the topical gaiety of our theatre, and the pungency of
+our theatrical announcements, henceforth immeasurably dulled.
+
+A few further points of minor interest remain to be noted concerning that
+popular and scathing personage Mr Pasquin. By May the company styled
+themselves "Pasquin's Company of Comedians"; a fresh indication of the
+credit attaching to the performance. In the previous month a contributor
+to _The Grub Street Journal_ tells "Dear Grub" that he has seen Pope
+applauding the piece; and, although the statement was promptly denied, a
+rare print by Hogarth lends some colour to a very likely story; for the
+great Mr Pope, the terror of his enemies, the autocrat of literature, was
+warmly on the side of the Opposition. Hogarth depicts the stage of
+Fielding's theatre, and thereon a scene in the fifth act of _Pasquin_, in
+which the foes of Queen Common Sense are for the moment triumphant. The
+side boxes are well filled; and in one of them Mr Pope's deformed figure,
+apparently, turns away, declaring: "There is no whitewashing this stuff."
+The curious may find another plate by Hogarth in which Pope _is_ busy
+whitewashing Lord Burlington; but the drift of the remark for the
+Opposition drama of _Pasquin_ seems obscure. The gains that accrued to
+Fielding from the success of _Pasquin_ are indicated by another rare
+print, that entitled the _Judgement of the Queen o' Common Sense.
+Addressed to Henry Fielding Esqre._ Here, again, it is _Pasquin's_ satire
+on the prevailing furore for pantomime that is chiefly illustrated; as
+Common Sense gives to Rich, the harlequin, a halter, while to Fielding she
+accords an overflowing purse. Supporting Fielding are a long lean
+Shakespeare, and two figures, possibly the distinguished players Kitty
+Clive and Quin; on the opposite side, behind Harlequin, are figures
+representing the bad clergy, lawyers, and doctors satirised in the
+_Tragedy_; and the whole is balanced by the emergence of the ghost in
+Hamlet, from a trap door in the foreground. Doggerel verses, at the foot
+of the print, celebrate the arrival of a bard, "from ye Great Mogul,"
+bringing with him _Wit, Humour, and Satyr_, and receiving the Queen's
+"honest favour," in "show'rs of gold."
+
+Under those golden showers, and with the applause of 'all the fashionable
+Squares' ringing in his ears, we may leave Mr Pasquin. Fielding's first
+venture as political dramatist and theatrical manager had proved
+brilliantly successful; his little theatre, like his own Tom Thumb, had
+assailed a dozen giant abuses, an all-powerful Minister among them, and
+the town had applauded the courage and wit of the performance. In the
+following season, those same boards were to witness the author of
+_Pasquin_ "laying about him" with an even greater political audacity.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Content, doubtless, with the success of _Pasquin_, Fielding does not seem
+to have launched any further political attacks during the remaining months
+of 1736. A newspaper advertisement of June announces the intention of the
+'Great Mogul's Company of Comedians' to continue "playing twice a week
+during the summer season," and _Pasquin_ remained occasionally in the
+bills as late as the 2nd of July. The public were advised that "This is
+much the coolest House in Town"; and audiences must have been drawn even
+in August, for in that month one small and presumably party play was
+performed, the _New Comi-Tragical Interlude call'd the Deposing and Death
+of Queen Gin_. This little piece consisted of only two scenes, and was
+probably a skit on a Bill "against spirituous liquors" which Walpole had
+supported earlier in the year. The measure met with violent opposition,
+including petitions from the Liverpool and Bristol merchants; and in view
+of Sir Robert's own notorious excesses with the bottle a temperance Bill
+from his hands may well have roused Fielding's ironic laughter. The
+authorship of the satire is unknown; but the moral appears to have been
+unexceptionable, as _Queen Gin_, in the final scene, "drinks a great
+quantity of liquor and at last dies."
+
+Fielding clearly began his second year at the 'little theatre' with some
+social or political exhortation, as the following bill appears for
+January:--"By a Company of Comedians, At the New Theatre in the Haymarket,
+this Day, January 26, will be presented a Dramatick Satire on the Times
+(never performed before) call'd The Mirrour." By February "the Original
+Company who perform'd _Pasquin_" are notified on the bills; and on the 2nd
+of March a performance is announced of a _Dramatick Tale of the King and
+the Miller of Mansfield_, presumably the same _Miller of Mansfield_ openly
+declared by one of Walpole's "hired scribblers" to be aimed at the
+overthrow of the Ministry. [6] All such preliminary skirmishes, however,
+served but to introduce the grand attack of the _Historical Register for
+the Tear 1736_, the first performance of which may be assigned to the end
+of March 1737. [7]
+
+In the _Register_ we have the most complete display of Fielding's vigour
+as a fighting politician. Here, to recur to Mr Pasquin's characteristic
+phrase, he "lays about him" with a gusto and honest frankness quite lost
+among our own tepid conventions. But however hard the hitting, however
+boisterous the broad humour, however biting the irony, it is noteworthy
+that in this his chief political satire, written moreover for a yet
+unregulated stage, Fielding never stoops to the shameless personalities of
+his day. The fashion of the eighteenth-century permitted even the great
+and classical genius of Pope to hurl lines at the persons of his opponents
+that, to modern ears, scarcely bear quotation. Fielding, as we know,
+constantly asserted his intention of throwing not at the vicious but at
+vice; and accordingly, even in this party play, flung openly in the face
+of the Minister, there is but one reference (and that only a fling at his
+"lack of any the least taste in polite literature") to the notorious
+personal failings of Sir Robert. It is against the Minister, and not the
+man, that the hot-blooded Opposition dramatist directs his humour and his
+irony. Fielding's manly and generous nature here permitted no virulent
+personalities to blacken his pages. [8]
+
+The irony of the _Register_ is chiefly reserved for the _Dedication to the
+Public_, designed for the reader at leisure; though here Walpole is
+indicated broadly enough, first in the figure of an ass hung out on a
+signpost, and again as "Old Nick," for "who but the devil could act such a
+part." Here the attacks of the Ministerial papers are parried by ironic
+explanations that "The Register is a ministerial pamphlet calculated to
+infuse into the minds of the people a great opinion of their ministry,"
+explanations full of admirable fencing and excellent hits. And in these
+dedicatory pages Fielding utters a sonorous warning to his countrymen
+concerning the insidious policy that was undermining their very
+constitution: "... Here is the danger, here is the rock on which our
+constitution must, if it ever does split. The liberties of a people have
+been subdued by conquests of valour and force, and have been betrayed by
+the subtle and dexterous arts of refined policy, but these are rare
+instances; for geniuses of this kind are not the growth of every age,
+whereas if a general corruption be once introduced, and those, who should
+be the guardians and bulwarks of our liberty, once find or think they find
+an interest in giving it up, no great capacity will be required to destroy
+it. On the contrary the meanest, lowest, dirtiest fellow, if such an one
+should ever have the assurance in future ages to mimick power, and
+browbeat his betters, will be as able as Machiavel himself could have
+been, to root out the liberties of the bravest people." From the
+solemnities of the _Dedication_ we come to the "humming deal of satire,"
+and the boisterous action, of the play itself. As in the case of _Pasquin_
+the form of the drama is that of a rehearsal, a form which affords
+excellent opportunities for such explanatory asides as that addressed to
+the critic who complains of the attempt to review a year's events in a
+single play: "Sir," says the author, "if I comprise the whole actions of a
+year in half an hour, will you blame me, or those who have done so little
+in that time?" The long years of Walpole's power were admittedly "years
+without parallel in our history, for political stagnation." Scene one
+discovers five 'blundering blockheads' of politicians, in counsel with one
+silent "little gentleman yonder in the chair;" who knows all and says
+nothing, and whose politics lie so deep that "nothing but an inspir'd
+understanding can come at 'em." The blockheads, however, have capacity
+enough to snatch hastily at the money lying on their council table.
+Walpole's jealousy of power, it may be remembered, had driven almost every
+man of ability out of his ministry. Then comes a vivacious parody on the
+fashionable auctions of the day. Lots comprising "a most curious remnant
+of Political Honesty," a "delicate piece of Patriotism," and a "very clear
+Conscience which has been worn by a judge and a bishop" and on which no
+dirt will stick, go for little or nothing, while Lot 8, "a very
+considerable quantity of Interest at Court," excites brisk bidding, and is
+finally knocked down for one thousand pounds. From the excellent fooling
+of the auction, the action suddenly changes to combined satire on the
+Ministry and on the two Cibbers, father and son. The Ministry are
+ingeniously implied to have been damn'd by the public; to give places with
+no attention to the capacity of the recipient; and to laugh at the dupes
+by whose money they live. A like weakness for putting blockheads in office
+and for giving places to rogues, and a like contempt of the public, is
+allegorically conveyed in the third act, in which 'Apollo' casts the parts
+for a performance among sundry unworthy actors, and declares that the
+people may grumble 'as much as they please, as long as we get their
+money.' "There sir," cries the author to the critic of the rehearsal, "is
+the sentiment of a great man." The _Great Man_ was a phrase, to use Pope's
+words, "by common use appropriated to the first minister"--that is, to
+Walpole. In the next scene the effrontery of the piece culminates in a
+ballet where the Prime Minister appears, leading a chorus of false
+patriots, who, to use Fielding's own words, are set in the 'odious and
+contemptible light' of a set of "cunning self-interested fellows who for a
+little paltry bribe would give up the liberties and properties of their
+country." These worthy patriots are of four types, the noisy, the
+cautious, the self-interested (he whose shop is his country) and the
+indolent ("who acts as I have seen a prudent man in company, fall asleep
+at the beginning of a fray and never wake 'till the end o't"). To them
+enters Quidam, unblushingly announced in the play bill as "Quidam, Anglice
+a Certain Person," in other words Walpole himself. Quidam pours gold into
+the pockets of the four patriots, drinks with them, and then, when the
+'bottle is out' (a too frequent occurrence at Sir Robert's table) takes up
+his fiddle, strikes up a tune and dances off, the patriots dancing after
+him. But even this is not all. "Sir," says the author, "every one of these
+patriots have a hole in their pockets as Mr Quidam the fiddler there
+knows; so that he intends to make them dance 'till all the money is fall'n
+through, which he will pick up again and so not lose one halfpenny by his
+generosity...." We may suppose that the final scene lost nothing in
+breadth by the acting of Quidam; and it is not surprising that the
+immediate result was the subjugation not, alas! of the Ministry, but of
+the liberty of the stage. Walpole's fall was delayed for three years; the
+destruction of the political stage was accomplished in three months.
+
+It is difficult to imagine that any party, in those days of comparatively
+arbitrary power, would venture a public satire so unveiled and so menacing
+as that of the _Register_, unless supported by some confidence in the
+immediate fall of their opponents. Without such confidence the political
+tactics of such an onslaught would be simple foolhardiness. Signs of these
+false hopes are not wanting in the slight, but equally bold, satire on the
+sycophants represented as composing Walpole's _levee_, which was shortly
+added to the _Register_. This little sketch, in which a protest concerning
+the damning, early in the year, of Fielding's ballad farce _Eurydice_ is
+combined with the political satire, was advertised as follows:--
+
+    "EURYDICE HISS'D: or, a Word to the Wise, giving an Account of
+    the Rise, Progress, Greatness, and Downfal of Mr Pillage, ... with
+    the dreadful Consequence and Catastrophe of the whole." [9]
+
+We have the authority of Tom Davies, at7 this time a member of Fielding's
+company, for the statement that "Fielding in his _Eurydice Hiss'd_ had
+brought on the Minister [Walpole] in a _levee_ scene" [10]; and as Pillage
+is the "very great man" who holds the _levee_ in the fragment, the above
+allusion to an expected downfall of Walpole's Ministry seems obvious.
+Passages of similar import to the advertisement occur in the piece itself.
+Thus the play is declared to convey a "beautiful image of the instability
+of human greatness"; and the spectacle is promised of the 'author of a
+mighty farce' at the pinnacle of human greatness and adored by a crowd of
+dependants, become by a sudden turn of fortune, scorned, "deserted and
+abandon'd."
+
+The single scene of the play opens when Pillage is at the zenith of his
+power; a stage direction orders that "The Levee enters, and range
+themselves to a ridiculous tune"; a partition of places ensues under the
+allegory of the business arrangements of a theatrical manager; and the
+author explains that by this _levee_ scene he hopes that persons greater
+than author-managers may learn to despise sycophants. Close on the heels
+of the _levee_ comes the catastrophe. Not one honest man, Pillage sadly
+admits, is on his side; as his 'shallow plot' opens out the first applause
+changes to hisses; his farce is damn'd; and he himself is left consoling
+the solitude of his downfall by getting exceedingly drunk on a third
+bottle.
+
+The figure of a fallen Minister boozing away his own intolerable
+reflections, was not calculated to pacify that notoriously hard drinker,
+Sir Robert, already soundly pilloried in the _Register_, and severely
+indited by _Pasquin_. By the end of April the _Register_ had reached its
+thirty-first performance, a good run at that date; and according to an
+advertisement in the _Craftsman_ the satire was still being played on the
+7th of May. In little more than four weeks, and after the alleged
+perpetration of a treasonable and profane farce called _The Golden Rump_,
+a Bill for stifling the liberty of the stage under a censorship was
+introduced, had passed through both Houses, and received the royal assent.
+Well might Lord Chesterfield exclaim in the brilliant speech which, in
+Smollet's words, "will ever endear his character to all the friends of
+genius and literature, to all those who are warmed with zeal for the
+liberties of their country," that the Bill was not only "of a very
+extraordinary nature, but has been brought in at a very extraordinary
+season and pushed with very extraordinary despatch." Concerning the nature
+of the measure Chesterfield had no doubt. He saw its tendency towards
+restraining the "liberty of the Press which will be a long stride towards
+the destruction of Liberty itself"; he pointed out that a Minister who has
+merited the esteem of the people will neither fear the wit nor feel the
+satire of the theatre; he denounced the subjugation of the stage under "an
+arbitrary Court license" which would convert it into a canal for conveying
+the vices and follies of "great men and Courtiers" through the whole
+kingdom; he protested against the Bill as an encroachment not only on
+liberty but also on property, for "Wit, my Lords, is a sort of property;
+it is the property of those that have it, and too often the only property
+that they have to depend on."
+
+As a manager of the intrepid little theatre in the Haymarket, as well as
+the author of the most successful of the offending plays, the Licensing
+Act fell with double weight on Fielding. "When I speak against the Bill,"
+cried Chesterfield, "I must think I plead the cause of Wit, I plead the
+cause of Humour, I plead the cause of the British Stage, and of every
+gentleman of taste in the Kingdom." Looking back over two centuries, we
+honour Chesterfield in that, unknown to himself, he also pleaded the cause
+of the greatest of English humourists. But appeals on behalf of genius and
+freedom were thrown away upon Walpole; the Act received the royal assent
+on June 21 1737; and, in the honourable company of Wit, Humour, and Taste,
+Fielding was forced to retire from the theatre, on the boards of which he
+had for two years so vigorously assailed Ministerial corruption and
+autocracy.
+
+[1] _Works of Henry Fielding_, Edited by Edmund Gosse. Introduction,
+p. xxi.
+
+[2] _Life of Garrick_. T. Davies. 1780, vol. i. p. 223.
+
+[3] _Notitia Dramatica_, MSS. Dept. British Museum, speaks of _Pasquin_ as
+performed for the fortieth time on April 21, 1736: and quotes an
+advertisement of the play for March 5. There seems to be no record of the
+actual first night.
+
+[4] Rich appears to have been the manager at Covent Garden from 1733 to
+1761.
+
+[5] _Autobiography of Mrs Delany._ 1861. Vol I. p. 554.
+
+[6] See Fielding's ironic reference to such "iniquitous surmises" in the
+Dedication to the _Historical Register_.
+
+[7] The earliest newspaper reference, so far available, is that of the
+_Daily Journal_ for April 6 1737, which speaks of April 11 as the ninth
+day of the _Register_.
+
+[8] In the succeeding Epilogue of _Eurydice Hiss'd_ it must be admitted
+that Sir Robert's love of the bottle is broadly satirised.
+
+[9] _Daily Advertiser_, April 29. 1737.
+
+[10] _Life of Garrick_, T. Davies, vol. ii. p. 206.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+HOMESPUN DRAMA
+
+    "Virtue distrest in humble state support."
+    Prologue to _Fatal Curiosity_.
+
+The Licensing Act of June 1737 thus brought Henry Fielding's career as
+political dramatist to a hasty conclusion; a conclusion quite unforeseen
+by the luckless author, as appears from his _Dedication_ to the
+_Historical Register_, published almost at the moment when the Act became
+law: "The very great indulgence you have shown my performances at the
+little theatre these two last years," he says, addressing his public,
+"have encouraged me to the proposal of a subscription for carrying on that
+theatre, for beautifying and enlarging it, and procuring a better company
+of actors."
+
+Before finally losing sight of the stage on which _Pasquin_ and the
+_Register_ had scored such signal success, we may notice some minor
+incidents of these two years of Fielding's administration. His company
+does not seem to have included either Macklin, Quin, or Kitty Clive; but
+that distinguished actress Mrs Pritchard, the central figure of Hogarth's
+charming group called "The Green Room, Drury Lane," is said to have made
+her first appearance on his boards, [1] and his players also included that
+man of many parts Tom Davies. Davies was a student of Edinburgh
+University; an actor at Drury Lane and elsewhere; a bookseller of whom the
+elder D'Israeli said 'all his publications were of the best kind'; the
+writer of various works including a _Life of Garrick_; and a particular
+friend of Dr Johnson. In the first year of Fielding's management in the
+Haymarket, Davies was cast for a principal part in George Lillo's tragedy
+_Fatal Curiosity_; and it is to his pen that we owe the only known
+contemporary reference to the active part taken by Fielding himself in the
+affairs of his theatre.
+
+Lillo, a jeweller of Moorfields, had captured the town, a few years
+previously, by his tragedy of common life, _George Barnwell_; and among
+the dramatists selected by Fielding for representation on his stage the
+most interesting is undoubtedly this pioneer of the coming revolution in
+English literature. For, incredible as it may seem, until that first
+performance of _Barnwell_, no writer, to quote Tom Davies' own words "had
+ventured to descend so low as to introduce the character of a merchant or
+his apprentice into a tragedy." Certain "witty and facetious persons who
+call themselves the town," continues Davies, brought to the first night
+copies of the old ballad on which the jeweller's play was based, meaning
+to mock the new tragedy with the old song; but so forcible and pathetic
+were Lillo's scenes that these merry gentlemen were obliged "to throw away
+their ballads, and take out their handkerchiefs." More tears, we learn,
+were shed over this 'homespun drama' than at all the imitations of ancient
+fables by learned moderns. To Fielding this revolution, from the buskin'd
+heroics of the Alexanders and Clelias to the living and natural pathos of
+the tragedy of a poor London apprentice, must have appealed with
+extraordinary force; for it is the especial glory of his own genius that,
+throwing aside all the traditions of his age, and 'adventuring on one of
+the most original expeditions that ever a writer undertook,' [2] he was to
+discover a new world for English fiction, the world of simple human
+nature. That expedition must have been already forming in his mind when,
+night after night, in the hottest part of the year, _George Barnwell_ was
+playing to crowded houses, and convincing the astonished audiences of 1731
+that even so low a creature as a London apprentice was possessed of
+passions extremely like their own. Some ten years later, when Fielding
+revealed the first true sign of his own surpassing genius in the _History
+of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews_, he chose for his hero a country
+footman. The worthy City jeweller was, in his own limited measure, the
+forerunner, on the stage, of that new era in English literature created by
+honest Andrews and Parson Adams, Partridge and Mrs Slipslop, Fanny and
+Sergeant Atkinson, Tow-wouse and Mrs Miller, to name but a few of
+Fielding's immortal portraits, drawn from the 'vast authentic book of
+Nature.'
+
+It is no wonder then, to return to Tom Davies, that a play by Lillo was
+announced on the bills of Fielding's theatre within a few months of the
+opening of his management. On May 27, 1736, the following advertisement
+appeared:
+
+    "Guilt its Own Punishment. Never Acted before. By Pasquin's
+    Company of Comedians. Being a True Story in Common Life and the
+    Incidents extremely affecting." By the Author of George Barnwell.
+
+Davies' part in the play was a chief one, that of young Wilmot, and the
+story of the performance may be given in his own words. "Mr Fielding, who
+had a just sense of our author's merit, and who had often in his humourous
+pieces laughed at those ridiculous and absurd criticks who could not
+possibly understand the merit of Barnwell, because the subject was low,
+treated Lillo with great politeness and friendship. He took upon himself
+the management of the play and the instruction of the actors. It was
+during the rehearsal of the _Fatal Curiosity_ that I had an opportunity to
+see and to converse with Mr Lillo. Plain and simple as he was in his
+address, his manner of conversing was modest affable and engaging. When
+invited to give his opinion how a particular sentiment should be uttered
+by the actor he expresst himself in the gentlest and most obliging terms,
+and conveyed instruction and conviction with good nature and good
+manners.... Fielding was not content merely to revise the 'Fatal
+Curiosity,' and to instruct the actors how to do justice to their parts.
+He warmly recommended the play to his friends and to the public. Besides
+all this he presented the author with a well written prologue."
+
+This _Prologue_, which has apparently hitherto escaped the collectors of
+Fielding's _Works_, seems worthy of a reprint here, if only for its
+characteristic sympathy with virtue and distress 'in humble state,' and
+for the opening tribute to 'Shakespeare's nature' and to 'Fletcher's
+ease.'
+
+PROLOGUE TO THE FATAL CURIOSITY
+
+  "The Tragic Muse has long forgot to please
+  With Shakespeare's nature or with Fletcher's ease:
+  No passion mov'd, thro' five long acts you sit,
+  Charm'd with the poet's language or his wit.
+  Fine things are said, no matter whence they fall;
+  Each single character must speak them all.
+
+  "But from this modern fashionable way
+  To-night our author begs your leave to stray.
+  No fustian hero rages here to-night,
+  No armies fall to fix a tyrant's right:
+  From lower life we draw our scenes' distress:
+  --Let not your equals move your pity less!
+  Virtue distrest in humble state support;
+  Nor think she never lives without the court.
+
+  "Tho' to our scenes no royal robes belong
+  And tho' our little stage as yet be young
+  Throw both your scorn and prejudice aside;
+  Let us with favour not contempt be try'd,
+  Thro' the first act a kind attention lend
+  The growing scene shall force you to attend:
+  Shall catch the eyes of every tender fair,
+  And make them charm their lovers with a tear.
+  The lover too by pity shall impart
+  His tender passion to his fair one's heart:
+  The breast which others' anguish cannot move
+  Was ne'er the seat of friendship or of love."
+
+
+Notwithstanding all the manager's friendly efforts, the play met at first
+with very little success, a failure in Davies' opinion "owing in all
+probability to its being brought on in the latter part of the season, when
+the public had been satiated with a long run of _Pasquin_," but, he adds,
+"it is with pleasure I observe that Fielding generously persisted to serve
+the man whom he had once espoused; he tacked the 'Fatal Curiosity' to his
+Historical Register which was played with great success in the ensuing
+winter." [3]  We owe no inconsiderable debt to Tom Davies in that he has
+preserved for us this picture of Fielding, actively engaged in the
+stage-management of his little theatre; a picture, moreover, that does
+equal honour to the brilliant wit, the successful political satirist, and
+to that modest, gentle Nonconformist poet, the man of whom it was said
+that he "had the spirit of an old Roman joined to the innocence of a
+Primitive Christian," George Lillo.
+
+A few weeks before the production of Lillo's tragedy, and while _Pasquin_
+was still in the full tide of political success, an event occurred of
+closer import to Fielding's affectionate nature than all the applause of
+the Opposition and the town. This was the birth, in April, 1736, of his
+daughter Charlotte. No English writer has left more charming pictures of
+mother and child than those we owe to the tenderness and simplicity of
+Fielding's pen. When we find Squire Western turning, in his latter days,
+to Sophia's nursery, and hear him declaring that the prattling of his
+granddaughter is "sweeter Music than the finest Cry of Dogs in _England_"
+when we see Captain Booth stretched at full length on the floor of his
+poor lodgings, with his "little innocents" jumping over him, we are almost
+inclined to forgive alike the brutalities of the old foxhunter, and the
+weaknesses of the young soldier. Fielding's affection for his children,
+his apprehensions for their ultimate provision, his anxiety in their
+sickness, his grief at the loss of a little daughter, are manifest in his
+pages. If anything could exceed the satisfaction which the brilliant
+success of _Pasquin_ must have given to his buoyant nature, it would be
+the birth of this, the first child apparently, of his marriage with the
+beautiful Charlotte Cradock. The entry in the registers of St Martin's in
+the Fields runs as follows: Baptized May 19th, 1736 Charlotte Fielding, of
+Henry and Charlotte, Born April 27th.
+
+The dates of _Pasquin_, of Lillo's tragedy, and of the _Historical
+Register_, cover a considerable portion of the years 1736, 1737, and their
+production in a theatre under Fielding's own management practically
+presupposes his presence in London at that time. This by no means fits in
+with Murphy's implication that Fielding retired to Stour on his marriage,
+and that, remaining there, he ran through his "little patrimony," in "less
+than three years." A complete country retirement cannot be assigned to
+those busy years in the Haymarket; and in 1736 the journey from London to
+Dorsetshire was no trifling undertaking. But it seems quite possible that
+Fielding and his wife went down to their small estate in Dorsetshire for
+part or all of the summer, autumn and winter of both 1736 and 1737. This
+would cover the hunting months, and "hounds and horses," according to
+Murphy, filled a large part in Fielding's country life at Stour; the time
+would be that of the comparatively dull season for the theatre in the
+Haymarket; and, with the year immediately preceding _Pasquin_, we should
+thus, perhaps, account sufficiently for Murphy's "three years". Certain
+passages in the _Miscellanies_, published long after the pleasant meadows
+and the modest house at Stour--no less than the turmoil of the green-room
+and the crowded political audiences in the Haymarket--were things of the
+past, have a personal ring, reminiscent perhaps of such months of "sweet
+Retirement" in Dorsetshire. Thus one of the characters in the _Journey
+from this World to the next_ recalls the change, from a life of "restless
+Anxieties," to a "little pleasant Country House, where there was nothing
+grand or superfluous, but everything neat and agreeable"; and how, after a
+little time, "I began to share the Tranquillity that visibly appeared in
+everything round me. I set myself to do Works of Fancy and to raise little
+Flower-Gardens, with many such innocent rural Amusements; which altho'
+they are not capable of affording any great Pleasure, yet they give that
+serene Turn of the Mind, which I think much preferable to anything else
+Human Nature is made susceptible of." To this pleasant picture of "rural
+Amusements," and tranquillity, it is surely not impertinent to add this
+further passage, as a possible echo of Charlotte Fielding's thought, well
+acquainted as she must have been both with the "sweetly winding banks of
+Stour" and with the clamorous successes of political drama: "in all these
+various Changes I never enjoyed any real Satisfaction, unless in the
+little time I lived retired in the Country free from all Noise and Hurry."
+
+In the summer or autumn of 1737 the curtain was finally rung down on all
+the 'noise and hurry,' the achievements and audacities of Fielding's
+"little stage"; a few months later, and the country retirement at Stour
+had also become but a memory of that short life into which he managed to
+compress "more variety of Scenes than many People who live to be very
+old."
+
+[1] _Life of Garrick_. T. Davies, vol. ii.
+
+[2] _Works of Henry Fielding_, edited by Edmund Gosse. Introduction, p.
+xxix.
+
+[3] _The Works of Mr George Lillo, with some Account of his Life_, T.
+Davies.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+BAR STUDENT. JOURNALIST
+
+    "the ... Covetous, the Prodigal, the Ambitious, the Voluptuous,
+    the Bully, the Vain, the Hypocrite, the Flatterer, the Slanderer,
+    call aloud   for the _Champion's_ Vengeance."
+    --The _Champion_, Dec. 22, 1739.
+
+There is no record of when or how Fielding disposed of his share in the
+management of the New Theatre in the Haymarket. But on June 21 1737,
+Walpole's Bill for regulating the stage received, as we have seen, the
+royal assent; and there can be no doubt that Sir Robert would at once
+apply his newly acquired powers to removing the dances of the fiddler, Mr
+Quiddam, and the drunken consolations of Mr Pillage, from the Haymarket
+boards, if indeed these gentlemen had not anticipated events by already
+removing themselves. We may safely assume that Henry Fielding's career as
+political dramatist came to an abrupt conclusion some time in the summer
+of 1737. [1]
+
+It remains a matter for speculation why, after seven years spent in
+producing a stream of not unsuccessful social comedies and farces, leading
+up to a final and brilliant success in the field of political satiric
+drama, Fielding should have thrown up the stage as a whole, when suddenly
+debarred from those party onslaughts which had occupied but a fraction of
+his dramatic energies. The cause was not any lack of popularity. "The
+farces written by Mr Fielding," wrote Murphy in 1762, "were almost all of
+them very successful, and many of them are still acted every winter, with
+a continuance of approbation." And it is obvious that the fashionable
+vices and follies of the time afforded ample inducement to a satiric
+dramatist to continue 'laying about him,' even when Ministerial offences
+had been rendered inviolate by Act of Parliament. Neither was Fielding's
+sanguine temperament likely to be daunted by the single failure of his
+farce _Eurydice_, which had been damned at Drury Lane on February 19 of
+this same year: "disagreeable impressions," Murphy tells us, "never
+continued long upon his mind." The most satisfactory solution of the
+matter seems to be that now, in the approaching maturity of his powers,
+the 'Father of the English Novel' was becoming conscious that the true
+field for his genius lay in a hitherto unattempted form of imaginative
+narration, and not within the five acts of comedy or farce. The entirely
+original conceptions of a _Joseph Andrews_ and a _Jonathan Wild_ may
+already have begun to captivate the vigorous energies of his mind. We have
+his own word for assigning "some years" to the writing of _Tom Jones_; it
+is therefore not unreasonable to suppose that the conception of the first
+English "Comic Epic Poem in Prose" may date as far back as the summer of
+1737.
+
+Leaving surmise for fact, it is certain that this year marks the dividing
+line in Fielding's life.
+
+Henceforth he ceases to be the witty, facile, popular dramatist; and he
+enters slowly on his birthright as the first in time, if not in genius, of
+English novelists. To this complete severance from the theatre belongs his
+own remark that "he left off writing for the stage when he ought to have
+begun." Arrived at a late maturity, and with accumulated stores of
+observation and insight,--"he saw the latent sources of human action,"
+says Murphy--his genius happily turned into a channel carved, with
+splendid originality, for itself alone. After nine years of servitude to
+the limitations of dramatic construction, limitations he was wont to
+relieve, as his friend James Harris tells us, by "pleasantly though
+perhaps rather freely" _damning the man who invented fifth acts_, Fielding
+was now soon to discover his freedom in the spacious, hitherto
+unadventured, regions of prose fiction. But genius, especially genius with
+wife and child to support, cannot maintain life on inspiration alone; and,
+accordingly, the ex-dramatist now flung himself, with characteristic
+impetuosity and courage, into a struggle for independence at the Bar,
+perhaps the most arduous profession, under all the circumstances, that he
+could have chosen. For a reputation as the writer of eighteen comedies,
+and as the reckless political dramatist whose boisterous energies had set
+the town ringing with _Pasquin_ and the _Register_, the fame in short of
+being the successful manager of _The Great Mogul's Company of Comedians_,
+was surely the last reputation in the world to bring a man briefs from
+cautious attorneys. And, with whatever hopes of political patronage, any
+temperament less buoyant might well have hesitated to embark on reading
+for the Bar at the age of thirty. But "by dificulties," says his earliest
+biographer, "his resolution was never subdued; on the contrary they only
+roused him to struggle through them with a peculiar spirit and
+magnanimity." So, within six months of the closing down of his little
+theatre under Walpole's irate hand, Fielding had formally entered himself
+as a student at the Middle Temple.
+
+The entry in the books of that society runs as follows:--
+
+    [574 G] 1 Nov'ris. 1737.
+
+    _Henricus Fielding, de East Stour in Com Dorset Ar, filius et
+    haeres apparens Brig: Gen'lis: Edmundi Fielding admissus est in
+    Societatem Medii Templi Lond specialiter at obligatur una cum &c.
+
+    Et dat pro fine_ 4. 0. 0.
+
+Of the ensuing two and a half years of student life in the Temple we know
+practically nothing, beyond one vivacious picture of Harry Fielding's
+attack upon the law. "His application while a student in the Temple,"
+writes Murphy, "was remarkably intense; and though it happened that the
+early taste he had taken of pleasure would occasionally return upon him,
+and conspire with his spirits and vivacity to carry him into the wild
+enjoyments of the town, yet it was particular in him that amidst all his
+dispositions nothing could suppress the thirst he had for knowledge, and
+the delight he felt in reading; and this prevailed in him to such a
+degree, that he has been frequently known by his intimates, to retire late
+at night from a tavern to his chambers, and there read and make extracts
+from the most abstruse authors, for several hours before he went to bed;
+so powerful were the vigour of his constitution and the activity of his
+mind."
+
+One of the few pages of Fielding's autograph that have come down to us is
+presumably a relic of these student days. In the catalogue of the
+_Morrison Manuscripts_ occurs this description of two undated pages in his
+hand: "List of offences against the King and his state immediately, which
+the Law terms High Treason. Offences against him in a general light as
+touching the Commonwealth at large, as Trade etc. Offences against him as
+supreme Magistrate etc." Were ever genius and wit more straitly or more
+honourably shackled than that of Henry Fielding, gallantly accepting such
+toil as this, toil moreover that must have weighed with double weight on a
+man who had spent nine years in the company of those charming if 'fickle
+jades' the Muses.
+
+All efforts have failed to trace where Fielding and his wife and child (or
+children--the date of the birth of his daughter Harriet is not known)
+lived during these laborious months; but that money was needed in the
+summer following his entry at the Middle Temple may be inferred from the
+sale of the property at Stour. According to the legal note of this
+transaction, [2] "Henry ffeilding and Charlotte his wife" conveyed, in the
+Trinity Term of 1738, to one Thomas Hayter, for the sum of L260, "two
+messuages, two dove-houses, three gardens, three orchards, fifty acres of
+Land, eighty acres of meadow, one hundred and forty acres of pasture, ten
+acres of wood and common and pasture for all manner of cattle with the
+appurtenances in East Stour." It does not need a very active imagination
+to realise the keen regret with which Fielding must have parted with his
+gardens and orchards, his pastures, woods and commons. Sixty years ago the
+barn and one of the "dove-houses" had been but recently pulled down; and
+to this day the estate is still known as "Fielding's Farm." [3]
+
+It has been stated, on what authority does not appear, that, after leaving
+Stour, Fielding went to Salisbury, and there bought a house, his solicitor
+being a Mr John Perm Tinney. Whatever be the fact as to the Salisbury
+residence, it is certain that a full year after the sale of the
+Dorsetshire property the Temple student was by no means at the end of his
+resources. For in the following letter [4] to Mr Nourse, the bookseller,
+dated July 1739, we find him requiring a London house at a rent of forty
+pounds and with a large "eating Parlour."
+
+
+"Mr Nourse,
+
+Disappointments have hitherto prevented my paying y'r Bill, which, I
+shall certainly do on my coming to Town which will be next Month. I
+desire the favour of y'u to look for a House for me near the Temple. I
+must have one large eating Parlour in it for the rest shall not be very
+nice.
+
+Rent not upwards of L40 p. an: and as much cheaper as may be. I will take
+a Lease for Seven years. Yr Answer to this within a fortnight will much
+oblige.
+
+Y'r Humble Serv't
+
+Henry Ffielding.
+
+I have got Cro: Eliz. [5]
+
+"July 9th 1739."
+
+This note, written a year before Fielding's call to the Bar, suggests
+that his early married life was by no means spent in the "wretched
+garrett" of Lady Louisa Stuart's celebrated reminiscence.
+
+In the September following the sale of his Dorsetshire estate Fielding had
+to regret the death of George Lillo, to whose success he had devoted so
+much personal care and energy, when staging Lillo's tragedy _Fatal
+Curiosity_ on the boards of the little theatre in the Haymarket. The close
+relationship in intellectual sympathy between Lillo's talent and the
+genius of Fielding has already been noticed. But apart from this
+intellectual sympathy, the personal worth and charm of the good tradesman
+is noteworthy, as affording striking proof of the quality of man chosen by
+the 'wild Harry Fielding' for regard and friendship. And it should be
+remembered that in those days to bridge the social gulf between the
+kinsman of the Earl of Denbigh and a working jeweller, required courage as
+well as insight. Some time after Lillo's death a generous memorial notice
+of him appeared in Fielding's paper the _Champion_. The writer detects in
+his work "an Heart capable of exquisitely Feeling and Painting human
+Distresses, but of causing none"; and declares that his title to be called
+the best tragic poet of his age, "was the least of his Praise, he had the
+gentlest and honestest Manners, and, at the same Time, the most friendly
+and obliging. He had a perfect Knowledge of Human Nature, though his
+Contempt of all base Means of Application, which are the necessary Steps
+to great Acquaintance, restrained his Conversation within very narrow
+Bounds: He had the Spirit of an old _Roman_, joined to the Innocence of a
+primitive Christian; he was content with his little State of Life, in
+which his excellent Temper of Mind gave him an Happiness, beyond the Power
+of Riches, and it was necessary for his Friends to have a sharp Insight
+into his Want of their Services, as well as good Inclinations or Abilities
+to serve him. In short he was one of the best of Men, and those who knew
+him best will most regret his Loss." [6] In the excellent company of Henry
+Fielding's friends George Lillo may surely take his stand beside the 'good
+Lord Lyttelton,' the munificent and pious Allen, and not far from 'Parson
+Adams' himself.
+
+No record has survived of Fielding's share in the political struggles of
+his party, during his first two years of "intense application" to the law.
+Walpole's power had been sensibly lessened by the death of the Queen, and
+he was losing the support of the country and even of the trading classes.
+The Prince of Wales, now openly hostile to the "great man," was the
+titular head of an Opposition numbering almost all the men of wit and
+genius in the kingdom. Lyttelton, Fielding's warmest friend, had become
+secretary to the Prince, and was recognised as a fluent leader of the
+Opposition in the House of Commons. Another friend, John Duke of Argyll,
+had joined the ranks of the Opposition in the Lords. On the whole the
+author of _Pasquin_, may well have hoped for a speedy fall of the
+"Colossos," with "its Brains of Lead, its Face of Brass, its Hands of
+Iron, its Heart of Adamant," and the accession to power of a party not
+without obligations to the fearless manager of the little theatre in the
+Haymarket. During these years the Opposition, even though supported by
+Pope and Chesterfield, Thomson and Bolingbroke, could scarcely fail to
+utilise the trenchant scorn, the whole-hearted vigour, the boisterous
+humour, of Fielding's genius; and Murphy, speaking vaguely of Fielding's
+legal years, says that a "large number of fugitive political tracts, which
+had their value when the incidents were actually passing on the great
+scene of business, came from his pen." It is not however till November
+1739, two years and a half after the pillorying of Walpole on the
+Haymarket boards, that Fielding is again clearly seen, 'laying about' him,
+in those clamourous eighteenth-century politics.
+
+His choice of a new weapon of attack is foreshadowed in the noble
+concluding words of the _Introduction_ to the _Historical Register_; words
+written on the very eve of the Ministerial Bill gagging that and all other
+political plays: "If nature hath given me any talents at ridiculing vice
+and imposture, I shall not be indolent, nor afraid of exerting them, while
+the liberty of the press and stage subsists, that is to say while we have
+any liberty left among us." A few weeks after these words were published
+the liberty of the stage was triumphantly stifled by Walpole's Licensing
+Bill. But even "old Bob" himself dared not lay his hand on the liberty of
+the British Press; and so we find Mr Pasquin reappearing under the guise,
+or in the company, of the _Champion and Censor of Great Britain_,
+otherwise one _Captain Hercules Vinegar_, a truculent avenger of wrong and
+exponent of virtue, in whose fictitious name a political, literary, and
+didactic newspaper entered the field of party politics on November 15,
+1739. The paper, under the title of the _Champion_, was issued three times
+a week, and consisted of one leading article, an anti-Ministerial summary
+of news, and literary notices of new books. The first number announced
+that the author and owner was the said Captain Hercules Vinegar, and that
+the Captain would be aided in various departments by members of his
+family. Thus the Captain's wife, Mrs Joan Vinegar, a matron of a very
+loquacious temper, was to undertake the ladies' column, and his son Jack
+was to have "an Eye over the gay Part of the Town." The criticism was to
+be conducted by Mr Nol Vinegar who was reported to have spent one whole
+year in examining the use of a single word in Horace. And the politics
+were to be dealt forth by the Captain's father, a gentleman intimately
+versed in kingdoms, potentates and Ministers, and of so close a
+disposition that he "seldom opens his Mouth, unless it be to take in his
+Food, or puff out the Smoke of his Tobacco."
+
+The paper bore no signed articles; but judging from an attack levelled
+against it in a pamphlet of the following year, [7] Fielding and his
+former not very worshipful partner in the Haymarket management, James
+Ralph, were the reputed "authors," Ralph being in a subordinate position.
+Thus, it is stated that Ralph, "is now say'd to be the 'Squire of the
+_British_ CHAMPION"; the writer identifies _Captain Vinegar_ and the
+author of _Pasquin_ as one and the same person; he describes Pasquin and
+Ralph as the "Authors of the Champion"; he asserts that the old Roman
+statues of Pasquin and Marfario, "are now dignified and distinguished (by
+The CHAMPION and his doughty Squire RALPH), under the Names [_sic_] of
+Captain Hercules Vinegar."; he prints an address to the "_Self-dubb'd
+Captain_ Hercules Vinegar," and his "Man _Ralph_"; and appends some
+doggerel verse entitled "Vinegar and his gang." But from all this nothing
+definite emerges as to the precise part taken by Fielding in the
+authorship of the _Champion_. The pamphleteer accredits a fragment of a
+paper signed C. to the _Captain_, and attributes two papers, [8] signed C.
+and L., to "Mr Pasquin"--_i.e._ Fielding; and as the reprint of the
+_Champion_, which appeared in 1741, announces that all papers so signed
+are the "Work of one Hand," there is so much external proof that all such
+pages in these volumes (numbering some sixty essays) are by Fielding. Dr
+Nathan Drake, writing in 1809, more than sixty years after the appearance
+of the paper, asserts, without stating his reasons, that the numbers
+marked "C." and "L." "were the work of Fielding." This view is further
+supported by the opinion of Mr Austin Dobson, that many of the papers
+signed _C._ "are unmistakably Fielding's."
+
+On the other hand Murphy, writing only twenty-two years after the
+appearance of the paper, but often with gross inaccuracy, states that the
+_Champion_ "owed its chief support to his [Fielding's] abilities," but
+that "his essays in that collection cannot now be so ascertained as to
+perpetuate them in this edition of his works." Boswell refers to Fielding
+as possessing a "share" in the paper. A manuscript copy of some of the
+Minutes of meetings of the _Champion_ partners, written out in an
+eighteenth-century handwriting, and now in the possession of the present
+writer, confirms Boswell's note, in as far as an entry therein records
+that "Henry Fielding Esq. did originally possess Two Sixteenth Shares of
+the Champion as a Writer in the said paper." One of the lists of the
+partners of the _Champion_ which occur in the same manuscript, is headed
+by the name of "Mr Fielding." Finally, a contemporary satirical print
+shows Fielding with his "length of nose and chin" and his tall figure,
+acting as standard-bearer of the _Champion_; the paper being represented
+in its political capacity of a leading Opposition organ. There is,
+moreover, the internal evidence of style and sentiment. Thus the matter
+rests; and although it is exceedingly tempting to use the _Champion_ for
+inferences as to the manner in which Fielding approached his new craft of
+journalism, and as to his attitude on the many subjects, theological,
+social, political and personal, handled in these essays, the evidence
+seems hardly sufficient to warrant such deductions. It does, however, seem
+clear, taking as evidence the shilling pamphlet already
+mentioned,[9] that Harry Fielding, the intrepid and audacious Mr Pasquin
+of 1736-7 reappeared, laying about him with his ever ready cudgel now
+raised to the dignity of a miraculous Hercules club, as the _Champion_ of
+1739-41. To all lovers of good cudgelling, whether laid on the shoulders
+of the incorrigible old cynic Sir Robert, or on those of the egregious
+Colley Cibber, or falling on the follies and abuses of the day, the
+"Pasquinades and Vinegarades" of _Captain Hercules Vinegar_, and his
+"doughty Squire Ralph," may be commended. And no fault can be found with
+the _Captain's_ declaration, when establishing a Court of Judicature for
+the trial and punishment of sundry offenders in his pages, that "whatever
+is wicked, hateful, absurd, or ridiculous, must be exposed and punished,
+before this Nation is brought to that Height of Purity and good Manners to
+which I wish to see it exalted." [10]
+
+One personal sketch of Fielding himself deserves quotation, whether drawn
+by his own hand or that of another. The _Champion_ for May 24, 1740,
+contains a vision of the Infernal Regions, where Charon, the ghostly
+boatman, is busy ferrying souls across the River Styx. The ferryman bids
+his attendant Mercury see that all his passengers embark carrying nothing
+with them; and the narrator describes how, after various Shades had
+qualified for their passage, "A tall Man came next, who stripp'd off an
+old Grey Coat with great Readiness, but as he was stepping into the Boat,
+_Mercury_ demanded half his Chin, which he utterly refused to comply with,
+insisting on it that it was all his own." Fielding's length of chin and
+nose was well known; and not less familiar, doubtless, was the 'old Grey
+Coat,' among the purlieus of the Temple.
+
+The beginning of the year 1740, when the lusty _Champion_ and his cudgel
+were well established, and _Captain Hercules'_ private legal studies were
+drawing to a close, was marked by a fresh outburst of the old feud with
+Colley Cibber. Cibber, already notorious as actor, dramatist, manager, the
+Poet Laureat of "preposterous Odes," and the 'poetical Tailor' who would
+even cut down Shakespeare himself, now appeared in the character of
+historian and biographer, publishing early in 1740 the famous _Apology for
+the Life of Mr Colley Cibber, Comedian, and late Patentee of the Theatre
+Royal. With an Historical View of the Stage during his Own Time._
+
+Cibber, soon to be scornfully chosen by Pope as dunce-hero of the
+_Dunciad_, had, for the past six years, been pilloried by Fielding; and,
+not unmindful of these onslaughts, he inserted in his new work a virulent
+attack on the late manager of the New Theatre in the Haymarket. The tenor
+of _Pasquin_ was here grossly misrepresented. Fielding was described as
+being, at the time of entering on his management, "a Broken Wit"; he was
+accused of using the basest dramatic means of profit, since "he was in
+haste to get money"; and the final insult was added by Cibber's stroke of
+referring to his enemy anonymously, as one whom "I do not chuse to name."
+
+Looking back across two centuries on to the supreme figures of Pope and
+Fielding, it is matter for some wonder that these giants of the intellect
+should have greatly troubled to annihilate a Colley Cibber. A finer
+villain, it seems to us, might have been chosen by Pope for the six
+hundred lines of his _Dunciad_ a worthier target might have drawn the
+arrows of Fielding's _Champion_. But Cibber possessed at least the art of
+arousing notable enmities; and the four slashing papers in which the
+_Champion_ [11] promptly parried the scurrilities of the _Apology_ still
+make pretty reading for those who are curious in the annals of literary
+warfare. It is noteworthy that these _Champion_ retorts are honourably
+free from the personalities of an age incredibly gross in the use of
+personal invective. Fielding's journal, even under the stinging
+provocation of the insults of the _Apology_, was still true to the
+standard set in the _Prologue_ of his first boyish play
+
+  'No private character these scenes expose.'
+
+It is Cibber's ignorance of grammar, his murder of the English tongue,
+his inflated literary conceit, rather than his 'private character' that
+are here exposed.
+
+Some time during the latter half of 1740 the whole feud between Cibber,
+Pope, Fielding and Ralph was reprinted in the shilling pamphlet, already
+referred to, entitled _The Tryal of Colley Cibber_. The collection
+concludes as follows:
+
+    "ADVERTISEMENT
+
+    "If the Ingenious _Henry Fielding_ Esq.; (Son of the Hon.
+    Lieut. General  _Fielding_, who upon his Return from his
+    Travels entered Himself of the  _Temple_ in order to study
+    the Law, and married one of the pretty Miss  _Cradocks_ of
+    _Salisbury_) will _own_ himself the AUTHOR of 18
+    strange Things  called Tragical _Comedies_ and Comical
+    _Tragedies_, lately advertised by _J. Watts_, of
+    _Wild-Court_, Printer, he shall be _mentioned_ in
+    Capitals in the _Third_ edition of Mr CIBBER'S _Life_,
+    and likewise be placed _among_ the _Poetae minores
+    Dramatici_ of the Present Age; then will both his _Name and
+    Writings be remembered on Record_ in the immortal _Poetical
+    Register_ written by Mr Giles Jacob."
+
+
+The whole production affords a lively example of the full-blooded
+pamphleteering of 1740; and throws valuable light on Fielding's repute as
+the _Champion_.
+
+As regards Ralph's collaboration with Fielding at this period (a
+collaboration further affirmed by Dr Nathan Drake's assertion, written in
+1809, that James Ralph was Fielding's chief coadjutor in that paper) it
+may be recalled that ten years previously this not very reputable American
+had provided a prologue for Fielding's early play, the _Temple Beau_; and
+that he appears again as Fielding's partner in the management of the
+Little Theatre in the Haymarket. Gradually relinquishing his theatrical
+ambitions, Ralph appears to have turned his talents to political
+journalism, and according to Tom Davies was becoming formidable as a party
+writer for the Opposition in these last years of Walpole's administration.
+Boswell tells us that Ralph ultimately succeeded Fielding in his share of
+the _Champion_; [12] but we have no definite knowledge of what precise
+part was taken by him in the earlier numbers. No continued trace occurs of
+his collaboration with Fielding; and indeed it is difficult to conceive
+any permanent alliance between Fielding's manly, independent, and generous
+nature, and the sordid and selfish character, and mediocre talents of
+James Ralph.
+
+[1] The fullest newspaper for theatrical notices at this date, preserved
+in the British Museum, the _London Daily Post_, is unfortunately missing
+for this year.
+
+[2] Now first printed, from documents at the Record Office.
+
+[3] A table inscribed by a former owner as having belonged to Henry
+Fielding, Esq., novelist, is now in the possession of the Somersetshire
+Archaeological Society. The inscription adds that Fielding "hunted from
+East Stour Farm in 1718." He would then be eleven years old!
+
+[4] From the hitherto unpublished original, in the library of Alfred Huth,
+Esq.
+
+[5] "Cro: Eliz." is the legal abbreviation for Justice Croke's law reports
+for the reign of Elizabeth.
+
+[6] _Champion_, February 26, 1740.
+
+[7] _The Tryal of Colley Cibber, Comedian etc._ 1740.
+
+[8] Those of April 22, and April 29, 1740.
+
+[9] And see _Daily Gazeteer_, Oct. 9, 1740.
+
+[10] _Champion_, December 22, 1739.
+
+[11] For April 22, April 29, May 6, and May 17.
+
+[12] Boswell's _Johnson_, edited by Birkbeck Hill. Vol. i. p. 169. n. 2:
+"Ralph ... as appears from the minutes of the partners of the _Champion_
+in the possession of Mr Reed of Staple Inn, succeeded Fielding in his
+share of the paper before the date of that eulogium [1744]."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+"COUNSELLOR FIELDING"
+
+    "Wit is generally observed to love to reside in empty pockets."
+    _Joseph Andrews_.
+
+The last retort on Colley Cibber had scarcely been launched from the
+columns of the _Champion_, when that intrepid 'Censor of Great Britain'
+and indefatigable law student, _Captain Hercules Vinegar_, attained the
+full dignities of a barrister of the Middle Temple. On June 20, 1740,
+Fielding was called to the Bar; and on the same day the Benchers of his
+Inn assigned to him chambers at No. 4 Pump Court, "up three pair of
+stairs." This assignment, according to the wording of the Temple records,
+was "for the term of his natural life." These chambers may still be seen,
+with their low ceilings and panelled walls, very much to all appearance as
+when tenanted by Harry Fielding. The windows of the sitting-room and
+bedroom look out on to the beautiful old buildings of Brick Court, and
+from the head of the staircase one looks across to the stately gilded
+sundial of Pump Court, old even in Fielding's day, with its warning motto:
+
+  "Shadows we are and like shadows depart."
+
+Here, in these lofty chambers, up their "three pair" of worn and narrow
+stairs, Fielding donned his barrister's gown, and waited for briefs; and,
+possessing as he did an imagination "fond of seizing every gay prospect,"
+and natural spirits that gave him, as his cousin Lady Mary tells us,
+cheerfulness in a garret, this summer of 1740 must have been full of
+sanguine hopes. He was now thirty-three, and his splendid physique had not
+yet become shattered by gout. He had gained, Murphy observes, no
+inconsiderable reputation by the _Champion_; his position as a brilliant
+political playwright had been long ago assured by _Pasquin_; the party to
+whose patriotic interests he had devoted so much energy and wit was now
+rapidly approaching power; and two years of eager application had equipped
+him with 'no incompetent share of learning' for a profession in which, we
+are told, he aspired to eminence. The swift disappointment of these brave
+hopes, the fast coming years of sickness, distress, and grief endow the
+old chambers with something of tragedy; but in June, 1740, the shadows
+were still but a sententious word on the dial.
+
+There is practically no surviving record of Fielding's activity as a
+barrister. From Murphy we learn that his pursuit of the law was hampered
+by want of means; and that, moreover, even his indomitable energies were
+soon often forced to yield to disabling attacks of illness. So long as his
+health permitted him he "attended with punctual assiduity" on the Western
+circuit, and in term time at Westminster Hall. But gout rapidly "began to
+make such assaults upon him as rendered it impossible for him to be as
+constant at the bar as the laboriousness of his profession required," and
+he could only follow the law in intervals of health. Under such
+"severities of pain and want" he yet made efforts for success; and the
+tribute rendered by his first biographer to the courage of those efforts
+deserves quotation in full: "It will serve to give us an idea of the great
+force of his mind, if we consider him pursuing so arduous a study under
+the exigencies of family distress, with a wife and children, whom he
+tenderly loved, looking up to him for subsistence, with a body lacerated
+by the acutest pains, and with a mind distracted by a thousand avocations
+and obliged for immediate supply to produce almost extempore a farce, a
+pamphlet, or a newspaper." Murphy's careless pen seems here to confuse the
+student years with those of assiduous effort at the Bar; and the extempore
+farces are, judging by the dates of Fielding's collected plays, no more
+than a rhetorical flourish: but there seems no reason to doubt the
+essential truth of this picture of the vigorous struggles of the sanguine,
+witty, and not unlearned barrister, ambitious of distinction, and always
+sensitively anxious as to the maintenance of his wife and children. We may
+see him attending the Western circuit in March and again in August, riding
+from Winchester to Salisbury, thence to Dorchester and Exeter, and on to
+Launceston, Taunton, Bodmin, Wells or Bristol as the case might be;
+constant in his appearance at Westminster; and supplementing his briefs by
+political pamphlets written in the service of an Opposition supported by
+the intellect and integrity of the day.
+
+It is inexplicable that no records, in the letters or diaries of his
+brother lawyers, should have come down to us of circuits, enlivened by the
+wit of Harry Fielding; that practically all traces of his professional
+work should be lost; and that concerning the many friendships which he is
+recorded to have made at the Bar we should know practically nothing beyond
+his own cordial acknowledgment of the lawyers' response, three years after
+his call, to the subscription for the _Miscellanies_. In the preface to
+those volumes he writes: "I cannot however forbear mentioning my sense of
+the Friendship shown me by a Profession of which I am a late and unworthy
+Member, and from whose Assistance I derive more than half the Names which
+appear to this subscription." All that we have to add to this, is the
+unconscious humour of Murphy's observation that the friendships Fielding
+met with "in the course of his studies, and indeed through the remainder
+of his life from the gentlemen of the legal profession in general, and
+particularly from some who have since risen to be the first ornaments of
+the law, will ever do honour to his memory." Had the names of these worthy
+'ornaments' been preserved, posterity could now give them due recognition
+as having been honoured by the friendship of Henry Fielding. [1]
+
+Fielding in his habit, as he lived, is for ever eluding us. His tall
+figure vanishes behind the prolific playwright, the exuberant politician,
+the truculent journalist, the indefatigable magistrate, the great creative
+genius. But at no point does the wittiest man of his day, and a lawyer of
+some repute--'Mr Fielding is allowed to have acquired a respectable share
+of jurisprudence'--escape us so completely as during these years of
+'punctual assiduity' at the Bar. His very domicile is unknown, after the
+surrender of those pleasant chambers in Pump Court, on November 28 1740.
+
+The political activities of "Counsellor Fielding" stand out far more
+clearly than do the legal labours of these years of struggle at the Bar.
+The year of his call, 1740, was one of constant embarrassment for Sir
+Robert Walpole, whose long enjoyment of single power was now at last
+drawing to a miserable close. The conduct of the Spanish War was
+arraigned, and suggestions were made that the Government were in secret
+alliance with the enemy. When the news came, in March, that Walpole's
+parliamentary opponent, the bluff Admiral Vernon, had captured Porto Bello
+from Spain, with six ships only, the public rejoicing and votes of
+congratulation were so many attacks on the peace-at-any-price Minister. A
+powerful fleet, designed against Spain, lay inactive in Torbay the greater
+part of the summer, through (alleged) contrary winds. And when Parliament
+met in November 1740, an onslaught by the Duke of Argyll in the Lords
+paved the way for the celebrated attack on Sir Robert in the Commons,
+known as "The Motion" of February 13, 1741. A fine political cartoon
+published in the following month, and here reproduced, in which Walpole
+appears as mocking at the death and burial of this same "Motion" of
+censure (which the House had rejected), places Fielding in the forefront
+of the Opposition procession. The dead "Motion" is being carried to the
+"Opposition" family vault, already occupied by Jack Cade and other
+"reformers"; and the bier is preceded by five standard-bearers, sadly
+carrying the insignia of the party's papers. Among these, and second only
+to the famous _Craftsman_, comes Fielding's tall figure, bearing aloft a
+standard inscribed _The Champion_, and emblazoned with that terrible club
+of _Captain Hercules Vinegar_, which, we may recall, was always ready to
+"fall on any knave in company." Behind the bier hobbles, clearly, the old
+Duchess of Marlborough; and Walpole's fat figure stands in the foreground,
+laughing uproariously at this "Funeral of Faction." In the doggerel verses
+beneath this cartoon, it is very plainly hinted that "old Sarah," and the
+Opposition, were in league with the Stewarts. In this historic debate, for
+which members secured seats at six o'clock in the morning, the vote of
+censure on "the _one person_" arraigned was defeated, Sir Robert once
+again securing a majority, and so "the Motion" as the cartoonist depicts,
+died "of a Disappointment." Another cartoon commemorating this ill-fated
+effort is instructive as showing, again in the foreground of the fight, a
+figure wearing a barrister's wig, gown, and bands, and inscribed with the
+words _Pasquin_ and _The Champion_. The Opposition Leader, Pulteney, leads
+both the _Pasquin_ figure, and another representing the paper _Common
+Sense_, literally by the nose with the one hand, while with the other he
+neatly catches, on his drawn sword, Walpole's organ the _Gazetteer_. In
+doggerel verses attached to the print Fielding is complimented with the
+following entire verse to himself:--
+
+  "Then the Champion of the Age,
+  Being Witty, wise, and Sage,
+  Comes with Libells on the Stage."
+
+This _Pasquin_ figure has none of the personal characteristics of
+Fielding, neither his "length of nose" nor his stately stature, so well
+suggested in the former print; but, lay figure though it be, it symbolises
+no less clearly the prominent part he played in these final political
+struggles of 1741. Also the lawyer's dress with which Fielding is here
+signified is noteworthy; and similar acknowledgment of his new dignities
+may be seen in the reference (in a copy of Walpole's _Gazetteer_ for 1740)
+to the attacks levelled on Sir Robert by "Captain Vinegar--_i.e._
+Counsellor F---d--g."
+
+These popular indications of Fielding's activity in the fighting ranks of
+the Opposition, during this last year of Walpole's domination, are
+supplemented by the evidence of his own pen. As early as January 1741, and
+while the grand Parliamentary attack of the 13th of February was but
+brewing, he published an eighteenpenny pamphlet, in verse, satirising Sir
+Robert's lukewarm conduct of the war with Spain. To the title of _The
+Vernoniad_, there was added a lengthy mock-title in Greek, the whole being
+presented as a lost fragment by Homer, describing, in epic style, the
+mission of one "Mammon" sent by Satan to baffle the fleets of a nation
+engaged in war with _Iberia_. "Mammon" is a perfectly obvious satirical
+sketch of Walpole himself, in the execution of which the hand that had
+drawn the corrupt fiddler "Mr Quidam" and the tipsy "Mr Pillage" for the
+Haymarket stage, has in no wise lost its cunning. "Mammon" (Walpole was
+reputed to have amassed much wealth) hides his palace walls by heaps of
+"ill-got Pictures." The pictures collected at Houghton, the Minister's
+pretentious Norfolk seat, were famous; and the notes to the "Text" are
+careful to depict, in illustration, "some rich Man without the least Taste
+having purchased a Picture at an immense Price, lifting up his eyes to it
+with Wonder and Astonishment, without being able to discover wherein its
+true Merit lies." "Mammon" declares virtue to be but a name, and his
+wonted eloquence is bribery. Sir Robert asserted that every man has his
+price. "Mammon" preserves dulness and ignorance, "while Wit and Learning
+starve." Walpole's illiterate tastes were notorious. At the close of the
+poem, "Mammon" accomplishes the behest of his master, Satan, by bribing
+contrary winds to drive back the English ships (a satire on Walpole's
+conduct of the war); and he finally returns to hell, and "in his Palace
+keeps a _three Weeks'_ Feast." Sir Robert it may be noted usually
+entertained for three weeks, in the spring, at Houghton. The whole is a
+slashing example of the robust eighteenth-century political warfare,
+polished by constant classical allusions and quotations; and doubtless it
+was read with delight in the coffee houses of the Town in that critical
+winter of 1740-1741. Two characteristic allusions must not be omitted.
+Even in the heat of party hard hitting Fielding finds time for a thrust at
+Colley Cibber, whose prose it seems was in several places by no means to
+be comprehended till "explained by the _Herculean_ Labours of Captain
+_Vinegar_" And there is a pleasant reference to "my friend Hogarth the
+exactest Copier of Nature."
+
+In this first month of 1741, Fielding published yet another poetical
+pamphlet for his party, but of a less truculent energy. _True Greatness_
+is a poem inscribed to a recruit in the Opposition ranks, the celebrated
+George Bubb Dodington; and when the eulogiums offered by the poet to his
+political leaders, Argyll, Carteret, Chesterfield, and Lyttelton, to all
+of whom are ascribed that "True Greatness" which "lives but in the Noble
+Mind," are completed by a description of Dodington as irradiating a blaze
+of virtues, this particular pamphlet becomes somewhat rueful reading. For
+Dodington was, if report speaks true, a pliant politician as well as an
+ineffable coxcomb, although it must be admitted that he won eulogies and
+compliments alike from the perfect integrity of Lyttelton, and the
+honourable pen of James Thomson. Even Fielding's glowing lines do not
+outstrip Thomson's panegyric in _The Seasons_.
+
+A more enduring interest however than the merits or demerits of a
+Dodington, lies in this shilling pamphlet. In it is clearly foreshadowed
+Fielding's great ironic outburst on false greatness, given to the world a
+few years later in the form of the history of that Napoleon in villany,
+the "great" Mr Jonathan Wild. In the medium of stiff couplets (verse being
+"a branch of Writing" which Fielding admits "I very little pretend to")
+the subject-matter of the magnificent irony of _Jonathan Wild_ is already
+sketched. Here the spurious "greatness" of inhuman conquerors, of droning
+pedants, of paltry beaus, of hermits proud of their humility, is
+mercilessly laid bare; and something is disclosed of the "piercing
+discernment" of that genius which, Murphy tell us, "saw the latent sources
+of human actions."
+
+We have seen indications in Murphy's careless pages that these few years
+of Fielding's assiduous efforts at the Bar were years burdened by
+"severities of want and pain." It is difficult not to admit a reference to
+some such personal experiences in a passage in this same poem. The lines
+in question describe the Poet going hungry and thirsty
+
+  "As down Cheapside he meditates the Song"....
+
+a "great tatter'd Bard," treading cautiously through the streets lest he
+meet a bailiff, oppressed with "want and with contempt," his very liberty
+to "wholesome Air" taken from him, yet possessing the greatness of mind
+that no circumstances can touch, and the power to bestow a fame that shall
+outlive the gifts of kings. This latter claim foreshadows the magnificent
+apostrophe in _Tom Jones_ on that unconquerable force of genius, able to
+confer immortality both on the poet, and the poet's theme. Was the 'great
+tatter'd Bard,' cautiously treading the streets, little esteemed, and yet
+the conscious possessor of true greatness (did not the author of _Tom
+Jones_ rely with confidence on receiving honour from generations yet
+unborn), none other than the tall figure of Fielding himself? At least we
+know that soon after this year he writes of having lately suffered
+accidents and waded through distresses, sufficient to move the pity of his
+readers, were he "fond enough of Tragedy" to make himself "the Hero of
+one."
+
+One of the rare fragments of Fielding's autograph, [2] refers both to this
+pamphlet, and to the _Vernoniad_:
+
+
+"Mr Nourse,
+
+"Please to deliver Mr Chappell 50 of [crossed out: my] [_sic_] True
+Greatness and 50 of the Vernoniad.
+
+Y'rs
+
+"Hen. Ffielding.
+
+"_April_ 20 1741."
+
+In June of this year occurred the death of General Edmund Fielding,
+briefly noticed in the _London Magazine_ as that of an officer who "had
+served in the late Wars against _France_ with much Bravery and
+Reputation." The General's own struggles to support his large family
+probably prevented his death affecting the circumstances of his eldest
+son. In the same month Fielding appears as attending a "Meeting of the
+Partners in the Champion," held at the Feathers Tavern, on June 29. The
+list of the partners present at the Feathers is given as follows:--[3]
+
+    Present
+
+    Mr Fielding
+    Mr Nourse
+    Mr Hodges
+    Mr Chappelle
+
+    Mr Cogan
+    Mr Gilliver
+    Mr Chandler
+
+The business recorded was the sale of the "Impressions of the Champion in
+two Vollumes, 12'o, No. 1000." The impression was put up to the Company by
+auction, and was knocked down to Mr Henry Chappelle for L110, to be paid
+to the partners. The majority of the partners are declared by the Minutes
+to have confirmed the bargain; the minority, as appears from the list of
+signatures, being strictly that of one, Henry Fielding. After this
+dissension Fielding's name ceases to appear at the _Champion_ meetings;
+and as he himself states that he left off writing for the paper from this
+very month the evidence certainly points to a withdrawal on his part in
+June 1741 from both the literary and the business management of the paper.
+The edition referred to in the Minutes is doubtless that advertised in the
+_London Daily Post_ a few days before the meeting of the partners, as a
+publication of the _Champion_ "in two neat Pocket Volumes." [4]
+
+Meanwhile the whole force of the Opposition was thrown into the battle of
+a General Election; and it is interesting to note that Pitt stood for the
+seat for Fielding's boyish home, and the home of his wife, that of Old
+Sarum. The elections went largely against Walpole, and by the end of June
+defeat was prophesied for a Minister who would only be supported by a
+majority of sixteen.
+
+It is somewhat inexplicable that at this, the very moment of the
+approaching victory of his party Fielding appears to have withdrawn from
+all journalistic work. "I take this Opportunity to declare in the most
+solemn Manner," he writes, in after years, "I have long since (as long as
+from _June_ 1741) desisted from writing one Syllable in the _Champion_, or
+any other public Paper." And yet more unexpected is the fact that six
+months later, during the last weeks of Walpole's failing power, a rumour
+should be abroad that Fielding was assisting his old enemy. In one of his
+rare references to his private life, that in the Preface to the
+_Miscellanies_, he seeks to clear himself from unjust censures "as well on
+account of what I have not writ, as for what I have"; and, as an instance
+of such baseless aspersions, he relates that, in this winter of 1741, "I
+received a letter from a Friend, desiring me to vindicate myself from two
+very opposite Reflections, which two opposite Parties thought fit to cast
+on me, _viz_. the one of writing in the _Champion_ (tho' I had not then
+writ in it for upwards of half a year) the other, of writing in the
+Gazetteer, in which I never had the honour of inserting a single Word."
+What can have occurred, in the bewildering turmoil of that
+eighteenth-century party strife, that the author of _Pasquin_, the
+possessor of "Captain Vinegar's" Herculean Club, should have to vindicate
+himself from a charge of writing in the columns of Walpole's _Gazetteer_.
+During these last months of Sir Robert's power his Cabinet was much
+divided, and two of his Ministers were in active revolt; possibly rumour
+assigned the services of the witty pen of Counsellor Fielding to these
+Opposition Ministerialists. But that some change did indeed take place in
+Fielding's political activities, in these last six months of 1741 is
+obvious from his withdrawal from writing in any "Public" paper; and from
+passages in the last political pamphlet known to have come from his pen.
+This pamphlet, entitled _The Opposition. A Vision_, was published in the
+winter of 1741, a winter of severe illness, and of "other circumstances"
+which, as he tells us, "served as very proper Decorations" to the sickbeds
+of himself, his wife, and child. It is a lively attack on the divided
+councils and leaders of the Opposition, thrown into the form of a dream,
+caused by the author's falling asleep over "a large quarto Book intituled
+'An apology for the Life of Mr Colley Gibber, Comedian.'" In his dream
+Fielding meets the Opposition, in the form of a waggon, drawn by very
+ill-matched asses, the several drivers of which have lost their way. The
+luggage includes the Motion for 1741, and a trunk containing the
+_Champion_ newspaper. One passenger protests that he has been hugely
+spattered by the "Dirt" of the "last Motion," and that he will get out,
+rather than drive through more dirt. A gentleman of "a meagre aspect" (is
+he the lean Lyttelton?) leaves the waggon; and another observes that the
+asses "appear to me to be the worst fed Asses I ever beheld ... that long
+sided Ass they call _Vinegar_, which the Drivers call upon so often to
+_gee up_, and _pull lustily_, I never saw an Ass with a worse Mane, or a
+more shagged Coat; and that grave Ass yoked to him, which they name
+_Ralph_, and who pulls and brays like the Devil, Sir, he does not seem to
+have eat since the hard Frost. [5] Surely, considering the wretched Work
+they are employed in, they deserve better Meat."
+
+The longsided ass, Vinegar, with the worst of manes and the most shagged
+coat, short even of provender, recalls the picture, drawn twelve months
+previously, of the great hungry tatter'd Bard; and the inference seems
+fair enough that for Fielding politics were no lucrative trade. A more
+creditable inference, in those days of universal corruption, it may be
+added, would be hard to find. The honour of a successful party writer who
+yet remained poor in the year 1741, must have been kept scrupulously
+clean. The _Vision_ proceeds to show the waggon, with two new sets of
+asses from Cornwall and Scotland (the elections had gone heavily against
+Walpole in both these districts), suddenly turning aside from the "Great
+Country Road" (the Opposition was known as the Country Party); and the
+protesting passengers are told that the end of their journey is "St
+James." Some of the asses, flinching, are "well whipt"; but the waggon
+leaves the dreamer and many of its followers far behind. Suddenly a Fat
+Gentleman's coach stops the way. The drivers threaten to drive over the
+coach, when one of the asses protests that the waggon is leaving the
+service of the country, and going aside on its own ends, and that "the
+Honesty of even an Ass would start" at being used for some purposes. The
+waggon is all in revolt and confusion, when the Fat Gentleman, who
+appeared to have "one of the pleasantest and best natured Countenances I
+ever beheld," at last had the asses unharness'd, and turned into a
+delicious meadow, where they fell to feeding, as after "long Abstinence."
+Finally, the pleasant-faced fat gentleman's coach proceeds on the way from
+which the waggon had deviated, carrying with it some of the former drivers
+of the same; the mob burn the derelict obstructing vehicle; and their
+noise, and the stink and smoke of the conflagration wake the dreamer.
+
+In this last word of Fielding's active political career (for his later
+anti-Jacobite papers are concerned rather with Constitutional and
+Protestant, than with party strife), a retirement from political
+collar-work is certainly signified. His reasons for such a step escape us
+in the mist of those confused and heated conflicts. His detestation of
+Walpole's characteristic methods may very well have roused his ever ready
+fighting instincts, whereas, once Walpole's fall was practically assured
+the weak forces of the Opposition (William Pitt being yet many years from
+power) could have availed but little to enlist his penetrating intellect.
+And he may by now have found that politics afforded, in those days, but
+scanty support to an honourable pen.
+
+But supposition, in lack of further evidence, is fruitless; all that we
+can clearly perceive is that this winter of sickness and distress marks a
+final severance from party politics. The hungry 'hackney writer' of the
+lean sides and shagged coat, if not, indeed, turned to graze in the fat
+meadow of his dream, was at last freed from an occupation that could but
+shackle the genius now ready to break forth in the publication of _Joseph
+Andrews_.
+
+[1] A tantalising reference to one such acquaintance occurs in Lord
+Campbell's _Lives of the Chancellors_. Vol. v. p. 357. In notes made by
+Lord Camden's nephew, George Hardinge, for a proposed Life of the Lord
+Chancellor there is this entry: "formed an acquaintance ... with Henry
+Fielding ... called to the Bar."
+
+[2] Now in the possession of W. K. Bixby, Esq., of St Louis, U.S.A.
+
+[3] In a manuscript copy of the Minutes, in the possession of the present
+writer.
+
+[4] _London Daily Post_, June 18-26, 1741.
+
+[5] The hard frost would be the terrible preceding winter of 1739-40, a
+winter long remembered for the severity of the cold, the cost of
+provisions, and the suffering of the poor.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+JOSEPH ANDREWS
+
+    "This kind of writing I do not remember to have seen hitherto
+    attempted in our language."
+    Preface to _Joseph Andrews_.
+
+On the 2nd of February 1742 Sir Robert Walpole, the 'Colossos' of popular
+broadsides, under whose feet England had lain for exactly thirty years,
+received his final defeat; and the intrepid wit, who for the past eight
+years had heartily lashed the tyrannies and corruptions of that 'Great
+Man,' enjoyed at last the satisfaction of witnessing the downfall of the
+_Mr Quiddam_ and _Mr Pillage_ of his plays, of the _Plunderer_ and
+_Mammon_ of his pamphlets, of the _Brass_ on whom many a stinging blow had
+fallen in the columns of his _Champion_.
+
+With the retirement of Walpole, Fielding's vigorous figure vanishes from
+active political service. No more caustic Greek epics, translated from the
+original "by Homer," no more boisterous interludes with three-bottle Prime
+Ministers appearing in the part of principal boy, come from his pen. But
+scarcely is the ink dry on the page of his last known political pamphlet,
+when Fielding reappears, in this Spring of 1742, not as the ephemeral
+politician, but as the triumphant discoverer of a new continent for
+English literature; as the leader of a revolution in imaginative writing
+which has outlived the Ministries and parties, the reforms, the broils,
+and warfares of two centuries. For, to-day, the fierce old contests of
+Whig and Tory, the far-off horrors of eighteenth-century gibbets, jails,
+and streets, the succession of this and that Minister, the French Wars and
+Pragmatic Sanctions of 1740 are all dead as Queen Anne. But the novel
+based on character, on human life, in a word on 'the vast authentic Book
+of Nature' is a living power; and it was by the publication, in February
+1742, of _The Adventures of Mr Joseph Andrews and his Friend Mr Abraham
+Adams_, that Fielding reveals himself as the father of the English novel.
+Henceforth we can almost forget the hard-hitting political _Champion_; we
+may quite forget the facile 'hackney writer' of popular farces, and the
+impetuous studies of the would-be barrister. With the appearance of these
+two small volumes Henry Fielding reaches the full stature of his genius as
+the first, and perhaps the greatest, of English novelists.
+
+It is difficult, at the present day, to realise the greatness of his
+achievement. Fielding found, posturing as heroines of romance, the
+_Clelias, Cleopatras, Astraeas_; he left the living women, Fanny Andrews,
+Sophia Western, Amelia Booth. "Amelia," writes his great follower
+Thackeray, "... the most charming character in English fiction,--Fiction!
+Why fiction? Why not history? I know Amelia just as well as Lady Mary
+Wortley Montagu." Again, Fielding found a world of polite letters, turning
+a stiff back on all "low" naturalness of life. He taught that world (as
+his friend Lillo had already essayed to do in his tragedy of a _London
+Merchant_) that the life of a humble footman, of a poor parson in a torn
+cassock, of the poverty-hunted wife of an impoverished army-captain, of a
+country lad without known parentage, interest or fortune, may make finer
+reading than all the Court romances ever written; and, moreover, that "the
+highest life is much the dullest, and affords very little humour or
+entertainment." And, having rediscovered this world of natural and simple
+human nature, his genius proceeded to the creation of nothing less than an
+entirely new form of English literary expression, the medium of the novel.
+
+The preface to _Joseph Andrews_ shows that Fielding was perfectly
+conscious of the greatness of his adventure. Such a species of writing, he
+says, "I do not remember to have seen hitherto attempted in our language."
+We can but wonder at, and admire, the superb energy and confidence which
+could thus embark on the conscious production of this new thing, amid
+want, pain, and distress. And wonder and admiration increase tenfold on
+the further discovery that this fresh creation in literature, fashioned in
+circumstances so depressing, is overflowing with an exuberance of healthy
+life and enjoyment. Having entered on his fair inheritance of this new
+world of human nature, Fielding pourtrays it from the standpoint of his
+own maxim, that life "everywhere furnishes an accurate observer with the
+ridiculous." So, into this, his newly-cut channel for imaginative
+expression (to use Mr Gosse's happy phrase) he poured the strength of a
+genius naturally inclined to that "exquisite mirth and laughter," which as
+he declared in his preface to these volumes, "are probably more wholesome
+physic for the mind and conduce better to purge away spleen, melancholy,
+and ill affections than is generally imagined." No book ever more
+thoroughly carried out this wholesome doctrine. The laughter in _Joseph
+Andrews_ is as whole-hearted, if not as noisy, the practical jokes are as
+broad, as those of a healthy school-boy; and the pages ring with a spirit
+and gusto recalling Lady Mary's phrase concerning her cousin "that no man
+enjoyed life more than he did." To quote again from Mr Gosse: "A good deal
+in this book may offend the fine, and not merely the superfine. But the
+vitality and elastic vigour of the whole carry us over every difficulty...
+and we pause at the close of the novel to reflect on the amazing freshness
+of the talent which could thus make a set of West country scenes, in that
+despised thing, a novel, blaze with light like a comedy of Shakespeare."
+
+So original in creation, so humane, so full of a brave delight in life,
+was the power that, mastering every gloomy obstacle of circumstance, broke
+into the stilted literary world of 1742; and Murphy's Irish rhetoric is
+not too warm when he talks of this sunrise of Fielding's greatness "when
+his genius broke forth at once, with an effulgence superior to all the
+rays of light it had before emitted, like the sun in his morning glory."
+
+Any detailed comment on the literary qualities of the genius which thus
+disclosed itself would exceed the limits of this memoir; and indeed such
+comment is, now, a thrice-told tale. To Sir Walter Scott, Fielding is the
+"father of the English novel"; to Byron, "the prose Homer of human
+nature." The magnificent tribute of Gibbon still remains a towering
+monument, whatever experts may tell us concerning the Hapsburg genealogy.
+"Our immortal Fielding," he wrote, "was of the younger branch of the Earls
+of Denbigh, who drew their origin from the Counts of Hapsburg. The
+successors of Charles V. may disdain their brethren of England; but the
+romance of _Tom Jones_, that exquisite picture of human manners, will
+outlive the palace of the Escurial and the Imperial Eagle of Austria."
+Smollett affirmed that his predecessor painted the characters, and
+ridiculed the follies, of life with equal strength, humour and propriety.
+The supreme autocrat of the eighteenth century, Dr Johnson himself, though
+always somewhat hostile to Fielding, read _Amelia_ through without
+stopping, and pronounced her to be 'the most pleasing heroine of all the
+romances.' "What a poet is here," cries Thackeray, "watching, meditating,
+brooding, creating! What multitudes of truths has that man left behind
+him: what generations he has taught to laugh wisely and fairly." Finally
+we may turn neither to novelist nor historian, but to the metaphysical
+philosopher, "How charming! How wholesome is Fielding!" says Coleridge,
+"to take him up after Richardson is like emerging from a sick-room, heated
+by stoves, into an open lawn on a breezy day in May." Such are some
+estimates of the quality of Fielding's genius, given by men not
+incompetent to appraise him. To analyse that genius is, as has been said,
+beyond the scope of these pages. But Fielding's first novel is not only a
+revelation of genius. It frankly reveals much of the man behind the pen;
+and in its pages, and in those of the still greater novels yet to come, we
+may learn more of the true Fielding than from all the fatuities and
+surmises of his early biographers.
+
+Thus in _Joseph Andrews_ for the first time we come really close to the
+splendid and healthy energy, the detachment, the relentless scorn, the
+warmth of feeling, that characterised Henry Fielding under all
+circumstances and at all times of his life. This book, as we have seen,
+was written under every outward disadvantage, and yet its pages ring with
+vigour and laughter. Here is the same militant energy that had nerved
+Fielding to fight the domination of a corrupt (and generally corrupting)
+Minister for eight lean years; and which in later life flung itself into a
+chivalrous conflict with current social crime and misery. Here is a
+detachment hardly less than that which fills the pages of the last
+_Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon_ with a courage, a gaiety, a serenity that
+no suffering and hardship, and not even the near approach of death itself,
+could disturb. Here, again, Fielding consciously avows a moral purpose in
+his art; the merciless scorn of his insight in depicting a vicious man or
+woman is actuated, he expressly declares, by a motive other than that of
+'art for art's sake.' And as this motive is scarce perceptible in the
+lifelike reality of the figures whom we see breathing in actual flesh and
+blood in his pages, and yet is of the first importance for understanding
+the character of their creator, the great novelist's confession of this
+portion of his literary faith may be quoted in full. The passage occurs in
+the preface to Book iii. of _Joseph Andrews_. Fielding is afraid, he
+explains, that his figures may be taken for particular portraits, whereas
+it is the type and not the individual that concerns him. "I declare here,"
+he solemnly affirms, "once for all, I describe not Men, but Manners; not
+an Individual, but a Species." And he proceeds to make example of the
+lawyer in the stage coach as not indeed confined "to one Profession, one
+Religion, or one Country; but when the first mean selfish Creature
+appeared on the human Stage, who made Self the Centre of the whole
+Creation; would give himself no Pain, incur no Damage, advance no Money to
+assist, or preserve his Fellow-Creatures; then was our Lawyer born; and
+while such a Person as I have described, exists on Earth, so long shall he
+remain upon it." Not therefore "to mimick some little obscure Fellow" does
+this lawyer appear on Fielding's pages, but "for much more general and
+noble Purposes; not to expose one pitiful Wretch, to the small and
+contemptible Circle of his Acquaintance; but to hold the Glass to
+thousands in their Closets that they may contemplate their Deformity, and
+endeavour to reduce it."
+
+Yet another characteristic of Fielding's personality appears in the
+conscious control exercised over all the humorous and satiric zest of
+_Joseph Andrews_. Here is no unseemly riot of ridicule. The ridiculous he
+declares in his philosophic preface is the subject-matter of his pages;
+but he will suffer no imputation of ridiculing vice or calamity. "Surely,"
+he cries, "he hath a very ill-framed Mind, who can look on Ugliness,
+Infirmity, or Poverty, as ridiculous in themselves"; and he formally
+declares that such vices as appear in this work "are never set forth as
+the objects of Ridicule but Detestation." What then were the limits which
+Fielding imposed on himself in treating this, his declared subject matter
+of the ridiculous? Hypocrisy and vanity, he says, appearing in the form of
+affectation; "Great Vices are the proper Object of our Detestation,
+smaller Faults of our Pity: but Affectation appears to me the only true
+Source of the Ridiculous." Such is Fielding's sensitive claim for the
+decent limits of ridicule; and such the consciously avowed subject of his
+work. But the force of his genius, the depth of his insight, the warmth of
+his detestations and affections, soon carried him far beyond any mere
+study in the ridicule of vain and hypocritical affectation. The immortal
+figure of Parson Adams, striding through these pages, tells us infinitely
+much of the character of his creator, but nothing at all of the nature of
+affectation. The "rural innocence of a Joseph Andrews," to quote Miss
+Fielding's happy phrase [1] and of his charming Fanny, are as natural and
+fresh as Fielding's own Dorsetshire meadows, but instruct us not at all in
+vanity or hypocrisy.
+
+To turn to the individual figures of _Joseph Andrews_; what do they tell
+us of the man who called them into being. First and foremost, it is Parson
+Adams who unquestionably dominates the book. However much the licentious
+grossness of Lady Booby, the shameless self-seeking of her waiting-woman,
+Mrs Slipslop, the swinish avarice of Parson Trulliber, the calculating
+cruelty of Mrs Tow-wouse, to name but some of the vices here exposed,
+blazon forth that 'enthusiasm for righteousness' which constantly moved
+Fielding to exhibit the devilish in human nature in all its 'native
+Deformity,' it is still Adams who remains the central figure of the great
+comic epic. Concerning the good parson, appreciation has stumbled for
+adequate words, from the tribute of Sir Walter Scott to that of Mr Austin
+Dobson. "The worthy parson's learning," wrote Sir Walter, "his simplicity,
+his evangelical purity of heart, and benevolence of disposition, are so
+admirably mingled with pedantry, absence of mind, and with the habit of
+athletic and gymnastic exercise, ... that he may be safely termed one of
+the richest productions of the Muse of Fiction." And to Mr Austin Dobson,
+this poor curate, compact as he is of the oddest contradictions, the most
+diverting eccentricities, is "assuredly a noble example of primitive
+goodness, and practical Christianity." We love Adams, as Fielding intended
+that we should, for his single-hearted goodness, his impulsiveness, his
+boundless generosity, his muscular courage; we are never allowed to forget
+the dignity of his office however ragged be the cassock that displays it;
+we admire his learning; we delight in his oddities. But above all he
+reflects honour on his creator by the inflexible integrity of his
+goodness. A hundred tricks are played on him by shallow knaves, and the
+result is but to convince us of the folly of knavery. His ill-clad and
+uncouth figure moves among the vicious and prosperous, and we perceive the
+ugliness of vice, and the poverty of wealth. With his nightcap drawn over
+his wig, a short grey coat half covering a torn cassock, the crabstick so
+formidable to ruffians in his hand, and his beloved AEschylus in his
+pocket, Adams smoking his pipe by the inn fire, or surrounded by his
+"children" as he called his parishioners vying "with each other in
+demonstrations of duty and love," fully justifies John Forster's comment
+on Fielding's manly habit of "discerning what was good and beautiful in
+the homeliest aspects of humanity." Before the true dignity of Abraham
+Adams, whether he be publicly rebuking the Squire and Pamela for laughing
+in church, or emerging unstained from adventures with hogs-wash and worse,
+the accident of his social position as a poor curate, contentedly drinking
+ale in the squire's kitchen, falls into its true insignificance.
+
+Rumour assigned to Fielding's friend and neighbour at East Stour, the Rev.
+William Young, the honour of being the original of Parson Adams; and it is
+a pleasant coincidence that the legal assignment for _Joseph Andrews_,
+here reproduced in facsimile, should bear the signature, as witness, of
+the very man whose "innate goodness" is there immortalised. If there be
+any detractors of Fielding's personal character still to be found, they
+may be advised to remember the truism that a man is known by his friends,
+and to apply themselves to a study of William Young in the figure of
+Parson Adams.
+
+Of the charming picture of rustic beauty and innocence presented in the
+blushing and warmhearted Fanny less need be said; for Fielding's ideal in
+womanhood was soon to be more fully revealed in the lovely creations of
+Sophia and Amelia. And honest Joseph himself, his courage and fidelity,
+his constancy, his tenderness and chivalrous passion for Fanny, his
+affection for Mr Adams, his voice "too musical to halloo to the dogs," his
+fine figure and handsome face, concerns us here chiefly as demonstrating
+that Fielding, when he chose, could display both virtue and manliness as
+united in the person of a perfectly robust English country lad.
+
+These then, are some of the figures that Fielding loved to create,
+breathing into their simple virtues a vigorous human life, fresh as
+Coleridge said, as the life of a Spring morning. In these joyous creations
+of his heart and of his genius, the great novelist assuredly gives us a
+perfectly unconscious revelation of his own character. And among the
+changing scenes of this human comedy one incident must not be forgotten.
+In the famous episode of the stage coach, all Fielding's characteristic
+and relentless hatred of respectable hypocrisy, all his love of innate if
+ragged virtue is betrayed in the compass of a few pages: in those pages in
+which we see the robbed, half-murdered, and wholly naked Joseph lifted in
+from the wayside ditch amid the protests and merriment of the respectable
+passengers; and his shivering body at last wrapped in the coat of the
+postilion,--"a Lad who hath since been transported for robbing a
+Hen-roost,"--who voluntarily stripped off a greatcoat, his only garment,
+"at the same time swearing a great Oath (for which he was rebuked by the
+Passengers) 'that he would rather ride in his Shirt all his Life, than
+suffer a Fellow-Creature to lie in so miserable a Condition.'"
+
+Much has been written concerning the notorious feud between Fielding and
+Richardson, a feud ostensibly based upon the fact that _Joseph Andrews_
+was, to some extent, frankly a parody of Richardson's famous production
+_Pamela_. In 1740, two years before the appearance of _Joseph Andrews_
+that middle-aged London printer had published _Pamela, or Virtue
+Rewarded_, achieving thereby an enormous vogue. That amazing mixture of
+sententious moralities, of prurience, and of mawkish sentiment, became the
+rage of the Town. Admirers ranked it next to the Bible; the great Mr Pope
+declared that it would "do more good than many volumes of Sermons"; and it
+was even translated into French and Italian, becoming, according to Lady
+Mary Wortley Montagu, who did not love Richardson, "the joy of the
+chambermaids of all nations." That all this should have been highly
+agreeable to the good Richardson, a 'vegetarian and water-drinker, a
+worthy, domesticated, fussy, and highly nervous little man,' ensconced in
+a ring of feminine flatterers whom he called 'my ladies,' is obvious; and
+proportionate was his wrath with Fielding's _Joseph Andrews_, of which the
+early chapters, at least, are a perfectly frank, and to Richardson
+audacious, satire on _Pamela_. The caricature was indeed frank. Joseph is
+introduced as Pamela's brother; he writes letters to that virtuous
+maid-servant; and the Mr B. of Richardson becomes the Squire Booby of
+Fielding. But there can be hardly two opinions as to such ridicule being
+an entirely justified and wholesome antidote to the pompous and nauseous
+original. To Fielding's robust and masculine genius, says Mr Austin
+Dobson, "the strange conjunction of purity and precaution in Richardson's
+heroine was a thing unnatural and a theme for inextinguishable Homeric
+laughter." To Thackeray's sympathetic imagination the feud was the
+inevitable outcome of the difference between the two men. Fielding, he
+says "couldn't do otherwise than laugh at the puny cockney bookseller,
+pouring out endless volumes of sentimental twaddle, and hold him up to
+scorn as a moll-coddle and a milksop. His genius had been nursed on sack
+posset, and not on dishes of tea. His muse had sung the loudest in tavern
+choruses, and had seen the daylight streaming in over thousands of empty
+bowls, and reeled home to chambers on the shoulders of the watchman.
+Richardson's goddess was attended by old maids and dowagers, and fed on
+muffins and bohea. 'Milksop!' roars Harry Fielding, clattering at the
+timid shop-shutters. 'Wretch! Monster! Mohock!' shrieks the sentimental
+author of _Pamela_; and all the ladies of his court cackle out an
+affrighted chorus."
+
+Looking back on the incident it seems matter for yet more Homeric laughter
+that Richardson should have called the resplendent genius of Fielding
+"low." But the feud, it may be surmised, led to much of the odium that
+seems to have attached to Fielding's name amongst some of his
+contemporaries. Feeling ran high and was vividly expressed in those days;
+and when cousinly admiration for Fielding was coupled by an excellent
+comment on Richardson's book as the delight of the maidservants of all
+nations, personal retorts in favour of the popular sentimentalist were but
+too likely to ensue. Apart from this aspect of the matter the ancient
+quarrel does not seem a very essential incident in Fielding's life.
+
+The lack of means indicated by Fielding himself, in his reminiscence of
+this winter of 1741-2 as darkened by the illness of himself, his wife and
+of a favourite child, attended "with other Circumstances, which served as
+very proper Decorations to such a Scene," received but little alleviation
+from the publication of _Joseph Andrews_. The price paid for the book by
+Andrew Millar was but L183, 11s.; and there is no record that Millar
+supplemented the original sum, as he did in the case of _Tom Jones_, when
+the sale was assured. The first edition appears to have consisted of 1,500
+copies. A second edition, of 2,000 copies was issued in the same
+summer,[2] and a third edition followed in 1743.
+
+Fielding's formal declaration that he described "not men but manners"; his
+solemn protest, in the preface to this very book, that "I have no
+Intention to vilify or asperse anyone: for tho' everything is copied from
+the Book of Nature, and scarce a Character or Action produced which I have
+not taken from my own Observations and Experience, yet I have used the
+utmost Care to obscure the Persons by such different Circumstances,
+Degrees, and Colours, that it will be impossible to guess at them with any
+degree of Certainty"--represent rather his intention than the result. The
+portraits of "manners" by the "prose Homer of human nature" were too
+lifelike to escape frequent identification. Thus not only was the
+prototype of Parson Adams discovered, but that of his antithesis, the
+pig-breeding Mr Trulliber, was thought to exist in the person of the Rev.
+Mr Oliver, the Dorsetshire curate under whose tutelage Fielding had been
+placed when a boy. Tradition also connects Mr Peter Pounce with the
+Dorsetshire usurer Peter Walter. [3]
+
+Two echoes have come down to us of the early appreciation of this novel. A
+translation of _Joseph Andrews_, "par une Dame Angloise," and bound for
+Marie Antoinette by Derome le Jeune, was placed on the shelves of her
+library in the Petit Trianon. [4] And, seven years after the appearance of
+_Joseph Andrews_, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, when sixty years old, writes
+from her Italian exile: "I have at length received the box with the books
+enclosed, for which I give you many thanks as they amuse me very much. I
+gave a very ridiculous proof of it, fitter indeed for my granddaughter
+than myself. I returned from a party on horseback; and after having rode
+20 miles, part of it by moonshine, it was ten at night when I found the
+box arrived. I could not deny myself the pleasure of opening it; and
+falling upon Fielding's works was fool enough to sit up all night reading.
+I think Joseph Andrews better than his Foundling." [5]
+
+[1] _Cleopatra and Octavia_. Sarah Fielding. Introduction.
+
+[2] See the ledgers of Woodfall, the printer, quoted in _Notes and
+Queries_, Series vi. p. 186.
+
+[3] It is interesting to note that Samuel Rogers was heard to speak with
+great admiration of chapter xiii. of Book iii., entitled "A curious
+Dialogue which passed between Mr Abraham Adams and Mr Peter Pounce." (MS.
+note by Dyce, in a copy of _Joseph Andrews_, now in the South Kensington
+Museum.)
+
+[4] This copy, published in Amsterdam in 1775, is now in the possession of
+Mr Pierpont Morgan.
+
+[5] Letters and Works of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Vol. ii. p. 194.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+THE _Miscellanies_ AND _Jonathan Wild_
+
+    "Is there on earth a greater object of contempt than the poor
+    scholar to a splendid beau; unless perhaps the splendid beau to
+    the poor scholar."
+    _Covent Garden Journal_, No. 61.
+
+If the 'sunrise' of Fielding's genius did indeed shine forth on the
+publication of _Joseph Andrews_, it was a sunrise attended by dark clouds.
+For, with the appearance of these two little volumes, we enter on the most
+obscure period of the great novelist's life, and on that in which he
+appears to have suffered the severest 'invasions of Fortune.'
+
+As regards the winter immediately preceding the appearance of that joyous
+epic of the highway, he himself has told us that he was 'laid up in the
+gout, with a favourite Child dying in one Bed, and my Wife in a Condition
+very little better, on another, attended with other Circumstances, which
+served as very proper Decorations to such a Scene.' In the following
+February, an entry in the registers of St Martin's in the Fields records
+the burial of a child "Charlott Fielding." So it is probable that the very
+month of the appearance of his first novel brought a private grief to
+Fielding the poignancy of which may be measured by his frequent betrayals
+of an anxious affection for his children.
+
+To such distresses of sickness and anxiety, there was now, doubtless,
+added the further misery of scanty means. For a few months later an
+advertisement (hitherto overlooked) appears in the _Daily Post_, showing
+that Fielding was already eagerly pushing forward the publication of the
+_Miscellanies_, that incoherent collection which is itself proof enough
+that necessity alone had called it into being. "The publication of these
+Volumes," he says, "hath been hitherto retarded by the Author's
+indisposition last Winter, and a train of melancholy Accidents, scarce to
+be parallel'd; but he takes this opportunity to assure his Subscribers
+that he will most certainly deliver them within the time mentioned in his
+last receipts, viz. by the 25th December next." [1]
+
+We may take it, then, that the first six months of 1742 were attended by
+no easy circumstances; and, accordingly, during these months Fielding's
+hard-worked pen produced no less than three very different attempts to win
+subsistence from those humoursome jades the nine Muses. To take these
+efforts in order of date, first comes, in March, his sole invocation of
+the historic Muse, the _Full Vindication of the Dutchess Dowager of
+Marlborough_, published almost before Joseph Andrews was clear of the
+printers, and sold at the modest price of one shilling. We learn from the
+title page that the _Vindication_ was called forth by a "late _scurrilous_
+Pamphlet," containing "_base_ and _malicious_ Invectives" against Her
+Grace. Together with Fielding's natural love for fighting, a family tie
+may have given him a further incitement to draw his pen on behalf of the
+aged Duchess. For his first cousin, Mary Gould, the only child of his
+uncle James Gould, M.P. for Dorchester, had married General Charles
+Churchill, brother to the great Duke. Whether this cousinship by marriage
+led to any personal acquaintance between 'old Sarah' and Harry Fielding we
+do not know; and the muniment room at Blenheim affords no trace of any
+correspondence between the Duchess and her champion. But certainly the
+_Vindication_ lacks nothing of personal warmth. Fielding tells us that he
+has never contemplated the character of that 'Glorious Woman' but with
+admiration; and he defends her against the attacks of her opponents
+through forty strenuous pages, in which the curious may still hear the
+echoes of the controversies that raged round the Duke and his Duchess,
+their mistress Queen Anne, and other actors of the Revolution. The
+_Vindication_ appeared in March; and a second edition was called for
+during the year. As far as Millar's payment goes Fielding, as appears from
+the assignment in _Joseph Andrews_, received only L5; and it is to be
+feared that the Duchess (who is said to have paid the historian Hooke
+L5000 for his assistance in the production of her own celebrated pamphlet)
+placed but little substantial acknowledgment in Fielding's lean purse. Her
+champion at any rate had, within three years, modified the views expressed
+in this _Vindication_, concerning the munificence of Her Grace's private
+generosity; for in his journal the _True Patriot_, there occurs the
+following obituary notice, "A Man supposed to be a Pensioner of the late
+Duchess of Marlborough.... He is supposed to have been Poor."
+
+This same month of March marked Fielding's final severance with the
+_Champion_. The partners of that paper, meeting on March the 1st, ordered
+"that Whereas Henry Fielding Esq., did Originally possess Two Sixteenth
+Shares of the Champion as a Writer in the said paper and having withdrawn
+himself from that Service for above Twelve Months past and refused his
+Assistance in that Capacity since which time Mr Ralph has solely
+Transacted the said Business. It is hereby Declared that the said Writing
+Shares shall devolve on and be vested in Mr James Ralph." [2] It is
+curious that Fielding did not add to his impoverished exchequer by selling
+his _Champion_ shares.
+
+Having sought assistance from the Muse of history in March, Fielding
+returns to his old charmer the dramatic Muse in May; assisting in that
+month to produce a farce, at Drury Lane, entitled _Miss Lucy in Town_. In
+this piece, he tells us, he had a very small share. He also received for
+it a very small remuneration; L10, 10s. being recorded as the price paid
+by Andrew Millar.
+
+In the following month Fielding's inexhaustible energies were off on a new
+tack, producing, in startling contrast to _Miss Lucy_, a classical work,
+executed in collaboration with his friend the Rev. William Young,
+otherwise Parson Adams. The two friends contemplated a series of
+translations of all the eleven comedies of Aristophanes; adorned by notes
+containing "besides a full Explanation of the Author, a compleat History
+of the Manners and Customs of the Ancient Greeks particularly of the
+Athenians"; and in June they inaugurated their scheme with the work in
+question, a translation of the Plutus.[3] William Young, says Hutchins,
+"had much learning which was the cement of Mr Fielding's connexion with
+him"; and Fielding's own scholarship, irradiated by his wit, would
+assuredly have made him an ideal translator of Greek comedy. But the
+public of 1742 appears to have afforded very little encouragement to this
+scheme, preferring that "pretty, dapper, brisk, smart, pert, Dialogue" of
+their own comedies, to which allusion is made in the authors' preface.
+
+The rest of the year shows nothing from a pen somewhat exhausted perhaps
+with the production of _Joseph Andrews_ of the historical _Vindication_,
+and of parts of a Drury Lane farce and of the _Plutus_, all within five
+months. And the winter following, in which the promised _Miscellanies_
+should have appeared, brought, in the renewed illness of his wife, an
+anxiety that paralysed even Fielding's buoyant vigour. This we learn from
+his own touching apology for the further delay of those volumes; a delay
+due, their author tells us, to "the dangerous Illness of one from whom I
+draw all the solid Comfort of my Life, during the greatest Part of this
+Winter. This, as it is most sacredly true, so will it, I doubt not,
+sufficiently excuse the Delay to all who know me." [4] Early in the
+following year, after this second winter of crushing anxiety, and under an
+urgent pressure for means, Fielding tried again his familiar _role_ of
+popular dramatist, giving his public the husks they preferred, in the
+comedy of the _Wedding Day_. This comedy was produced at Drury Lane on the
+17th of February 1743.
+
+If Fielding had failed to descend to the taste of the Town in offering
+them Aristophanes, he flung them in the _Wedding Day_ something too
+imperfect for acceptance, even by the 'critic jury of the pit,' And the
+bitter humour in which he was now shackling his genius to the honourable
+task of immediate bread-winning, or in his own words to the part of
+"hackney writer," comes out clearly enough in the well-known anecdote of
+the first night of this comedy. In Murphy's words, Garrick, then a new
+player, just taking the Town by storm, "told Mr Fielding he was
+apprehensive that the audience would make free in a particular passage;
+adding that a repulse might so flurry his spirits as to disconcert him for
+the rest of the night, and therefore begged that it might be omitted. 'No,
+d--mn 'em,' replied the bard, 'if the scene is not a good one, let them
+find _that_ out.' Accordingly the play was brought on without alteration,
+and, just as had been foreseen, the disapprobation of the house was
+provoked at the passage before objected to; and the performer alarmed and
+uneasy at the hisses he had met with, retired into the green-room, where
+the author was indulging his genius, and solacing himself with a bottle of
+champaign." Fielding, continues Murphy, had by this time drank pretty
+plentifully, and "'_What's the matter, Garrick?_' says he, '_what are they
+hissing now?_' Why the scene that I begged you to retrench; I knew it
+would not do; and they have so frightened me that I shall not be able to
+collect myself again the whole night. _Oh! d--mn 'em_, replies the author,
+_they HAVE found it out, have they!_" That Fielding should be scornfully
+indifferent to the judgment of the pit on work forced from him by
+overwhelming necessities, and which his own judgment condemned, is a
+foregone conclusion; but that he suffered keenly in having to produce
+imperfect work, and was jealously anxious to clear his reputation, as a
+writer, in the matter of this particular comedy, is no less apparent from
+the very unusual personal explanation he offered for it, soon after the
+brief run of the play was over. For no man was more shy of
+autobiographical revelations. His biographers are continually reduced to
+gleaning stray hints, here and there, concerning his private life.
+[5] And therefore we can measure by this emergence from a habitual
+personal reticence the soreness with which he now published work unworthy
+of his genius. "Mr Garrick," Fielding tells us, speaking of this
+distressed winter of 1742-3 "... asked me one Evening, if I had any play
+by me; telling me he was desirous of appearing in a new Part [and] ... as
+I was full as desirous of putting Words into his Mouth, as he could appear
+to be of speaking them, I mentioned [a] Play the very next morning to Mr
+_Fleetwood_ who embraced my Proposal so heartily, that an Appointment was
+immediately made to read it to the Actors who were principally to be
+concerned in it." On consideration, however, this play appeared to
+Fielding to need more time for perfecting, and also to afford very little
+opportunity to Garrick. So, recollecting that he still had by him a play
+which, although 'the third Dramatic Performance' he ever attempted,
+contained a character that would keep the audience's "so justly favourite
+Actor almost eternally before their Eyes," he decided, with characteristic
+impetuosity, to a change at the last moment. "I accordingly," he writes,
+"sat down with a Resolution to work Night and Day, owing to the short Time
+allowed me, which was about a Week, in altering and correcting this
+Production of my more Juvenile Years; when unfortunately the extreme
+Danger of Life into which a Person, very dear to me, was reduced, rendered
+me incapable of executing my Task. To this Accident alone I have the
+vanity to apprehend, the Play owes most of the glaring Faults with which
+it appeared.... Perhaps, it may be asked me why then did I suffer a Piece
+which I myself knew was imperfect, to appear? I answer honestly and
+freely, that Reputation was not my Inducement; and that I hoped, faulty as
+it was, it might answer a much more solid, and in my unhappy situation, a
+much more urgent Motive." This hope was, alas, frustrated; not even the
+brilliancy of a cast which included Garrick, Mrs Pritchard, Macklin, and
+Peg Woffington, could carry the _Wedding Day_ over its sixth night; and
+the harassed author received 'not L50 from the House for it.' The comedy
+is a coarsely moral attack on libertinism, a fact which probably, in no
+wise added to the popularity of the play in the pit and boxes of 1743.
+
+A doggerel prologue, both written and spoken by Macklin, gives an
+excellent picture of the playhouse humours, and of the wild pit, of those
+exuberant days; and contains moreover the following sound advice,
+addressed to Fielding
+
+  "Ah! thou foolish follower of the ragged Nine
+  You'd better stuck to honest Abram Adams, by half;
+  He, in spite of critics can make your Readers laugh."
+
+The next publication of these lean years was the _Miscellanies_, a
+collection of mingled prose, verse, and drama, of which the only
+connecting link seems to be the urgent need of money which forced so
+heterogenous a medley from so great an artist. These long delayed volumes
+appeared, probably, in April, and were, says Fielding, composed with a
+frequent "Degree of Heartache." They include the lover's verses of his
+early youth; philosophical, satiric, and didactic essays; a reprint of the
+political effusion dedicated to Dodington; a few plays; the fragment
+entitled _A Journey from this World to the Next_; and the splendid ironic
+outburst on villany, _Jonathan Wild_.
+
+The _Preface_, largely occupied as it is with those private circumstances
+which forced the hasty production of the _Wedding Day_, has other matter
+of even greater interest for the biographer. Thus Fielding's sensitive
+care of his reputation in essential matters appears in the fiery denial
+here given to allegations of publishing anonymous scandals: "I never was,
+nor will be the Author of anonymous Scandal on the private History or
+Family of any Person whatever. Indeed there is no Man who speaks or thinks
+with more detestation of the modern custom of Libelling. I look on the
+practice of stabbing a Man's Character in the Dark, to be as base and as
+barbarous as that of stabbing him with a Poignard in the same manner; nor
+have I ever been once in my Life guilty of it." Here too, he marks his
+abhorrence of that 'detestable Vice' hypocrisy, which vice he was, before
+long, to expose utterly in the person of Blifil in _Tom Jones_. His happy
+social temperament is betrayed in the characteristic definition of good
+breeding as consisting in "contributing with our utmost Power to the
+Satisfaction and Happiness of all about us." And in these pages we have
+Fielding's philosophy of _goodness_ and _greatness_, delivered in words
+that already display an unrivalled perfection of style. Speaking of his
+third volume, that poignant indictment of devilry the _Life of Mr Jonathan
+Wild the Great_, it is thus that Fielding exposes the iniquity of villains
+in "great" places:--"But without considering _Newgate_ as no other than
+Human Nature with its mask off, which some very shameless Writers have
+done, a Thought which no Price should purchase me to entertain, I think we
+may be excused for suspecting, that the splendid Palaces of the Great, are
+often no other than _Newgate_ with the Mask on. Nor do I know anything
+which can raise an honest Man's Indignation higher than that the same
+Morals should be in one Place attended with all imaginable Misery and
+Infamy and in the other with the highest Luxory and Honour. Let any
+impartial Man in his Senses be asked, for which of these two Places a
+Composition of Cruelty, Lust, Avarice, Rapine, Insolence, Hypocrisy, Fraud
+and Treachery, was best fitted, surely his Answer must be certain and
+immediate; and yet I am afraid all these Ingredients glossed over with
+Wealth and a Title, have been treated with the highest Respect and
+Veneration in the one, while one or two of them have been condemned to the
+Gallows in the other."
+
+Here is the converse of that insight which could discern goodness under a
+ragged cassock, or in a swearing postilion. And, having discerned the true
+nature of such Great Men, Fielding proceeds to point out that "However the
+Glare of Riches and Awe of Title may terrify the Vulgar; nay however
+Hypocrisy may deceive the more Discerning, there is still a Judge in every
+Man's Breast, which none can cheat or corrupt, tho' perhaps it is the only
+uncorrupt thing about him"; that nothing is so preposterous as that men
+should laboriously seek to be villains; and that this Judge, inflexible
+and honest "however polluted the Bench on which he sits," always bestows
+on the spurious Great the penalty of fear, an evil which "never can in any
+manner molest the Happiness" of the "Enjoyments of Innocence and Virtue."
+
+The subsequent philosophic dissertation on the qualities of goodness and
+greatness is interesting for such passages as the definition of a good man
+as one possessing "Benevolence, Honour, Honesty, and Charity"; and the
+fine declaration that of the passion of Love "goodness hath always
+appeared to me the only true and proper Object." And the very springs of
+action underlying half at least of each of the three great novels, and
+almost every page of _Jonathan Wild_, are revealed in the final
+declaration of the writer's intention to expose in these pages vice
+stripped of its false colours; to show it "in its native Deformity." As
+the native and stripped deformity of vice is perhaps not often fully
+apprehended and certainly is very seldom exposed in our own age, Fielding,
+by the very sincerity and fire of his morality, doubtless loses many a
+modern reader.
+
+It is in the third volume of the _Miscellanies_, a volume completely
+occupied by _Jonathan Wild_, that Fielding first fully reveals himself as
+public moralist. And in this Rogue's progress to the gallows he displays
+so concentrated a zeal, that nothing short of his genius and his humour
+could have saved these pages from the dullness of the professional
+reformer. For the little volume consists of a relentless exposure of the
+deformity and folly of vice. Here the foul souls of Wild and his
+associates, stripped of all the glamour of picturesque crime, stand
+displayed in their essential qualities, with the result that even the
+pestilential air of thieves' slums, of 'night cellars,' and of Newgate
+purlieus, an air which hangs so heavy over every page, falls back into
+insignificance before the loathsomeness of the central figure. A few years
+later, in the preface to _Tom Jones_, Fielding formally asserted his
+belief that the beauty of goodness needed but to be seen 'to attract the
+admiration of mankind'; in _Jonathan Wild_ he appears to be already at
+work on the converse doctrine, that if the deformity of vice be but
+stripped naked, abhorrence must ensue. Such a naked criminal is Wild; and
+in the contemplation of his vices, as in the case of the arch hypocrite
+Blifil, in _Tom Jones_, and of the shameless sensualist "My Lord," in
+_Amelia_, Fielding's characteristic compassion for the faults of hard
+pressed humanity is, for the time, scorched up in the fierceness of his
+anger and scorn at deliberate cruelty, avarice and lust. Under the spell
+of Fielding's power of painting the devil in his native blackness, we feel
+that for such as Wild hanging is too handsome a fate. It is easy for his
+Newgate chaplain to assert that "nothing is so sinful as sin"; it takes a
+great genius and a great moralist to convince us, as in this picture, that
+nothing is so deformed or so contemptible. The dark places of _Jonathan
+Wild_ receive some light in the character of the good jeweller, in the
+tender scenes between that honest ruined tradesman and his wife and
+children, and in the devoted affection of his apprentice. But the true
+illumination of the book, and its personal value for the biographer, lie
+in the white heat of anger, the "sustained and sleepless irony" to adopt
+Mr Austin Dobson's happy phrase, with which Fielding, with a force
+unwavering from the first page to the last, here assails his subject. An
+underlying attack on the Ministerial iniquity of "Great Men" in high
+places seems to be often suggested; if this be a true inference, it does
+but give us further proof of Fielding's energies as a political, no less
+than as a moral, reformer. Certainly, through all the squalid scenes of
+the book, the contention is insisted on that criminals of Wild's
+tyrannical stamp may as easily be found in courts, and at the head of
+armies, as among the poor leaders of Newgate gangs. To the wise moralist
+it is the same rogue, whether picking a pocket or swindling his country.
+
+And not to forget the wit in the moral reformer, we may leave Mr Jonathan
+Wild listening to one of the reasons given by the Newgate chaplain for his
+Reverence's preference for punch over wine: "Let me tell you, Mr Wild
+there is nothing so deceitful as the spirits given us by wine. If you must
+drink let us have a bowl of punch; a liquor I the rather prefer as it is
+nowhere spoken against in Scripture."
+
+After _Jonathan Wild_ the most interesting fragment of the _Miscellanies_
+is the _Journey from this World to the Next_. In this essay Fielding
+reveals his philosophy, his sternness, his affections, and his humour, as
+a man might do in intimate conversation. His warm humanity breathes in the
+conception that "the only Business" of those who had won admission to
+Elysium 'that happy Place,' was to "contribute to the Happiness of each
+other"; and again in the stern declaration of Heaven's doorkeeper, the
+Judge Minos, that "no Man enters that Gate without Charity." And indeed
+the whole chapter devoted to the judgments administered by Minos on the
+spirits that come, confident or trembling, before him, and are either
+admitted to Heaven, sent back to earth, or despatched to the "little Back
+Gate" opening immediately into the bottomless pit, is full of personal
+revelation. We feel the glee with which Fielding consigns the "little
+sneaking soul" of a miser to diabolically ingenious torments; the
+satisfaction with which he watches Minos apply a kick to the retreating
+figure of a duke, possessed of nothing but "a very solemn Air and great
+Dignity"; and the pleasure it gave him to observe the rejection accorded
+to "a grave Lady," the Judge declaring that "there was not a single Prude
+in Elysium." Again, nothing could be more true to Fielding's nature than
+the account of the poet who is admitted, not for the moral value he
+himself places on his Dramatic Works (which he endeavours to read aloud to
+Minos), but because "he had once lent the whole profits of a Benefit Night
+to a Friend, and by that Means had saved him and his Family from
+Destruction"; unless it were the account of the poverty driven wretch,
+hanged for a robbery of eighteen-pence, who yet could plead that he had
+supported an aged Parent with his labour, that he had been a very tender
+Husband, and a Kind Father, and that he had ruined himself for being Bail
+for a Friend. "At these words," adds the historian, "the gate opened, and
+_Minos_ bid him enter, giving him a slap on the Back as he passed by him."
+
+When the author's own turn came, he very little expects, he tells us, "to
+pass this fiery Trial. I confess'd I had indulged myself very freely with
+Wine and Women in my Youth, but had never done an Injury to any Man
+living, nor avoided an opportunity of doing good; but I pretended to very
+little Virtue more than general Philanthropy and Private Friendship." Here
+Minos cut the speaker short, bidding him enter the gate, and not indulge
+himself trumpeting forth his virtues. Whether or no we may here read the
+reflections of Fielding's maturity, looking honestly back over his own
+forty years and forward with humble fear into the future, we may certainly
+see reflected in both confession and judgment much of the doctrine and the
+practice of his life.
+
+After the failure, early in 1743, of the _Wedding Day_, and the subsequent
+publication of the _Miscellanies_, Fielding seems to have thrown his
+energies for twelve months into an exclusive pursuit of the law. This
+appears from his statement, made a year later, in May 1744, that he could
+not possibly be the author of his sister's novel _David Simple_, which had
+been attributed to him, because he had applied himself to his profession
+"with so arduous and intent a diligence that I have had no leisure, if I
+had inclination, to compose anything of this kind." Clearly, in the period
+that covers the publication of _Joseph Andrews_ an historical pamphlet,
+parts of a farce and of _Plutus_, and of the _Miscellanies_, Fielding
+found both leisure and inclination for writing; so this sudden immersion
+in law must relate to the twelve months or so intervening between these
+works and the publication of his statement. Murphy corroborates this bout
+of hard legal effort. After the _Wedding Day_ says that biographer "the
+law from this time had its hot and cold fits with him." The cold fits were
+fits of gout; and inconveniences felt by Fielding from these interruptions
+were, adds Murphy "the more severe upon him, as voluntary and wilful
+neglect could not be charged upon him. The repeated shocks of illness
+disabled him from being as assiduous an attendant at the bar, as his own
+inclination and patience of the most laborious application, would
+otherwise have made him."
+
+Mr Counsellor Fielding follows his retrospect of this strenuous attack on
+the law with a declaration that, henceforth, he intends to forsake the
+pursuit of that 'foolscap' literary fame, and the company of the
+'infamous' nine Muses; a decision based partly on the insubstantial nature
+of the rewards achieved, and partly it would seem due to the fact that at
+Fielding's innocent door had been laid, he declares, half the anonymous
+scurrility, indecency, treason, and blasphemy that the few last years had
+produced. [6] In especial he protests against the ascription to his pen of
+that 'infamous paltry libel' on lawyers, the _Causidicade_, an ascription
+which, as he truly says, accused him "not only of being a bad writer and a
+bad man, but with downright idiotism in flying in the face of the greatest
+men of my profession." He also declares that no anonymous work had issued
+from his pen since his promise to that effect; and that these false
+accusations had injured him cruelly in ease, reputation and interest. This
+solemn declaration that the now detested Muses shall no longer beguile
+Fielding's pen affords excellent reading in view of the fact that this
+absorbed barrister must, within a year or two, have been at work on _Tom
+Jones_. The whole emphatic outburst was probably partly an effort to
+assert himself as now wholly devoted to the law, and partly an example of
+one of those "occasional fits of peevishness" into which, Murphy tells us,
+distress and disappointment would betray him.
+
+The preface to his sister's novel _David Simple_, in which Fielding took
+occasion to announce these protests and assertions, is his only extant
+publication for this year of 1744; and apart from its biographical value
+is not of any great moment. Ample proof may be found in it of brotherly
+pride and admiration for the work of a sister "so nearly and dearly allied
+to me in the highest friendship as well as relation." There is the
+noteworthy declaration that the "greatest, noblest, and rarest of all the
+talents which constitute a genius" is the gift of "a deep and profound
+discernment of all the mazes, windings, and labyrinths which perplex the
+heart of man." The utterance concerning style, by so great a master of
+English, is memorable--"a good style as well as a good hand in writing is
+chiefly learned by practice." And a delightful reference should not be
+forgotten to the carping ignorant critic, who has indeed, "had a little
+Latin inoculated into his tail," but who would have been much the gainer
+had "the same great quantity of birch been employed in scourging away his
+ill-nature."
+
+Disabled by gout and harassed by want of money, a yet greater distress was
+now fast closing on Fielding in the prolonged illness of his wife. "To see
+her daily languishing and wearing away before his eyes," says Murphy, "was
+too much for a man of his strong sensations; the fortitude with which he
+met all other calamities of life [now] deserted him." In the autumn of
+1744 Mrs Fielding was at Bath, doubtless in the hope of benefit from the
+Bath waters. And here, in November, she died. Her body was brought to
+London for burial in the church of St. Martin's in the Fields; receiving
+on the 14th of November, 1744, honourable interment in the chancel vault,
+to the tolling of the great tenor bell, and with the fullest ceremonial of
+the time. Indeed it is evident, from the charges still preserved in the
+sexton's book, that Fielding rendered to his wife such stately honours as
+were occasionally accorded to the members of the few great families
+interred in the old church.
+
+The death of this beloved wife, Murphy tells us, brought on Fielding "such
+a vehemence of grief that his friends began to think him in danger of
+losing his reason." When we remember that he himself has explicitly stated
+that lovely picture of the 'fair soul in the fair body,' the Sophia of
+_Tom Jones_, to have been but a portrait of Charlotte Fielding, we can in
+some measure realise his overwhelming grief at her death. And that the
+exquisite memorial raised to his wife by Fielding's affection and genius
+was not more beautiful in mind or face than the original, is acknowledged
+by Lady Bute, a kinswoman of the great novelist. Lady Bute was no
+stranger, "to that beloved first wife whose picture he drew in his Amelia,
+where, as she said, even the glowing language he knew how to employ did
+not do more than justice to the amiable qualities of the original, or to
+her beauty. He loved her passionately, and she returned his affection; yet
+had no happy life for they were almost always miserably poor, and seldom
+in a state of quiet and safety. His elastic gaiety of spirit carried him
+through it all; but meanwhile, care and anxiety were preying upon her more
+delicate mind, and undermining her constitution. She gradually declined,
+caught a fever and died in his arms." That Fielding's married life was
+unhappy, whatever were its outward conditions, is obviously a very shallow
+misstatement; but, for the rest, the picture accords well enough with our
+knowledge of his nature. The passionate tenderness of which that nature
+was capable appears in a passage from those very _Miscellanies_, which, he
+tells us, were written with so frequent a "Degree of Heartache." In the
+_Journey from this World to the Next_, Fielding describes how, on his
+entrance into Elysium, that "happy region whose beauty no Painting of the
+Imagination can describe" and where "Spirits know one another by
+Intuition" he presently met "a little Daughter whom I had lost several
+years before. Good Gods! What Words can describe the Raptures, the melting
+passionate Tenderness, with which we kiss'd each other, continuing in our
+Embrace, with the most extatic Joy, a Space, which if Time had been
+measured here as on Earth, could not have been less than half a Year."
+
+The fittest final comment on Henry Fielding's marriage with Charlotte
+Cradock is, perhaps, that saying of a member of his own craft of the
+drama, "Now to love anything sincerely is an act of grace, but to love the
+best sincerely is a state of grace."
+
+[1] _Daily Post_, June 5, 1742.
+
+[2] MS. copy of the Minutes of the Meetings of the Partners in the
+_Champion_, in the possession of the present writer.
+
+[3] See _Daily Post_. May 29, 1742.
+
+[4] Preface to the _Miscellanies_.
+
+[5] Such as the inscription on some verses, published in the
+_Miscellanies_, as "Written _Extempore_ in the Pump-room" at Bath, in
+1742.
+
+[6] Preface to _David Simple_.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+PATRIOTIC JOURNALISM
+
+    "he only is the _true Patriot_ who always does what is in
+    his Power for his Country's Service without any selfish Views or
+    Regard to private Interests."--The _True Patriot_.
+
+Fielding's active pen seems to have been laid aside for twelve months
+after the death of his wife; and it is perfectly in accord with all that
+we know of his passionate devotion to Charlotte Cradock that her loss
+should have shattered his energies for the whole of the ensuing year.
+Murphy, as we have seen, speaks of the first vehemence of his grief as
+being so acute that fears were entertained for his reason. According to
+Fielding's kinswomen, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Lady Bute, the first
+agonies of his grief approached to frenzy; but "when the first emotions of
+his sorrow were abated" his fine balance reasserted itself, and to quote
+again from Murphy, "philosophy administered her aid; his resolution
+returned, and he began again to struggle with his fortune."
+
+As we hear no more of exclusive devotion to the law, it may be assumed
+that the attempt of the previous year to live by that arduous calling
+alone was now abandoned; and to a man of Fielding's strong Protestant and
+Hanoverian convictions the year of the '45, when a Stewart Prince and an
+invading Highland army had captured Edinburgh and were actually across the
+border, could not fail to bring occupation. Fielding believed ardently
+that Protestant beliefs, civil liberty, and national independence of
+foreign powers were best safeguarded by a German succession to the English
+throne; so by the time Prince Charles and 6,000 men had set foot on
+English soil, the former 'Champion of Great Britain' was again up in arms,
+discharging his sturdy blows in a new weekly newspaper entitled the _True
+Patriot_.
+
+The _True Patriot_ is chiefly notable as affording the first sign that
+Fielding was now leaving party politics for the wider, and much duller,
+field of Constitutional liberty. A man might die for the British
+Constitution; but to be witty about it would tax the resources of a
+Lucian. And, accordingly, in place of that gay young spark Mr Pasquin, who
+laid his cudgel with so hearty a good will on the shoulders of the
+offending 'Great Man,' there now steps out a very philosophic, mature, and
+soberly constitutional _Patriot_; a patriot who explicitly asserts in his
+first number, "I am of no party; a word I hope by these my labours to
+eradicate out of our constitution: this being indeed the true source of
+all those evils which we have reason to complain of." And again, in No.
+14, "I am engaged to no Party, nor in the Support of any, unless of such
+as are truly and sincerely attached to the true interest of their Country,
+and are resolved to hazard all Things in its Preservation." Here is a
+considerable change from the personal zest that placed Mr Quiddam and Mr
+Pillage before delighted audiences in the Little Theatre in the Haymarket.
+
+The available copies of the _True Patriot_, now in the British Museum,
+[1] include only thirty-two numbers, starting from No. 1, which appeared
+on the 5th of November, 1745, and ending on June 3, 1746. The first number
+contains a characteristic tribute to Dean Swift, whose death had occurred
+'a few days since.' Doctor Jonathan Swift, says the _Patriot_, was "A
+genius who deserves to be rank'd among the first whom the World ever saw.
+He possessed the Talents of a Lucian a Rabelais and a Cervantes and in his
+Works exceeded them all. He employed his Wit to the noblest Purposes in
+ridiculing as well Superstition in Religion as Infidelity and the several
+Errors and Immoralities which sprung up from time to time in his Age; and
+lastly in defence of his Country.... Nor was he only a Genius and a
+Patriot; he was in Private Life a good and charitable Man and frequently
+lent Sums of Money, without interest, to the Poor and Industrious; by
+which means many Families were preserved from Destruction." In No. 2, the
+_Patriot_ reiterates his "sincere Intention to calm and heal, not to blow
+up and inflame, any Party-Divisions"; but even the task of defending the
+British Constitution could not stifle Fielding's wit, and he escapes, for
+breathing space as it were, into a column devoted to the news items of the
+week, gathered from various papers, and adorned by comments of his own,
+printed in italics. And in this running commentary on the daily occurences
+of the time we get nearer, perhaps, to the table-talk of Henry Fielding
+than by any other means. Thus he faithfully repeats the inflated obituary
+lists that were then in fashion, but with such a variation as the
+following, "Thomas Tonkin, ... universally lamented by his Acquaintance.
+Upwards of 40 Cows belonging to one at Tottenham Court, _universally
+lamented by all their Acquaintance_." On a notice of an anniversary
+meeting of the Society for propagating the Gospel in Foreign Parts there
+is the pertinent comment "_It is a Pity some Method--was not invented for
+the Propagation of the Gospel in Great Britain_." After the deaths of a
+wealthy banker and factor, comes the obituary of "One Nowns a Labourer,
+_most probably immensely poor, and yet as rich now as either of the two
+Preceeding_"; beside which may be placed the very characteristic assertion
+in No. 6 that "Spleen and Vapours inhabit Palaces and are attired with
+Pomp and Splendor, while they shun Rags and Prisons."
+
+There is scarcely a personal allusion in all the thirty-two numbers of the
+_Patriot_, save the charming picture of that gentleman sitting in his
+study "meditating for the good and entertainment of the public, with my
+two little children (as is my usual course to suffer them) playing near
+me." And the ending of his horrid nightmare, in which a Jacobite
+executioner was placing a rope round his neck, "when my little girl
+entered my bedchamber and put an end to my dream by pulling open my eyes,
+and telling me that the taylor had brought home my cloaths for his
+Majesty's Birthday." The number for January 28 must not be overlooked,
+containing as it does, a scathing and humourous exposure of the profligate
+young sparks of the Town, from no less a pen than that of the Rev. Mr.
+Abraham Adams; and Parson Adams' letter concludes with a paragraph in
+which may be heard the voice of the future zealous magistrate: "No man can
+doubt but that the education of youth ought to be the principal care of
+every legislation; by the neglect of which great mischief accrues to the
+civil polity in every city." When himself but a lad of twenty, and in the
+prologue of his first comedy, Fielding had entered his protest against
+certain popular vices of the time, and had made merry over its follies.
+The desire to make the world he knew too well a better place than he found
+it is just as keen in the wit and humourist of thirty-nine; a desire,
+moreover, undulled by twenty years of vivacious living. Surely not the
+least amazing feature of Fielding's genius is this dual capacity for
+exuberant enjoyment, and incisive judgement. "His wit," said Thackeray,
+"is wonderfully wise and detective; it flashes upon a rogue and brightens
+up a rascal like a policeman's lantern."
+
+To this time of national ferment belongs a publication of which we know
+nothing but the title, a _Serious Address_; and also one of our rare
+glimpses of the novelist's home life. Joseph Warton writes to his brother
+Tom, on October 29, 1746:--"I wish you had been with me last week when I
+spent two evenings with Fielding and his sister, who wrote David Simple,
+and you may guess I was very well entertained. The lady indeed retir'd
+pretty soon, but Russell and I sat up with the Poet till one or two in the
+morning, and were inexpressibly diverted. I find he values, as he justly
+may, Joseph Andrews above all his writings: he was extremely civil to me,
+I fancy, on my Father's account." Joseph Warton's father was Vicar of
+Basingstoke, Professor of Poetry at Oxford, and moreover, something of a
+Jacobite; whereby, we may surmise, that the _True Patriot_ did not allow
+his staunch Hanoverian sentiments too great an invasion into his private
+society. Alas, that it did not occur to Warton to preserve, for the
+entertainment of later ages, some fuller record of those two _noctes
+ambrosianae_.
+
+This sister, Sally Fielding as her cousin Lady Mary Wortley Montagu called
+her, made some figure in the literary world of the day. Richardson
+extolled her "knowledge of the human heart"; Murphy writes of her "lively
+and penetrating genius"; and her classical scholarship is attested by a
+translation of Xenophon's _Memorabilia_. That she also shared some of the
+engaging qualities of her brother may be assumed from the lines written to
+the memory of the "esteemed and loved ... Mrs. Sarah Fielding," by her
+friend Dr. John Hoadley.
+
+  "Her unaffected Manners, candid Mind,
+  Her Heart benevolent, and Soul resign'd;
+  Were more her Praise than all she knew or thought
+  Though Athens Wisdom to her Sex she taught."
+
+Sarah Fielding's name occurs again as living with her brother in that
+house in Beaufort Buildings with which is associated perhaps the happiest
+instance of Fielding's warm-hearted generosity. The story may be given as
+nearly as possible in the words of the narrator, one G. S., writing from
+Harley Street in 1786. After speaking of the conspicuous good nature of
+"the late Harry Fielding," G. S. says: "His receipts were never large, and
+his pocket was an open bank for distress and friendship at all times to
+draw on. Marked by such a liberality of mind it is not to be wondered at
+if he was frequently under pecuniary embarrassments.... Some parochial
+taxes for his house in Beaufort Buildings being unpaid, and for which he
+had been demanded again and again [we may remember how Mr. Luckless' door
+was "almost beat down with duns"]...he was at last given to understand by
+the collector who had an esteem for him, that he could procrastinate the
+payment no longer." To a bookseller, therefore he addressed himself, and
+mortgaged the coming sheets of some work then in hand. He received the
+cash, some ten or twelve guineas, and was returning home, full freighted
+with this sum, when, in the Strand, within a few yards of his own house,
+he met an old college chum whom he had not seen for many years. "Harry
+felt the enthusiasm of friendship; an hundred interrogatives were put to
+him in a moment as where had he been? where was he going? how did he do?
+&c. &c. His friend told him in reply he had long been buffeting the waves
+of adverse fortunes, but never could surmount them." Fielding took him off
+to dine at a neighbouring tavern, and as they talked, becoming acquainted
+with the state of his friend's pocket, emptied his own into it; and a
+little before dawn, he turned homewards "greater and happier than a
+monarch." Arrived at Beaufort Buildings his sister, who had anxiously
+awaited him, reported that the collector had called for the taxes twice
+that day. "Friendship," answered Harry Fielding "has called for the money
+and had it;--let the collector call again." Well might his cousin Lady
+Mary say of the man of whom such a story could be told, "I am persuaded he
+has known more happy moments than any prince upon earth."
+
+During the summer following Warton's visit to the brother and sister,
+Fielding published a _Dialogue between an Alderman and a Courtier_. And in
+the following November his second marriage took place, at the little City
+church of St Bene't's, Paul's Wharf. The story of this marriage cannot be
+better told than in the words of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's
+granddaughter, Lady Louisa Stuart, quoting from the personal knowledge of
+her mother and grandmother:
+
+"His biographers seem to have been shy of disclosing that after the death
+of this charming woman [his first wife] he married her maid. And yet the
+act was not so discreditable to his character as it may sound. The maid
+had few personal charms, but was an excellent creature, devotedly attached
+to her mistress, and almost broken-hearted for her loss. In the first
+agonies of his own grief, which approached to frenzy, he found no relief
+but from weeping with her; nor solace, when a degree calmer, but in
+talking to her of the angel they mutually regretted. This made her his
+habitual confidential associate, and in process of time he began to think
+he could not give his children a tenderer mother, or secure for himself a
+more faithful housekeeper and nurse. At least this was what he told his
+friends; and it is certain that her conduct as his wife confirmed it, and
+fully justified his good opinion." From a supposed allusion by Smollett,
+in the first edition of _Peregrine Pickle_, (an allusion afterwards
+suppressed) it would appear that Fielding's old schoolfellow and lifelong
+friend 'the good Lord Lyttelton' so far approved the marriage as himself
+to give Mary Daniel away; and, as the dates in the Twickenham Register of
+births show that the marriage was one of justice as well as expediency,
+this well accords with Lyttelton's upright and honourable character. Of
+Fielding's affectionate and grateful loyalty to his second wife ample
+evidence appears in the pages of his last book, the _Journal of a Voyage
+to Lisbon_. Throughout this touching record of the journey of a dying man,
+there are references to her tenderness, ability and devotion. At the sad
+parting from children and friends, on the morning of their departure for
+Lisbon, he writes of her behaviour as "more like a heroine and
+philosopher, though at the same time the tenderest mother in the world."
+When, during the voyage down the Thames, an unmannerly custom house
+officer burst into the cabin where Fielding and his wife were sitting, the
+man was soundly rated for breaking "into the presence of a lady without an
+apology or even moving his hat"; by which we may see his sensitive care
+that due respect was accorded her. He tells us how he persuaded her with
+difficulty to take a walk on shore when their vessel was wind bound in
+Torbay, it being "no easy matter for me to force [her] from my side." With
+anxious forboding he thinks of his "dear wife and child" facing the world
+alone after his death, for "in truth I have often thought they are both
+too good and too gentle to be trusted to the power of any man I know, to
+whom they could possibly be so trusted." And in a more formal tribute he
+acknowledges the abilities that accompanied her worth, when he says that
+"besides discharging excellently well her own and all tender offices
+becoming the female character; ... besides being a faithful friend, an
+amiable companion, and a tender nurse, [she] could likewise supply the
+wants of a decrepit husband and occasionally perform his part." That
+Fielding suffered socially by the fact of his second marriage is probable.
+But the fact is proof, if proof were needed, of his courage in reparation,
+and of the unworldly spirit in which he ultimately followed the dictates
+of that incorruptible judge which he himself asserted to be in every man's
+breast.
+
+It was in December 1747, just a month after his second marriage, that
+Fielding again flung himself into the arena of contentious journalism,
+'brandishing' his pen as truculently as ever on behalf of the Protestant
+and Hanoverian succession, and in despite of the Jacobite cause. He called
+his new paper "_The Jacobite's Journal_, by John Trott Plaid Esq're.," and
+the ironic title was accompanied by a woodcut traditionally associated
+with Hogarth. The ironic mask, Fielding explains, was assumed "in order if
+possible to laugh Men out of their follies and to make men ashamed of
+owning or acting by" Jacobite principles.
+
+The _Jacobite's Journal_ appeared at a moment when public opinion, and
+public gossip also, seem to have been immersed in the question whether a
+notorious pamphlet purporting to have been found among the papers of a
+late Minister, Mr. Thomas Winnington, were genuine or a libel. Into this
+fray Fielding promptly plunged, publishing, in December 1747, [2] a
+shilling pamphlet entitled _A Proper Answer to a Late Scurrilous
+Libel,... By the Author of the Jacobites Journal._ This little pamphlet,
+copies of which may be seen in the British Museum, is merely a further
+vigorous declamation for civil liberty and the Protestant religion, as
+under King George, and contains hardly any reference either to Winnington
+or to the author. It was retorted on in two further pamphlets. In one of
+these a Lady Fanny and her friend, enjoying a 'Chit chat,' discuss the
+news that Lady Fanny is she "whom F---g represents in a _Plaid Jocket_ in
+the front of his _Jacobite_ Journal." "The Whirling Coxcomb," cries Lady
+Fanny enraged, "what had he to do with ridiculing any Party, who had
+travell'd round the whole Circle of Parties and Ministers, ever since he
+could brandish a Pen." [3] Her Ladyship adds some further sneers on
+writers pensioned to amuse people with their nonsense. The other counter
+pamphlet consists of conversations overheard, all over the town, on the
+subject of Winnington and his _Apology_. Here a mercer and a bookseller
+abuse Fielding for boxing the political compass, and for selling his pen.
+Another bookseller insinuates that Fielding's own attack on the _Apology_
+is but a half-hearted affair--"Ah Sir, you know not what F---g could do if
+he were willing ... you would have seen him mince and hash it so as to
+make half the Town weep and the other laugh. Don't you think the Pen that
+writ _Pasquin, Joseph Andrews_, and the _Champion_ could have answered the
+Apology if he had had the Will?" "But I can't see why the Author of the
+Jacobite Journal should want that will," protests a Bencher. "Alas Sir!"
+cries the bookseller, "You forget the Power of _Necessity_. If a Man that
+wants Bread can establish a Paper by the P--t Off--e [Post Office?] taking
+off two thousand every week is he not more excusable...." To which the
+Bencher replies that possibly it is Fielding's 'Wavering Principles' that
+have "brought him to the Necessity of writing for Bread." [4] From all
+which we may assume that Fielding's superiority to what he calls the
+"absurd and irrational Distinction of Parties [which] hath principally
+contributed to poison our Constitution" [5] was very little understood by
+the heated party factions of 1747.
+
+To call one's political opponent a 'Whirling Coxcomb,' or a 'pensioned
+scribbler,' was a very mild amenity in eighteenth century party warfare;
+and the abuse of such small fry as these anonymous pamphleteers might be
+wholly disregarded did it not show Fielding's prominence, during these
+anxious times, as a strenuous Hanoverian, and also the fact that he had
+now not only largely abjured party politics, but that what party tenets he
+still held were changed. Indeed as much may surely be deduced from the
+following philosophic passage in his _True Patriot_. "I have formerly
+shown in this Paper, that the bare objecting to a Man a _Change_ in his
+_Political Notions_, ought by no means to affect any Person's _Character_;
+because in a Country like this it is simply impossible that a Man of sound
+Sense, and strict Honour, should always adhere to the same _Political
+Creed_." [6] It is very little material to our knowledge of Fielding as an
+honest man and a great genius to discover, were it possible, precisely
+what changes his political views underwent. When Sir Robert Walpole
+essayed to corrupt the nation Fielding fought strenuously in the cause of
+political honour; when a Stewart invasion threatened (as he thought) both
+civil liberty and Protestant beliefs he flung himself as zealously into
+the defence of the Church of England and of the Hanoverian Government. It
+is clear that the latter exertions stirred up much cheap obliquy; and it
+must be admitted that such references to his antagonists as "last weeks
+Dunghill of Papers" were likely to entail unsavory retort.
+
+This abuse seems to have broken out with an excess of virulence not long
+after the appearance of the _Jacobite's Journal_; a fate, as Fielding
+observes, little to be expected by the editor of a loyal paper. His
+dignified protest in the matter is worth recalling. In a leading article
+he declares that "before my paper hath reached the 20th. number a heavier
+load of Scandal hath been cast upon me than I believe ever fell to the
+Share of a Single Man. The Author of the Journal was soon guessed at;
+Either from some Singularity in Style, or from little care which being
+free from any wicked Purpose, I have ever taken to conceal my Name. Of
+this several Writers were no sooner possessed than they attempted to
+blacken it with every kind of Reproach; pursued me into private Life,
+_even to my boyish Years_; where they have given me almost every Vice in
+Human Nature. Again they have followed me with uncommon Inveteracy into a
+Profession in which they have very roundly asserted that I have neither
+Business nor Knowledge: And lastly, as an Author they have affected to
+treat me with more Contempt than Mr. Pope, who hath great Merit and no
+less Pride in the Character of a Writer hath thought proper to bestow on
+the lowest Scribbler of his Time. All this moreover they have poured forth
+in a vein of Scurrility which hath disgraced the Press with every abusive
+Term in our Language." Although, as Fielding adds, those who knew him
+would not take their opinion from those who knew him not, it is to be
+feared that the scurrilous libellers of the day succeeded in creating a
+prejudice that is hardly yet dispersed. For such petty clamours would be
+trifling enough round the figure of the creator of the English novel, were
+it not that in the abuse of the gutter press of his day we may probably
+find the reason for much of the vague cloud which has so strangely
+overhung Fielding's name. In his own spirited protest he tells us of the
+'ordure' that was thrown at him; and it is an old saying that if enough
+mud be thrown some will stick.
+
+In the February following the appearance of his new paper Fielding must
+have been at Twickenham; for the baptism of his son William appears in the
+Parish Register for that month. A writer of thirty years ago says that the
+house celebrated as that in which Fielding lived was then still standing,
+a quaint old fashioned wooden dwelling, in Back Lane; and adds the
+information that Fielding had two rooms, the house being then let in
+lodgings. [7] Lysons, however, in his _Environs of London_, published in
+1795, says that Fielding "rented a house at this time in the Back-Lane at
+Twickenham," adding that he received his information from the Earl of
+Orford. The site is now occupied by a row of cottages. In his _Parish
+Register for Twickenham_ Horace Walpole commemorates the great novelist's
+residence in that quiet village, so full of eighteenth century memories.
+Here, he says,
+
+  "... Fielding met his bunter Muse,
+  And, as they quaff'd the fiery juice,
+  Droll Nature stamp'd each lucky hit
+  With unimaginable wit."
+
+Bunter was a cant word for a woman who picks up rags about the street; and
+it may seem to later generations that the epithet fitted far more nicely
+the _bunter muse_ of that "facile retailer of _ana_ and incorrigible
+society-gossip," that rag-picker of anecdotes, Mr. Horace Walpole himself.
+
+When the _Journal_ had been running some six months, Fielding formally
+relinquished his ironic character of a Jacobite, partly because, as he
+says, the evils of Jacobitism were too serious for jesting and required
+more open denunciation; partly because the age required more highly
+seasoned writing, the general taste in reading very much resembling "that
+of some particular Man in eating who would never willingly devour what
+doth not stink"; and partly from the ineptitude of the public to
+appreciate the ironic method. This latter passage is of interest as coming
+from the author of that great masterpiece in irony, _Jonathan Wild_.
+Fielding has observed, he tells us that "though Irony is capable of
+furnishing the most exquisite Ridicule; yet as there is no kind of humour
+so liable to be mistaken it is of all others the most dangerous to the
+Writer. An infinite Number of Readers have not the least taste or relish
+for it, I believe I may say do not understand it; and all are apt to be
+tired when it is carried to any degree of Length."
+
+The _Jacobite's Journal_ is of course mainly occupied with maintaining the
+Protestant British Constitution; but here, as in the _True Patriot_,
+Fielding allows himself a pleasant running commentary on the daily news.
+He also erects a _Court of Criticism_ in which, by virtue of his "high
+Censorial Office," he administers justice in "all matters in the Republic
+of Literature." By thus adopting the title of "Censor of Great Britain"
+the editor of the _Jacobites Journal_ preserves his identity with that
+censorial _Champion_ who nine years before had essayed to keep rogues in
+fear of his Hercules' club. Two judgments delivered by the _Court_ are of
+interest. In one, due castigation is given to that incorrigible mimic and
+wit Foote, who was once threatened by no less a cudgel than that of Dr.
+Johnson himself. Foote was evading all law and order by his inimitable
+mimicries at the Little Theatre in the Haymarket; and for these
+performances at his "scandal-shop" is very properly brought up before Mr.
+Censor's _Court_. Whereupon Foote begins to mimic the _Court_ "pulling a
+Chew of Tobacco from his Mouth, in Imitation of his Honour who is greatly
+fond of that weed." The culprit suffers conviction for crime against law
+and good manners. Having thus seen to the public welfare, Fielding also
+happily settles a little score of his own on one of his anonymous
+libellers. "One Porcupine Pillage," he records, "came into the court and
+threw a great shovelful of dirt at his honour, _but luckily none of it hit
+him_." His comments on weekly news items are no less characteristic than
+those hidden in the columns of the _Patriot_. Thus, on a trotting match,
+he observes, "Trotting is a Sport truly adapted to the English Genius."
+And on a man found dead in Jewin Street "formerly an eminent Dealer in
+Buckrams, but [who] being greatly reduced is supposed to have died for
+Want," he notes, "_either of Common Sense in himself or Common Humanity in
+his Aquaintance_." His own humanity is shown in the wise appeals, repeated
+on more than one page of the _Journal_, for some effective provision for
+the distressed widows and children of the poor clergy. And his unbiassed
+judgment appears in the _amende honorable_ to Richardson, in the form of
+generous and unstinted praise of _Clarissa_.
+
+The first number of the _Jacobite's Journal_ was dated Dec. 5, 1747, and
+'Mr. Trott Plaid' formally takes leave of his subject exactly eleven
+months later, on November 5, 1748, declaring that Jacobites were, by then,
+little to be feared. [8] Ten days before this last 'brandish' of
+Fielding's Constitutional pen, on October 26, 1748, his oaths had been
+received as a Justice of the Peace for Westminster.
+
+[1] These are in the Burney Collection, and are inscribed "These papers
+are by the celebrated Henry Fielding Esqre."
+
+[2] See the _Gentleman's Magazine_. Dec. 1747.
+
+[3] _A Free Comment on the Late Mr. W-G-N's Apology ... By a
+Lady ..._ 1748.
+
+[4] _The Patriot Analized_. 1748.
+
+[5] _True Patriot No. 14_.
+
+[6] _True Patriot_. No. 29. May 20, 1746.
+
+[7] R. Cobbett. _Memorials of Twickenham_, 1872.
+
+[8] The _Journal's_ epitaph was promptly written by a scurrilous opponent
+in lines showing that the prominences of Fielding's profile were
+well-known:
+
+  Beneath this stone
+  Lies _Trott Plaid John_
+  His length of chin and nose.
+
+See the _Gentleman's Magazine_, November 1748.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+TOM JONES
+
+    "In God's Name let us speak out honestly and set the good against
+    the bad."
+    No. 48 of the _Jacobite's Journal_.
+
+The two years of Fielding's life preceding his appointment as a Bow Street
+magistrate (an appointment comparable only to the choice of Robert Burns
+as an exciseman) were marked, as we have seen, by lively passages in the
+political arena, and a steady output of political journalism. Indeed, by
+this time, the public must have associated swingeing denunciations of
+Jacobites, and glowing eulogies of the British Constitution, with Harry
+Fielding's name; just as seven years previously he had been in their eyes
+the 'Champion' journalist of a brilliant Opposition; and, for ten years
+before that, the witty writer of a stream of popular farces and comedies.
+For there is no evidence that his audacious innovation, his splendid
+adventure in literature, _Joseph Andrews_, really revealed the existence
+of a new genius in their midst to the Whigs and Tories of those factious
+days, to the gay frequenters of the play-house, to the barristers at
+Westminster Hall and on the Western Circuit. In 1748 Fielding must have
+been, to his many audiences, a witty and well-born man of letters who, at
+forty-one, had as yet achieved no towering success; a facile dramatist;
+and a master of slashing political invective, growing perplexingly
+impartial, alike in his praise and his condemnation. While, as regards
+outward circumstances, the struggling barrister, baffled in his
+professional hopes by persistent attacks of gout, was now so far enlisted,
+to use his own fine image, under the black banner of poverty, that even
+the small post and hard duties of a Bow Street magistrate were worth his
+acceptance. [1]
+
+Such was Harry Fielding as the world of 1748 knew him, in the Coffee
+houses, the Mall, the Green-room and the Law-courts. What that world did
+not know was that all this dramatic, journalistic, and political action,
+was little more than the surface movement of a vitality far too exuberant
+to be contained in any one groove of hackney writing,--of an impetuous
+'enthusiasm for righteousness' far too ardent to pass by any flagrant
+social, moral, or political abuse without inflicting some form of
+chastisement; and that beneath this ever active surface movement
+Fielding's genius was slowly maturing in that new continent of literature
+the borders of which he had already crossed seven years before. In the
+pages of _Joseph Andrews_, he had, as we know, tentatively explored that
+continent feeling his way along the unknown paths of this long neglected
+world of human nature; bringing back with him one immortal figure, that
+living embodiment of simple piety and scholarship, of charity and honest
+strength, Parson Adams; disclosing hints of discoveries, not yet
+perfected, among the humours and villanies, the virtues and charms, of a
+dozen other inhabitants of his _terra incognita_. But there is no sign
+that the greatness of his discovery, the splendour of his addition to the
+empire of English literature, was in the least apprehended during the
+seven years following the appearance of _Joseph Andrews_. Only Fielding
+himself was conscious that he had created a kind of writing "hitherto
+unattempted in our language."
+
+And, having crossed the borders of this new continent, he seems, after his
+first survey, to have deliberately immersed himself in one portion, and
+that the blackest, of his re-discovered world. For _Jonathan Wild_, with
+its disclosure of the active spirit of 'diabolism,' of naked vice, is
+little else than the exploration of those darkest recesses of human nature
+which can be safely entered only by the sanest and healthiest of
+intellects. Fielding's strength was equal to his exploit; and from this,
+his second adventure, he brought back a picture of the deformity and folly
+of vice, drawn with a just and penetrating scorn unequalled, perhaps, by
+any English moralist. But neither of these two essays in the new field of
+writing had covered more than isolated or outlying portions, the first in
+sunlight, the second in shadow, of that vast territory. And it was not
+till the perfect maturity of his powers and of his experience, not till he
+had seen both the 'manners of many men,' and the workings of many hearts,
+not in a word till he had made himself master of great tracts of that
+human nature which had so long lain neglected, that Fielding in _Tom
+Jones_ disclosed himself as the creator of the English novel.
+
+Little is known as to when the conception of _Tom Jones_ first shaped
+itself in his mind, of where he lived during the writing of the great
+Comic Epic, or of the time occupied in its completion. Appropriately for a
+book expressly designed "to recommend goodness and innocence" the plan of
+the novel was suggested, many years before its appearance, by the 'good
+Lord Lyttelton'; and we know, further, that the writing occupied 'some
+thousands of hours'; but _Tom Jones_ does not emerge into definite
+existence till the summer of 1748.
+
+Legend it is true, attesting to the greatness of the achievement contained
+in the six little volumes, endows many localities with the fame of their
+origin. A well-credited contemporary writer, the Rev. Richard Graves,
+declared that the novelist "while he was writing his novel of Tom Jones"
+lived at Tiverton (Twerton), one and a half miles from Bath, and dined
+daily at Prior Park the seat of his munificent and pious friend Ralph
+Allen. Mr Graves says that Fielding then lived in "the first house on the
+right hand with a spread eagle over the door." [2] Salisbury is insistent
+that part at least of the great novel was written at Milford House, near
+to that city. An anonymous old engraver asserts the same honour for
+Fielding's Farm at East Stour, an assertion certainly not confirmed by the
+newly found documents concerning Fielding's sale of property at Stour in
+1738. Twickenham claims that the book was wholly composed in the house in
+Back Lane. And to an ancient building at Tintern Parva in the Wye Valley,
+said to have once been the lodging of the Abbot of Tintern, was also
+assigned the reputation of being the birthplace of the English novel. If
+the latter tradition were true, the fact that it was in the Harlequin
+chamber of the Abbots of Glastonbury that Henry Fielding was born, becomes
+strangely matched by the birth, some forty years later, of his
+masterpiece, in the lodging of the Abbot of Tintern. The one point of real
+interest in all these traditions is the fact that the fame of _Tom Jones_
+has been sufficient to create a widespread popular legend. The truth
+probably is that the book was written in the many shifting scenes of
+Fielding's life during these years; now at Bath whither his gout and the
+generous hospitality of Ralph Allen would take him; now in Salisbury, the
+home of his boyhood, and the scene of his courtship with the lovely
+original of Sophia Western; possibly in his own county of Somerset; and
+most probably both at Twickenham, and in London.
+
+From these various legends it is pleasant to be able to disentangle one
+clear picture of the making of _Tom Jones_. Before the manuscript was
+placed in the printers' hands Fielding submitted it to the opinion both of
+the elder Pitt, and of the estimable and pious Lyttelton; and the account
+of this memorable meeting cannot be better given than in the words of a
+descendant of the hostess on that occasion, the Rev. George Miller,
+great-grandson of that Sanderson Miller of Radway, Warwickshire, who
+numbered many men of note among his acquaintance, and with whom Fielding
+was on terms of intimate friendship. [3] Writing to the present writer, in
+1907, Mr. Miller says: "Lord Chatham and Lord Lyttleton came to Radway to
+visit my ancestor, when Lord Chatham planted three trees to commemorate
+the visit, and a stone urn was placed between them. Fielding was also of
+the party and read 'Tom Jones' in manuscript after dinner for the opinion
+of his hearers before publishing it. My father told me this often and he
+had the account from his Grandmother who survived her husband several
+years and who was the hostess on the occasion." Unhappily no record exists
+of the comments of one of the greatest of English statesmen when listening
+to this reading, in manuscript, of indubitably one of the greatest of
+English novels.
+
+The vagueness which hangs over the places in which _Tom Jones_ was
+written, the certainty that in all of them poverty was constantly present,
+is in perfect accord with the power of detachment manifested in this book
+from circumstances that would surely have tinged, if not over-whelmed, a
+weaker genius. Sickness and poverty are stern sponsors; but neither were
+suffered to leave more than two traces on the pages destined to outlive so
+greatly the harsh circumstances in which they had birth. There is the
+frank acknowledgement of the writer's dependence on Lyttelton's noble
+generosity, without which the book had never, Fielding says, been
+completed, since "I partly owe to you my Existence during great Part of
+the Time which I have employed in composing it." And a touching betrayal
+occurs of his anxiety for the future provision of the "prattling babes,
+whose innocent play hath often been interrupted by my labours." Fielding
+was sensitively anxious for his wife and children; but, for himself,
+living as he did with visions such as that of the _Invocation_ introducing
+Book xiii of _Tom Jones_, the precise situation of his "little Parlour,"
+or the poorness of its furniture, cannot have appeared very material.
+"Come bright Love of Fame," he cries "... fill my ravished Fancy with the
+Hopes of charming Ages yet to come... Do thou teach me not only to
+foresee, but to enjoy, nay, even to feed on future Praise. Comfort me by a
+solemn Assurance, that when the little Parlour in which I sit at this
+Instant, shall be reduced to a worse furnished Box, I shall be read, with
+Honour, by those who never knew nor saw me, and whom I shall neither know
+nor see."
+
+This capacity of Fielding for relegating circumstance to its true level,
+the detached idealism that moulded his genius, are, indeed, shown once for
+all in the fact that the exquisite picture of virtue, the whole-hearted
+attack on vice, the genial humour, the sunny portraits of humanity, the
+splendid cheerfulness of _Tom Jones_, that 'Epic of Youth,' came from a
+man in middle age, immersed in disheartening struggles, and fighting
+recurrent ill health. Superficial critics have called Fielding a realist
+because his figures are so full-blooded and alive that we feel we have met
+them but yesterday in the street; to eyes so shortsighted life itself must
+seem merely realistic. As none but an idealist could have conceived Parson
+Adams, so the creator of Sophia again announced himself an idealist in the
+Dedication of _Tom Jones_. Here, in language of pure symbolism, he
+contends that the ideal virtues such as goodness and innocence, may most
+effectively be presented to men in a figure, for "an Example is a Kind of
+Picture, in which Virtue becomes as it were an Object of Sight, and
+strikes us with an Idea of that Loveliness, which _Plato_ asserts there is
+in her naked Charms." [4] To the man who could write thus, and, who, in
+later pages of his great 'Epic,' could humbly desire of Genius "do thou
+kindly take me by the Hand, and lead me through all the Mazes, the winding
+Labyrinth of Nature. Initiate me into all those Mysteries which profane
+Eyes never beheld,"--to this man the material surroundings of life must
+have seemed of little greater import than the fittings of that narrow box
+to the occupation of which he looked forward with so calm a foresight.
+Indeed he himself acknowledges a carelessness of outward comfort on his
+own behalf. "Come," he cries, to the spirit of mercenary success, "Thou
+jolly Substance, with thy shining Face, ... hold forth thy tempting
+Rewards; thy shining chinking Heap; thy quickly-convertible Bank-bill, big
+with unseen Riches; thy often-varying Stock; the warm, the comfortable
+House; ... Come thou, and if I am too tasteless of thy valuable Treasures,
+warm my Heart with the transporting Thought of conveying them to others."
+His happy constitution, wrote his cousin Lady Mary, "made him forget
+everything when he was before a venison pasty or a flask of champagne";
+but behind those healthy exhilarations was, assuredly, a serenity based on
+a clear perception of the values of life. To a man of Fielding's happy
+social temperament, and who was yet also initiated into mysteries and
+occupied in converting ideal loveliness into 'an object of sight,' such
+matters as duns and pawnbrokers would seem precisely fit for oblivion in
+venison and champagne. In the creator of Tom Jones and of Sophia the most
+indestructible delight in living, and the keenest discernment of the
+unsubstantial qualities of that delight, appear to have been admirably
+interwoven.
+
+By June 11, 1748, the book was far enough advanced for the publisher,
+Andrew Millar, to pay L600 for it, as appears from a receipt now in the
+possession of Mr. Alfred Huth. [5] And it is eminently characteristic of
+the finances of a man who, as Lady Mary said, would have wanted money had
+his estates been as extensive as his imagination, that the receipt for
+this L600 is dated more than six months before the publication of the
+book. For it was not till February 28, 1749, that the _General Advertiser_
+announced
+
+    This day is published, in six vols., 12 mo
+    THE HISTORY OF TOM JONES,
+    A FOUNDLING
+    _Mores hominum multorum vidit_.
+    _By_ HENRY FIELDING, _Esqre_
+
+Henceforth Fielding ceases to be the boisterous politician, the witty
+dramatist; his poverty and his struggles for subsistence fall back, at his
+own bidding, among the accidents of life; and he stands revealed as the
+supreme genius, the creator of the English novel, the inheritor of that
+lasting fame which he had dared so confidently to invoke.
+
+The immediate success of the book, in that eighteenth-century world into
+which it was launched, is attested by the notice in the _London Magazine_
+of the very month of its publication. Under the heading of a "Plan of a
+late celebrated NOVEL," the _Magazine_ devotes its five opening pages to a
+summary of a book "which has given great Amusement and we hope Instruction
+to the polite Part of the Town." The summary is preceded by a description
+of _Tom Jones_ as a novel "calculated to recommend religion and virtue, to
+shew the bad consequences of indiscretion, and to set several kinds of
+vice in their most deformed and shocking light." The reviewer declares
+that "after one has begun to read it, it is difficult to leave off before
+having read the whole." And he concludes, "Thus ends this pretty novel,
+with a most just distribution of rewards and punishments, according to the
+merits of all the persons who had any considerable share in it." [6] Three
+months later Horace Walpole wrote, "Millar the bookseller has done very
+generously by him [Fielding]: finding Tom Jones, for which he had given
+him L600, sell so greatly, he has since given him another hundred." An
+admirer breaks out into rhyme, in the _Gentleman's Magazine_ for August
+1749,--
+
+  "let Fielding take the pen!
+  Life dropt her mask, and all mankind were men."
+
+thereby anticipating Thackeray's famous complaint that in his day no one
+dared "to depict to his utmost power a Man." Lady Bradshaigh, writing by a
+happy irony of fate to Richardson, says "as to Tom Jones I am fatigued
+with the name, having lately fallen into the company of several young
+ladies, who had each a 'Tom Jones' in some part of the world, for so they
+call their favourites." The gentlemen also had their Sophias, one indeed
+having bestowed that all-popular name on his 'Dutch mastiff puppy.' That
+eccentric eighteenth century philosopher, and enthusiastic Greek scholar,
+Lord Monboddo declared that _Tom Jones_ had more of character in it than
+any other work, ancient or modern, known to him, adding, "in short, I
+never saw anything that was so animated, and as I may say, _all alive_
+with characters and manners as _the History of Tom Jones_"; a criticism
+that recalls Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's remark that no man enjoyed life
+more than did Fielding. Doubtless it was his own magnificent capacity for
+living that endowed the very creatures of his pen with so abundant a
+vitality. In her own copy Lady Mary wrote _Ne plus Ultra_.
+
+To turn from the popular voices of the day to the comments of those
+capable of appraising genius, "What a master of composition Fielding was!"
+exclaimed Coleridge, "Upon my word I think 'Oedipus Tyrannus,' the
+'Alchemist,' and 'Tom Jones' the three most perfect plots ever planned."
+To Sir Walter Scott _Tom Jones_ was "truth and human nature itself."
+Gibbon described the book as "the first of ancient or modern romances";
+and, as we have seen, declared that its pages would outlive the Imperial
+Eagle of those Hapsburgs from whom Fielding was said to be descended.
+"There can be no gainsaying the sentence of this great judge," wrote
+Thackeray. "To have your name mentioned by Gibbon is like having it
+written on the dome of St Peter's. Pilgrims from all the world admire and
+behold it." Pilgrims from all the world have likewise admired _Tom Jones_.
+Translations have appeared in French, German, [7] Spanish, Swedish,
+Russian, Polish and Dutch; and as for the English editions, they range
+from the three editions issued within the year of publication to the
+several noble volumes newly edited in our own day, and the sixpenny copies
+on our railway bookstalls. So fully has time justified the invocation to
+future fame sent forth from the little ill-furnished parlour of the
+struggling barrister.
+
+To analyse the grounds for a chorus of praise ranging from the 'young
+ladies' of the eighteenth century to the utterances of distinguished
+critics, and popular authors of our own day, would be to confound literary
+criticism with biography. But there are some points appertaining to
+Fielding's great novel which cannot be here disregarded, in that they
+closely affect his personal character. Such are the light in which he
+himself regarded his masterpiece, the intention with which he wrote it,
+and the means which he selected to carry that intention into effect.
+
+All these he himself very plainly sets forth in his _Dedication_ to
+Lyttelton and in other passages of _Tom Jones_. As to his intention. "I
+declare," he says, in the _Dedication_, "that to recommend Goodness and
+Innocence hath been my sincere Endeavour in this History." And the means
+selected for this end, and for the companion object of persuading men from
+guilt, are as clearly stated. First as we have seen, Fielding plays the
+part of pure idealist, purposing to create a picture "in which virtue
+becomes as it were an object of sight." For such pictures we have but to
+think of Sophia Western, and of that final page of _Tom Jones_, than which
+no more charming representation of mutual affection, esteem, and well
+doing can be imagined. But besides this means of reaching his audience
+Fielding adopted, he tells us, a second method. He argues that no
+acquisitions of guilt can compensate a man for the loss of inward peace,
+for the attendant horror, anxiety, and danger, to which he subjects
+himself; thus endeavouring to enlist man's self-interest no less than his
+admiration, on the side of virtue. Again, he explains yet another method
+by which he essays to foil the progress of evil, viz. to show that virtue
+and innocence are chiefly betrayed "into the snares that deceit and
+villainy spread for them" by indiscretion; a moral which he has "the more
+industriously laboured ... since I believe it is much easier to make good
+Men, wise than to make bad Men good." For this purpose, he concludes,
+namely to show, as in a figure, the beauty of virtue, to persuade men that
+in following innocence and virtue they follow their own obvious interests,
+to arm them from the snares of villainy and deceit, "I have employed all
+the Wit and Humour of which I am Master in the following History; wherein
+I have endeavoured to laugh Mankind out of their favourite Follies and
+Vices."
+
+And, conscious that wit and humour require a rein quite unneeded by the
+methods of the professional moralist, Fielding further asserts that in
+these pages his laughter is worthy of the aim which he sets before him.
+Here, he carefully insists, are wit and humour wholly void of offence. He
+assures his reader that in the whole course of the work, he will find
+"nothing prejudicial to the Cause of Religion and Virtue; nothing
+inconsistent with the strictest Rules of Decency, nor which can offend
+even the chastest Eye in the Perusal." As the almost incredible change
+from the manners of 1749 to those of the following century, and of our own
+day, has injuriously affected the reputation of Fielding among readers
+ignorant of past conditions, this protest, in striking accord with the
+prologue for his first play acted when he was but a lad of twenty, cannot
+be too emphatically recorded. And no further justification of Fielding's
+words need be entered than that verdict of the eighteenth century scholar
+and bishop of the English Church, Doctor Warburton, when he declared that
+"Mr. Fielding [stands] the foremost among those who have given a faithful
+and chaste copy of life and manners."
+
+Such were the noble purposes to which Fielding consciously dedicated his
+genius in _Tom Jones_, and such was the careful restraint with which he
+exercised his chosen methods of wit and humour. That these purposes,
+executed by a supreme genius in the language and scenes of his own day,
+should ever have laid their author open to a charge of immorality is
+perhaps one of the most amazing pieces of irony in the whole history of
+English literature. But as this charge of moral laxity has been seriously
+brought against the pages of _Tom Jones_, and is perhaps not yet quite
+exploded, it cannot be wholly disregarded. The imputation amounts,
+briefly, to a too easy forgiveness for the youthful sins of Jones, and the
+involving that engaging youth in too deep a degradation. The answers to
+these charges are, firstly, that Fielding held strongly, and here
+exhibits, the humane and wise doctrine that a man should be judged, not by
+what he sometimes does, but by what he _is_. And, secondly, that as Sir
+Walter Scott pointed out, when dealing with this very matter, "the vices
+into which Jones suffers himself to fall are made the direct cause of
+placing him in the distressful situation which he occupies during the
+greater part of the narrative; while his generosity, his charity, and his
+amiable qualities become the means of saving him from the consequences of
+his folly." Fielding was not wholly concerned with the acts of a man; to
+him the admission of the Penitent Thief into Paradise, at the eleventh
+hour, could have been no stumbling block. And, further, Tom Jones not only
+suffers for his ill doing, but wins no heaven until he wholly purges
+himself from the sin which did so easily beset him.
+
+The distinction between doing and being is very fully enunciated by
+Fielding himself, in the _Introduction_ to Book vii. "A single bad Act,"
+he says, "no more constitutes a Villain in Life, than a single bad Part on
+the Stage". And again, "Now we, who are admitted behind the Scenes of this
+great Theatre of Nature, (and no Author ought to write any Thing besides
+Dictionaries and Spelling-Books who hath not this Privilege) can censure
+the Action, without conceiving any actual Detestation of the Person, whom
+perhaps Nature may not have designed to act an ill Part in all her Dramas:
+For in this Instance, Life most exactly represents the Stage, since it is
+often the same Person who represents the Villain and the Heroe". Coleridge
+has expressed the same truth in words written in a copy of _Tom Jones_,
+"If I want a servant or mechanic I wish to know what he _does_--but of a
+Friend I must know what he _is_. And in no writer is this momentous
+distinction so finely brought forward as by Fielding. We do not care what
+Blifil does ... but Blifil _is_ a villain and we feel him to be so." [8]
+
+It is true that, as Scott regrets the depth of degradation into which Tom
+Jones is suffered to fall, so Coleridge expresses a wish, "relatively to
+Fielding himself" that the great novelist had emphasised somewhat more the
+repentance of his hero: but this may be balanced by that other noble
+tribute to his morality, "I dare believe who consulted his heart and
+conscience only without adverting to _what the world_ would say could rise
+from the perusal of Fielding's _Tom Jones_, _Joseph Andrews_ and _Amelia_
+without feeling himself the better man--at least without an intense
+conviction that he could not be guilty of a base act." [9] To be forced to
+watch the temporary degradation of a noble nature, and the miseries
+ensuing, is surely one of the most effective means of rousing a hatred of
+vice. That such an exhibition should ever have been construed into moral
+laxity on the part of the author, especially when the restoration of the
+hero's character is drawn as entirely due to his ingrained worship of
+innocence and virtue, is almost incredible.
+
+In exact accordance with Fielding's character as moralist in intent,
+although supreme artist in execution, is the fact of the dedication of
+_Tom Jones_ to his life-long friend Lyttelton. George Lyttelton,
+statesman, scholar, and orator, was a friend of whom any man might be
+proud. It was said of him that he "showed the judgment of a minister, the
+force and wit of an orator, and the spirit of a gentleman." As theologian
+he wrote a treatise on _The Conversion of St. Paul_ which, a hundred years
+later, was described as being "still regarded as one of the subsidiary
+bulwarks of Christianity." As poet he won the praise of Gray for his
+tender and elegiac verse. Thomson sang of his "sense refined," and adds
+
+  Serene yet warm, humane yet firm his mind
+  As little touch'd as any man's with bad;
+
+And Pope drew his character as
+
+  "Still true to virtue and as warm as true."
+
+It was to this devout scholar, this refined gentleman, this warm-hearted
+follower of virtue, that _Tom Jones_ was dedicated, nay more, to him it
+owed both origin and completion. "To you, Sir," Fielding writes in his
+_Dedication_, "it is owing that this History was ever begun. It was by
+your Desire that I first thought of such a Composition.... Again, Sir,
+without your Assistance this History had never been completed.... I partly
+owe to you my Existence during great Part of the Time in which I have
+employed in composing it." And that Lyttelton cordially approved the book
+which owed so much to his own insight and generosity is evident from the
+references, in the _Dedication_, to his favourable judgment.
+
+With the appearance of _Tom Jones_ Fielding steps into his own place among
+the immortals. But lofty as his genius was, his feet were firmly planted
+in the world which he relished so keenly. To no man could be applied more
+happily the motto chosen by him for his title page, _mores hominum
+multorum vidit_--he saw the manners of many men. This characteristic
+emerges in a personal reminiscence of the novelist, at the very moment
+when the sheets of _Tom Jones_ were passing through the press. The
+great-nephew of his intimate friend Mrs Hussey relates; "Henry Fielding
+was fond of colouring his pictures of life with the glowing and variegated
+tints of Nature, by conversing with persons of every situation and
+calling, as I have frequently been informed by one of my great aunts, the
+late Mrs Hussey, who knew him intimately. I have heard her say, that Mr
+Fielding never suffered his talent for sprightly conversation to mildew
+for a moment; and that his manners were so gentlemanly, that even with the
+lower classes, with which he frequently condescended particularly to chat
+such as Sir Roger de Coverley's old friends, the Vauxhall water-men, they
+seldom outstepped the limits of propriety. My aunt ... [was] a fashionable
+sacque and mantua-maker, and lived in the Strand, ... One day Mr Fielding
+observed to Mrs Hussey, that he was then engaged in writing a novel, which
+he thought would be his best production; and that he intended to introduce
+into it the characters of all his friends. Mrs Hussey, with a smile,
+ventured to remark, that he must have many niches, and that surely they
+must already be filled. 'I assure you, my dear madam,' replied he, 'there
+shall be a bracket for a bust of you.' Some time after this, he informed
+Mrs Hussey that the work was in the press; but, immediately recollecting
+that he had forgotten his promise to her, went to the printer, and was
+time enough to insert, in vol. iii. p. 17, where he speaks of the shape of
+Sophia Western--'Such charms are there in affability, and so sure is it to
+attract the praises of all kinds of people.... It may indeed be compared
+to the celebrated Mrs Hussey.' To which observation he has given the
+following note: 'A celebrated mantua-maker in the Strand, famous for
+setting off the shapes of women.'" [10]
+
+Here is yet further proof, that Fielding loved not only to see the manners
+of many men, but also to render them whatever service lay within his
+power. Never were the warmest heart and the loftiest genius more happily
+united than in the creator of the English novel.
+
+Lyttelton not only suggested and approved the great Comic Epic, and
+enabled distressed genius to live while composing it; his own worth and
+benevolence, together with those of the generous Allen, afforded Fielding,
+as he tells us, the materials for the picture here presented of Allworthy.
+"The World," he says, speaking of this picture, "will not, I believe, make
+me the Compliment of thinking I took it from myself. I care not: This they
+shall own, that the two Persons from whom I have taken it, that is to say,
+two of the best and worthiest Men in the World, are strongly and zealously
+my Friends." And a point of still closer personal interest is the fact,
+already noticed, that in the lovely character and person of Sophia
+Western, Fielding raised an enduring memorial to that beloved wife whose
+death had occurred a few years before the publication of _Tom Jones_. The
+authenticity of the portrait is explicitly stated in the _Invocation_
+prefixed to Book xiii. Apostrophizing that 'gentle Maid,' bright 'Love of
+Fame,' Fielding bids her, in the eighteenth century phrase that falls so
+strangely on a modern ear, "Foretell me that some tender Maid, whose
+Grandmother is yet unborn, hereafter, when under the fictitious Name of
+_Sophia_ she reads the real worth which once existed in my _Charlotte_,
+shall, from her sympathetic Breast, send forth the _Heaving Sigh_." Then
+follows, immediately, his own desire that he too may live in the knowledge
+and honour of far distant readers. Fielding lies buried under southern
+skies, far from his wife's English grave; but in the immortal pages of his
+masterpiece they are not divided.
+
+[1] The Fiat appointing Fielding as Magistrate for the City and Borough of
+Westminster, now in the House of Lords, is dated July 30, 1748.
+
+[2] On the house identified with Mr Graves' description, and now known as
+"Fielding's Lodge," a tablet has recently been placed, through the energy
+of Mr R. G. Naish of Twerton.
+
+[3] See _Life of the Earl of Hardwicke_. G. Harris. 1847. Vol. II. pp.
+456-7.
+
+[4] _Tom Jones_. Dedication.
+
+[5] See Appendix for this, hitherto unpublished, receipt.
+
+[6] _London Magazine_. Feb. 1749.
+
+[7] In Germany an edition of 1771 was followed by a second in 1780, and a
+third in 1786. In 1765 a lyrical comedy founded on the famous novel was
+acted in Paris; and the same year it was transformed into a German comedy
+by J.H. Steffens.
+
+[8] S. T. Coleridge. Manuscript notes in a copy of _Tom Jones_, now in the
+British Museum.
+
+[9] Ibid.
+
+[10] J. T. Smith. _Nollekens and his Times_. Vol. i. pp. 124-5.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+MR JUSTICE FIELDING
+
+  "The principal Duty which every Man owes is to his Country."
+  _Enquiry into the ... Increase of Robbers_.
+
+To have created the English novel were, it might seem, achievement enough
+to tire for a while the most vigorous of intellects; but to the author of
+_Tom Jones_ the apathy of repose was unknown. At no period of Fielding's
+short life can he be discerned as doing nothing; and, indeed, to an
+insight so penetrating, to an ardour so irrepressible, the England of
+George the Second can have afforded but very little inducement to
+inaction.
+
+Thus, in the one month of October 1748, the pages of _Tom Jones_ must have
+been nearing completion, if indeed the sheets were not already passing
+through the press. The Hanoverian philippics of "Mr Trott-Plaid" were
+still resounding in the _Jacobite's Journal_. While, on the 26th. of the
+month, Fielding's oaths were received for an entirely new role, that of a
+Justice of the Peace for Westminster. [1] Ten days later the _Jacobite's
+Journal_ had ceased to exist; and that a rumour was abroad connecting this
+demise of the _Journal_ with the bestowal of a new and arduous post on its
+editor appears from a paragraph in the _London Evening Post_. On Nov. 8,
+that organ prepares its readers for the fact that the now defunct "Mr
+Trott-Plaid" may possibly "rise awful in the Form of a Justice." Within
+four weeks of this announcement 'Justice Fielding's' name appears for the
+first time in the Police-news of the day, in a committal dated December
+10th [2]. And two days later he is sending three thieves to the Gatehouse,
+and admitting a suspected thief to bail, "after an Examination which
+lasted several hours." And it is interesting to notice that throughout
+this first month of his magisterial work the now 'awful form' of Justice
+Henry Fielding was kept constantly tempered in the public mind by the fact
+of his still undiminished popularity as a dramatist. In this December his
+comedies, with the inimitable 'romp' Kitty Clive as _Miss Lucy_, or the
+_Intrigueing Chambermaid_ or _Chloe_, as the case might be, were played no
+fewer than nine times on the Drury Lane boards.
+
+Scarcely had Fielding bent his genius to these new responsibilities of
+examining Westminster suspects and sending the rogues of that city to
+prison, than he appears preparing for an extension of those duties over
+the county of Middlesex. To be a county magistrate in 1750, however,
+necessitated the holding of landed estate worth L100 per annum; and
+Fielding's estate, for many years, seems to have been his pen. In this
+difficulty he turned to the Duke of Bedford, whose public virtues, and
+private generosity, were so soon to be acknowledged in the Dedication of
+_Tom Jones_. It was but three weeks after his appointment that the
+Westminster magistrate wrote as follows to the giver of those "princely
+Benefactions":
+
+
+"Bow Street. Decr. 13. 1748.
+
+"My Lord,
+
+"Such is my Dependence on the Goodness of your Grace, that before my Gout
+will permit me to pay my Duty to you personally, and to acknowledge your
+last kind Favour to me, I have the Presumption to solicite your Grace
+again. The Business of a Justice of Peace for Westminster is very
+inconsiderable without the Addition of that for the County of Middlesex.
+And without this Addition I cannot completely serve the Government in that
+office. But this unfortunately requires a Qualification which I want. Now
+there is a House belonging to your Grace, which stands in Bedford St., of
+70l. a year value. This hath been long untenanted, and will I am informed,
+require about 300l. to put in Repair. If your Grace would have the
+Goodness to let me have a Lease of this House, with some other Tenement
+worth 30l. a year, for 21 years, it would be a complete Qualification. I
+will give the full Worth for this lease, according to the valuation which
+any Person your Grace shall be pleased to appoint sets upon it. The only
+favour I beg of your Grace is, that I be permitted to pay the Money in two
+years, at four equal half-yearly Payments. As I shall repair the House as
+soon as possible, it will be in Reality an Improvement of that small Part
+of your Grace's estate, and will be certain to make my Fortune.
+
+"Mr Butcher will acquaint your Grace more fully than perhaps I have been
+able to do; and if Your Grace thinks proper to refer it to him, I and mine
+will be eternally bound to pray for your Grace tho I sincerely hope you
+will not lose a Farthing by doing so vast a service to,
+
+"My Lord your Grace's
+"Most obliged most obed' humble servant
+"H. Ffielding." [3]
+
+It seems probable that the Duke found better means of helping wit and
+genius, than by the leasing of the dilapidated tenement in Bedford Street.
+At any rate a month later, on January 11, we find Fielding duly swearing
+to an estate as consisting of "several Leasehold Messuages or Tenements
+Lying or being in the several parishes of St Paul Covent Garden, St Martin
+in the ffields, St Giles in the ffields, and St Georges Bloomsbury ... now
+in the possession or occupation of [my] Tennants or Undertennants, for and
+during the Term of Twenty one years of the clear yearly value of L100...."
+This statement, which is preserved in the Middlesex Records, is followed
+by Fielding's signature, appended to an oath that his qualification to
+serve as a Justice of the Peace for the county is as above described. [4]
+
+On the day following this sworn statement, January 12, 1749, his oaths
+were received as a Justice of the Peace for Middlesex. [5] But even this
+did not satisfy all the requirements of those days of doctrinal
+inquisitions and Jacobite risings. The certificate may still be seen among
+the Middlesex Records, duly certified by Charles Tough, Minister of the
+Parish and Church of St Pauls, Covent Garden, and 'Sworn in Court,' that
+"Henry Fielding Esq. on Sunday the 26th day of March, 1749, did receive
+the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper in ye Parish Church aforesaid,
+immediately after Divine Service and Sermon, according to the usage of the
+Church of England." [6] And among the same archives the dusty _Oath Roll_
+is preserved, bearing, under date of April 5, 1749, the signature of
+_Henry ffielding_ to a declaration of disbelief in the doctrine of
+Transubstantiation; a comprehensive oath of faithful service to King
+George and abjuration of King James; an oath directed against the power of
+the Holy See; and an oath of true allegiance to King George. All which
+oaths and declarations, it appears from the endorsement of the _Roll_,
+were taken immediately after the administration of Holy Communion, as
+attested by two credible witnesses.[7]
+
+It is with this second Commission in the Peace that we enter on the last
+five years of Fielding's crowded life, years full of that valiant struggle
+with eighteenth century crime to which the health of the great novelist
+was ultimately sacrificed. For no magistrate ever fulfilled more
+faithfully, or at greater personal cost, the first obligation of his Oath,
+"Ye shall swear that as Justice of Peace ... ye shall do equall right to
+the Poor and to the Rich, after your Cunning Witt and Power and after the
+Laws and Customes of the Realm...." And Fielding brought to his new post
+something more than a zealous discharge of the daily and nightly duties of
+an eighteenth century police magistrate. His genius and his patriotism
+found opportunity in the squalid Bow Street Court-room for advocating
+reforms as yet untouched by the slow hand of the professional
+philanthropist. The names of those reformers, of the men and women who
+swept away the pestilential horrors of eighteenth century prisons, of the
+statesmen who abolished laws that hung a man for stealing a handkerchief,
+and destroyed the public gallows that gave the mob their _Tyburn holiday_,
+of the creators of our temperance legislation, of our poor-law system, of
+our model dwellings,--all these are held high in honour. Because Henry
+Fielding was above all things a great creative genius his wise and
+strenuous efforts to raise social conditions, and to eradicate social
+sores, have been unduly forgotten.
+
+"Whatever he desired, he desired ardently," says Murphy. We soon have
+evidence of Justice Henry Fielding's ardent desire to cleanse London from
+some of the crying evils of his time. Of these evils none pressed more
+cruelly on the honest citizens than the prevalence and brutality of street
+robberies. To the well-protected Englishman of to-day the London of 1750
+would seem a nightmare of lawlessness. Thieves, as Fielding tells us,
+attacked their victims with loaded pistols, beat them with bludgeons and
+hacked them with cutlasses; and as to the murderers of the period, he has
+recorded how he himself was engaged on _five_ different murders, all
+committed by different gangs of street robbers within the space of one
+week. The exploit of one such gang may be quoted, from a newspaper
+paragraph of the first month of Fielding's administration at Bow Street.
+"On Friday evening," says the _General Advertiser_ for January 23, 1749,
+"about twenty fellows arm'd with Pistols, Cutlasses, Hangers, &c. went to
+the Gatehouse and one of them knocking at the Door, it was no sooner
+open'd than they all rush'd in, and struck and desperately wounded the
+Turnkey, and all that oppos'd them, and in Triumph carried off the Fellow
+who pick'd General Sinclaire's pocket of his watch as he was going into
+Leicester House." Surely, cries the indignant newspaper, "this instance of
+Daring Impudence must rouse every Person of Property to assemble and
+consult means for their own Security at least; for if Goals can be forc'd
+in this manner, private Houses can make but little resistance against such
+Gangs of Villains as at present infest this Great Metropolis." It was
+admitted that the numbers and arms of street robbers rendered it
+ordinarily impossible to arrest them in the act; and Fielding tells us how
+"Officers of Justice have owned to me that they have passed by [men] with
+Warrants in their Pockets against them without daring to apprehend them;
+and indeed they could not be blamed for not exposing themselves to sure
+Destruction: For it is a melancholy Truth, that at this very Day a Rogue
+no sooner gives the Alarm within certain Purlieus, than twenty or thirty
+armed Villains are found ready to come to his Assistance." And the new
+Justice found no effectual means at his disposal for coping with what he
+very aptly calls the enslaved condition of Londoners, assaulted, pillaged,
+and plundered; unable to sleep in their own houses, or to walk the
+streets, or to travel in safety. There were the Watch, who, we learn from
+_Amelia_ were "chosen out of those poor old decrepid People, who are from
+their Want of bodily Strength rendered incapable of getting a Livelihood
+by Work. These Men, armed only with a Pole, which some of them are scarce
+able to lift, are to secure the Persons and Houses of his Majesty's
+Subjects from the Attacks of Gangs of young, bold, stout, desperate and
+well-armed Villains.... If the poor old Fellows should run away from such
+Enemies, no one I think can wonder, unless he should wonder that they are
+able even to make their Escape." [8] These lineal descendants of Dogberry
+were supplemented by constables who it appears had to apply to the
+military when called upon to cope with the mere suppression of a
+gaming-house; and by "Thief-catchers," individuals so popularly odious
+that "the Thief-catcher is in Danger of worse Treatment from the Populace
+than the Thief." While the law was thus handicapped, the thief, on his
+side, had the advantage of the irregular buildings and the immense number
+of lanes, alleys, courts, and bye-places of London and Westminster, which,
+says Fielding, "had they been intended for the very purpose of
+concealment, they could scarce have been better contrived. Upon such a
+view the whole appears as a vast Wood or Forest, in which a Thief may
+harbour with as great Security as Wild Beasts do in the Desarts of Africa
+or Arabia." Also the thief's organisation was excellent: "there are at
+this Time," Fielding observes, "a great Gang of Rogues whose Number falls
+little short of a Hundred, who are incorporated in one Body, have Officers
+and a Treasury; and have reduced Theft and Robbery into a regular System."
+Further, he could generally bribe or deter the prosecutor. And in a last
+resource "rotten Members of the Law" forged his defence, and abundant
+false witnesses supported it. An illuminating example of the methods
+employed by our Georgian ancestors towards "deterring" prosecution occurs
+in a smuggling case of 1748, perpetrated shortly before Fielding first
+took office. A party of smugglers caught a custom-house officer and a
+shoemaker on their way to give evidence. The officer had 'every joint of
+him' broken; and after other torture, the description of which is more
+suitable for eighteenth century pages than our own, was dispatched. The
+less fortunate shoemaker was hung by the middle over a dry well, and left
+there. Several days afterwards the smugglers, returning and hearing him
+groan, cut the rope, let him drop to the bottom, and threw in logs and
+stones to cover him. And it was not only from the common thief that the
+Londoner of 1750 suffered. That fine flower of eighteenth century
+lawlessness, the gentleman of the road, carried his audacities into the
+heart of the Town itself. "I was sitting in my own dining-room on Sunday
+night," writes Horace Walpole, to a friend, "the clock had not struck
+eleven, when I heard a loud cry of 'stop thief!' A highwayman had attacked
+a postchaise in Piccadilly: the fellow was pursued, rode over the
+watchman, almost killed him, and escaped."
+
+It was into a conflict with this epidemic of crime that Fielding, at
+forty-three, and with already broken health, flung his energies, to such
+purpose that in these last five years of his life it is but too easy to
+forget the creator of _Joseph Andrews_, of _Tom Jones_, and of _Amelia_,
+in his last 'ardent desire,' as ardently pursued, to purify the sorely
+diseased body politic. His method of attack was twofold. He dealt
+vigorously with the individual criminal; and he sought to remove some of
+the causes by which those criminals were engendered. The individual attack
+is, for the most part, but sordid reading. Thus from a fragment of the
+Westminster _Committment Books_, preserved with the Middlesex Records, we
+may see how in January and February of this year 1749 'Henry Fielding
+Esq.' committed to the New Prison such cases as:
+
+Thomas Thrupp                for riot
+Thomas Trinder               for burglary
+T. Chamberlain and Terence
+Fitz Patrick                 for assault
+C. O'Neal                    for assaulting two Watchmen
+Mary Hughes and Caterine
+Edmonds                      for assault and beating
+John Smithson                for exercising the art of pattenmaker
+                             without having been brought up thereto
+                             for seven years
+Cornelius York               for filing guineas
+Christo Kelsey               for ill fame
+Bryan Park                   for assault
+
+
+This sorry list, interspersed with cases of murder, of robbery with
+violence, and of smuggling, may doubtless be extended over the entire five
+years of Fielding's work on the Bench; and to reiterate the details of
+such work would be as tedious now as the monotonous discharge of these
+duties must once have been to the author of _Tom Jones_. [9] Of much more
+enduring interest is the great novelist's second line of attack on the
+problem confronting him.
+
+For Henry Fielding's insight was far too profound for him to fail to
+strike at the root of individual crime, in those conditions which bred the
+criminal as surely as, to use his own favourite simile, unclean
+surroundings breed disease. And he had not been six months on the Bench
+before finding his first opportunity in a _Charge_ delivered, as their
+Chairman, to the Westminster Grand Jury, on June 29, 1749. [10] This "very
+loyal, learned, ingenious, excellent and useful" Charge was published "By
+Order of the Court, and at the unanimous Request of the Gentlemen of the
+Grand Jury"; and it is, Mr Austin Dobson tells us, "still regarded by
+lawyers as a model exposition." It is also a stirring appeal to the worthy
+jurors to discharge their duties as befitted men called upon to exercise
+one of the most ancient and honourable of English liberties: "Grand
+Juries, Gentlemen," declared their new Chairman, "are in Reality the only
+Censors of this Nation. As such, the Manners of the People are in your
+Hands, and in yours only. You, therefore, are the only Correctors of
+them.... To execute this Duty with Vigilance, you are obliged by the Duty
+you owe both to God and to your Country." Here is the same zeal, now
+directed to stimulating the conscience of the Westminster Jurors, which
+moved _Captain Vinegar_ to lay about him so lustily on all the abuses
+within reach of his newspaper, and which inspired the 'father of the
+English Novel' with the admitted motive,--"I declare, that to recommend
+Goodness and Innocence hath been my sincere Endeavour in this History"--if
+not with the consummate art of his pages.
+
+Fielding specially directs the energies of his jurors to the repression of
+open profligacy, the more as, through the 'egregious folly' of their
+parents, the _Town_ had then become the 'seminaries of education' for
+youths of birth and station. And he bids them attend to those 'temples of
+iniquity' the masquerade rooms of the time, with a side glance at Foote's
+scandalous performances; to the gaming houses; to the prevalent vice of
+profane swearing, that "detestable Crime, so injurious to the Honour of
+God, so directly repugnant to His positive Commands, so highly offensive
+to the Ears of all good Men, and so very scandalous to the Nation in the
+Ears of Foreigners"; and to the libeller, a species of 'Vermin' whom "men
+ought to crush wherever they find him, without staying till he bite them."
+It is noteworthy also, that to the genius of Fielding, 'watching,
+brooding, creating,' the characteristic feature of his age seemed to be a
+"fury after licentious and luxurious pleasures." "Gentlemen," he cries,
+"our News-Papers, from the Top of the Page to the Bottom, the Corners of
+our Streets up to the very Eves of our Houses, present us with nothing but
+a View of Masquerades, Balls, and Assemblies of various Kinds, Fairs,
+Wells, Gardens, &c. tending to promote Idleness, Extravagance and
+Immorality, among all Sorts of People." Many of the public, he declares,
+make diversion "no longer the Recreation or Amusement, but the whole
+Business of their Lives"; and not content with three theatres they must
+have a fourth. What would he have said to a London in which not four but a
+hundred and twenty theatres draw nightly, and sometimes twice a day, their
+crowded audiences.
+
+Two days after the delivery of this _Charge_ (which the _General
+Advertiser_ praises as "excellent and learned") a three days street riot
+broke out, which it fell to Fielding to subdue. On Saturday July 1 a mob
+had gathered in the Strand, about a disorderly house where a sailor was
+said to have been robbed. Beadle Nathaniel Munns, arriving on the scene,
+found the mob crying out "Pull down the house, pull down the house!"; and
+sent for the constables. Meanwhile the mob broke open the house and
+demolished and stripped the same; and throwing the goods out of the
+windows, set fire to them, causing such danger of a general conflagration
+that 'the parish engines' were sent for. A constable, _not being able to
+find any magistrate in Town_, went to Somerset House to procure assistance
+from the military, and on his returning with a corporal and twelve men, a
+force that later that night was increased to an officer and forty men, the
+mob was at last dispersed. On the next day, however, Sunday, they
+reassembled, and proceeded to demolish a second house, and to burn the
+goods thereof with an even larger fire than that of the preceding night.
+Mr Saunders Welch, High Constable for Holborn and, Fielding tells us, "one
+of the best Officers who was ever concerned in the Execution of Justice,
+and to whose Care, Integrity and Bravery the Public hath, to my Knowledge,
+the highest Obligations," passing through Fleet Street at the time, saw
+this second fire, and was told by the owner of another house that the mob
+threatened to come to him next. Upon which Mr Welch "well knowing the
+Impossibility of procuring any Magistrate at that Time who would act,"
+went to the Tilt Yard and procured an officer and some forty men; and
+returning, found the third house in great part wrecked, the danger of fire
+here being aggravated by the extreme narrowness of the street on both
+sides and the fact that the premises of a bank were adjacent. This same
+Sunday night, also, the mob broke open the night-prison under Beadle
+Munns' house, rescuing two prisoners; and forced the Watch-house of the
+Liberty with stones and brick bats, to the imminent danger of the Beadle's
+life, as "sworn before me, Henry Fielding." Till three in the morning Mr
+Welch and the soldiers remained on duty, by which time the rioters had
+again dispersed. All this time Fielding, Mr Welch records, was out of
+town; but, by noon on Monday, the Justice was back in Bow Street: and, on
+being acquainted with the riot, immediately dispatched an order for a
+party of the Guards to bring the prisoners to his house, the streets being
+then full of a riotous crowd threatening danger of rescue. Fielding
+proceeded to examine the prisoners, a "vast mob" meanwhile being assembled
+in Bow Steet, and the streets adjacent. On information of the threatening
+aspect of the people he applied to the Secretary at War for a
+reinforcement of the Guards; and from his window, spoke to the mob,
+informing them of their danger, and exhorting them to disperse, but in
+vain. Rumours, moreover, came that four thousand sailors were assembling
+to march to the Strand that Monday night. In view of these rumours and of
+the riotous state of the streets, Fielding, the officer of the guard, and
+Mr Welch "sat up the whole night, while a large party of soldiers were
+kept ready under arms who with the peace officers patrolled the streets."
+And thanks to this vigorous action on the part of their new magistrate the
+citizens found peace restored within twelve hours of his return to town.
+
+The same day as that on which Fielding was addressing the riotous mob from
+his Bow Street windows, and sitting up all night with the officer of a
+military guard, he found time to write to the Duke of Bedford on his own
+behalf and on that of his family, concerning the provision for which he
+betrays so constant an anxiety.
+
+
+"Bow Street. July 3. 1749.
+
+"My Lord,
+
+"The Protection which I have been honoured with receiving at the Hands of
+your Grace, and the goodness which you were pleased to express some time
+toward me, embolden me to mention to your Grace that the Place of
+Solicitor to the Excise is now vacant by the Death of Mr Selwyn. I hope
+no Person is better qualified for it, and I assure you, my Lord, none
+shall execute it with more Fidelity. I am at this Moment busied in
+endeavouring to suppress a dangerous Riot, or I w'd have personally
+waited on your Grace to solicite a Favour which will make me and my
+Family completely happy.
+
+"I am, &c.,
+
+"H. Ffielding." [11]
+
+The vacant post was secured, alas, by another candidate.
+
+A few weeks after the riotous scenes which had enabled Fielding to show
+himself a man of prompt action in times of popular ferment, the
+publication is advertised of his _Charge_, published "by order of the
+Court and at the request of the Gentleman of the Grand Jury." And on the
+same day he submits to the Lord Chancellor a copy both of this pamphlet,
+and of a draft of a _Bill for the better preventing Street Robberies &c_,
+the design of which it appears Lord Hardwick had already encouraged.
+
+
+"Bow Street, July 21. 1749.
+
+"My Lord,
+
+"I beg your Lordship's acceptance of a Charge given by me to the Grand
+Jury of Westminster though I am but too sensible how unworthy it is of
+your notice.
+
+"I have likewise presumed to send my Draught of a Bill for the better
+preventing street Robberies &c. which your Lordship was so very kind to
+say you would peruse; I hope the general Plan at least may be happy in
+your Approbation.
+
+"Your Lordship will have the goodness to pardon my repeating a desire
+that the name of Joshua Brogden, may be inserted in the next commission
+of the Peace for Middlesex and Westminster for whose [integrity] and
+Ability in the Execution of his office. I will engage my credit with your
+Lordship, an Engagement which appears to me of the most sacred Nature.
+
+"I am,
+"My Lord, with the utmost Respect and Devotion,
+"Your Lordship's most Obed't
+"Most humble Servant
+"H. Ffielding. [12]
+
+"To the Right Hon'ble.
+"The Lord High Chancellor of G. Britain."
+
+All trace of the text of this draft Bill seems to have been lost; but the
+fact of the Lord Chancellor's consent to consider its provisions shows
+clearly enough how rapidly Fielding was adding to his now achieved fame as
+the author of _Tom Jones_ the very different reputation of an authority on
+criminal legislation.
+
+The application on behalf of Joshua Brogden, later if not at this time the
+Justice's Clerk, recalls the further pleasant tribute paid to the
+soundness of Mr Brogden's morals in the _Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon_.
+If all Fielding's modest magisterial income of L300 a year had gone, as he
+declares it should have done, to his clerk, that functionary would, he
+tells us, have been "but ill paid for sitting almost sixteen hours in the
+twenty four, in the most unwholesome, as well as nauseous air in the
+universe, and which hath in his case corrupted a good constitution without
+contaminating his morals." It was Joshua Brogden who had witnessed, a few
+months earlier, the agreement with Andrew Millar for _Tom Jones_. Could
+the good clerk but have played the part of a Boswell to his illustrious
+master we should have something more than our present scanty materials for
+the personal life of Henry Fielding.
+
+Yet another of Fielding's rare letters belongs to this year; a letter
+conveying his formal congratulations to Lyttelton, on that model
+statesman's second marriage, and in which his warm heart again makes
+application, not on behalf of his own scanty means, but for a friend.
+
+
+"Bow Street, Aug't 29, 1749.
+
+"Sir,
+
+"Permit me to bring up the Rear of your Friends in paying my Compliments
+of Congratulation on your late Nuptials. There may perhaps be seasons when
+the Rear may be as honourable a Post in Friendship as in War, and if so
+such certainly must be every time of Joy and Felicity. Your present
+situation must be full of these; and so will be, I am confident, your
+future Life from the same Fountain. Nothing can equal the excellent
+character your Lady bears among those of her own Sex, and I never yet knew
+them speak well of a woman who did not deserve their good words. How
+admirable is your Fortune in the Matrimonial Lottery! I will venture to
+say there is no man alive who exults more in this, or in any other
+Happiness that can attend you than myself; and you ought to believe me
+from the same Reason that fully persuades me of the satisfaction you
+receive from any Happiness of mine; this Reason is that you must be
+sensible how much of it I owe to your goodness; and there is a great
+Pleasure in Gratitude though it is second I believe to that of
+Benevolence; for of all the Delights upon Earth none can equal the
+Raptures which a good mind feels on conferring Happiness on those whom we
+think worthy of it. This is the sweetest ingredient in Power, and I
+solemnly protest I never wished for Power, more than a few days ago for
+the sake of a Man whom I love, and that more perhaps from the esteem I
+know he bears towards you than from any other Reason. This Man is in Love
+with a young Creature of the most apparent worth, who returns his
+affection. Nothing is wanting to make two very miserable People extremely
+Blessed but a moderate portion of the greatest of human Evils. So
+Philosophers call it, and so it is called by Divines, whose word is the
+rather to be taken, as they are, many of them, more conversant with this
+Evil than ever Philosophers were. The Name of this man is Moore to whom
+you kindly destined that Laurel, which, though it hath long been withered,
+may not probably soon drop from the Brow of its present Possessor; but
+there is another Place of much the same Value now vacant: it is that of
+Deputy Licensor to the Stage. Be not offended at this Hint; for though I
+will own it impudent enough in one who hath so many Obligations of his own
+to you, to venture to recommend another man to your Favour, yet Impudence
+itself may possibly be a Virtue when exerted on the behalf of a Friend; at
+least I am the less ashamed of it, as I have known men remarkable for the
+opposite Modesty possess it without the mixture of any other good Quality.
+In this Fault then you must indulge me; for should I ever see you as high
+in Power as I wish, and as it is perhaps more my Interest than your own
+that you should be, I shall be guilty of the like as often as I find a Man
+in whom I can, after much intimacy discover no want, but that of the Evil
+above mentioned. I beg you will do me the Honour of making my Compliments
+to your unknown Lady, and believe me to be with the highest Esteem,
+Respect, Love, and Gratitude
+
+"Sir,
+"Y'r most obliged
+"Most obed't
+"humble Servant
+
+"Henry Fielding.
+
+"To the Hon'ble
+"George Lyttelton, Esqr." [13]
+
+This Edward Moore was a poet held worthy, it would seem, to possess the
+Laureat's 'withered' laurel (even in 1749 Fielding cannot refrain from a
+thrust at Colley Cibber); a journalist; a writer of whom Dibden declared
+that the tendency of all his productions was to "cultivate truth and
+morality"; a tradesman in the linen business; and the son of a dissenting
+minister: a combination of circumstances closely recalling Fielding's
+friendship for the good dissenter, jeweller, and poet, George Lillo. And
+it is to an undated letter by Edward Moore, hitherto overlooked, that we
+owe one of the rare references to Henry Fielding from a contemporary pen.
+Moore is writing to a dissenting minister at Taunton, one Mr John Ward, of
+whom it was said that venerable as he himself was for learning, worth, and
+piety he deemed it "_an honour to have his name connected with that of
+Moore_,"--a further proof of the quality of man whom Fielding choose for
+friend. Moore had been prevented, by Fielding's illness, from appointing
+an evening on which he might invite the Taunton minister to his lodgings
+to meet there some of the first wits of the day. "It is not," he writes,
+"owing to forgetfulness that you have not heard from me before. Fielding
+continues to be visited for his sins so as to be wheeled about from room
+to room; when he mends I am sure to see him at my lodgings; and you may
+depend upon timely notice. What fine things are Wit and Beauty, if a Man
+could be temperate with one, or a Woman chaste with the other! But he that
+will confine his acquaintance to the sober and the modest will generally
+find himself among the dull and the ugly. If this remark of mine should be
+thought to shoulder itself in without an introduction you will be pleased
+to note that Fielding is a Wit; that his disorder is the Gout, and
+intemperance the cause." It is of course idle to contend that Fielding
+always carried a cool head. Murphy tells us that to him might justly be
+applied a parody on a saying concerning Scipio,--"always over a social
+bottle or a book, he enured his body to the dangers of intemperance, and
+exercised his mind with Studies." But we must in justice remember that the
+Augustan age of English literature concerned itself but very little with
+our modern virtue of sobriety. That Fielding, with the other great men of
+his day, very often drank more than was good for him, amounts to little
+more than saying that he wore a laced coat when he had one, and carried a
+sword at his side.
+
+The execution of one of the Strand rioters, Bosavern Penlez by name, in
+September, had roused much controversy; and as the evidence in the case
+was in Justice Fielding's possession, and the attacks were levelled at the
+Government, we find him plunged once more into political pamphleteering in
+the publication, under the date of 1749, of the learned little treatise
+entitled "_A True State of the Case of Bosavern Penlez' who suffered on
+account of the late riot in the Strand. In which the Law regarding these
+Offences and the Statute of George I. commonly called the Riot Act are
+fully considered_." The pamphlet opens with a warm protest against the
+abuse to which Fielding had been subjected by his political opponents. "It
+may easily be imagined," he writes, "that a Man whose Character hath been
+so barbarously, even without the least Regard to Truth or Decency,
+aspersed, on account of his Endeavours to defend the present Government,
+might wish to decline any future Appearance as a political Writer"; but
+more weighty considerations move him to lay the defence of the Riot Act in
+general, and of this application of it in particular, before a public
+which had been imposed upon "in the grossest and wickedest manner." We
+have already quoted the vivid depositions concerning this Strand riot,
+which were sworn before Fielding, and which he here reproduces; and his
+historical defence of the public need of suppressing riots, from the days
+of Wat Tyler onwards, may be left to the curious reader. Needless to say,
+Fielding makes out an excellent case against the toleration of mob law:--
+"When by our excellent Constitution the greatest Subject, no not even the
+King himself, can, without a lawful Trial and Conviction divest the
+meanest Man of his Property, deprive him of his Liberty, or attack him in
+his Person; shall we suffer a licentious Rabble to be Accuser, Judge,
+Jury, and Executioner; to inflict corporal Punishment, break open Men's
+Doors, plunder their Houses, and burn their Goods?" And, at the close,
+this pamphlet reveals the warm-hearted magistrate no less than the erudite
+lawyer. For of the two condemned prisoners, Wilson and Penlez, the case of
+the former seemed to Fielding "to be the Object of true Compassion."
+Accordingly he laid the evidence in his possession before "some very noble
+Persons," and, he adds, "I flatter myself that it might be a little owing
+to my Representation, that the Distinction between an Object of Mercy, and
+an Object of Justice at last prevailed". So the felon gained his respite,
+and a lasting niche for his name, in that he owed his life partly if not
+wholly to the generous compassion of Henry Fielding. The pamphlet seems to
+have made its mark, for a second edition was advertised within a month of
+publication.
+
+This eventful year, the year which had seen the publication of _Tom
+Jones_, the shackling of Fielding's genius within the duties of a London
+magistrate, the issue of two pamphlets occupied with criminal reform and
+administration, the drafting of a proposed Criminal Bill, and the
+suppression of a riot, closed sadly with the death of Fielding's little
+daughter, Mary Amelia, when barely twelve months old. She was buried at St
+Paul's, Covent Garden, on the seventeenth of December, 1749. And some time
+in the autumn or early winter Fielding himself appears to have been
+dangerously ill. This we learn from the following paragraph in the
+_General Advertizer_ for December 28: "Justice Fielding has no
+Mortification in his Foot as has been reported: that Gentleman has indeed
+been very dangerously ill with a Fever, and a Fit of the Gout, in which he
+was attended by Dr Thompson, an eminent Physician, and is now so well
+recovered as to be able to execute his Office as usual."
+
+[1] His Commission in the Peace for Westminster bears date October 25.
+1748.
+
+[2] An application is reported for the 2nd of December before "Justice
+Fielding" of Meards Court, St. Anne's, but for reasons given below this
+_may_ refer to John Fielding.
+
+[3] From the autograph now at Woburn Abbey, and printed in the
+_Correspondence of John Fourth Duke of Bedford_. Vol. i. p. 589.
+
+[4] Middlesex Records. Volume of _Qualification Oaths for Justices of the
+Peace_. 1749. From an entry dated July 13, 1749, in the same volume,
+Fielding appears to have then owned leases in the three first named
+parishes only.
+
+[5] See the King's Writ, now preserved in the Record Office.
+
+[6] Middlesex Records. _Sacramental Certificates_.
+
+[7] Middlesex Records. _Oath Rolls_.
+
+[8] _Amelia_. Book i. Chapter ii.
+
+[9] The Westminster _Session Rolls_, preserved among the Middlesex
+Records, contain many recognizances all signed by Fielding.
+
+[10] "On Friday last," announces the General Advertiser for May 17,
+"Counsellor Fielding, one of his Majesty's Justices of the Peace was
+chosen Chairman of the Sessions at Hicks Hall for the County of
+Middlesex"; a statement not very compatible with the incontestable
+evidence preserved in the _General Orders Books_ of the Middlesex Records,
+by which it appears that John Lane Esq're was elected Chairman of the
+Middlesex General Sessions and General Quarter Session from Ladyday 1749
+to September 1752. The personal paragraphist of 1749 was perhaps no less
+inaccurate than his descendant of to-day. But a few weeks later this
+honour of chairmanship was certainly accorded to Fielding by his brethren
+of the Bench for Westminster. An entry in the _Sessions Book_ of
+Westminster, 1749 runs as follows: "May. 1749, Mr Fielding elected
+chairman of this present Session and to continue untill the 2nd day of the
+next." _MSS Sessions Books for Westminster. Vol. 1749_. Middlesex Records.
+
+[11] From the autograph now at Woburn Abbey, and printed in the
+_Correspondence of John, Fourth Duke of Bedford_, vol. ii. p. 35.
+
+[12] From the hitherto unpublished autograph now in the British Museum.
+
+[13] This letter is now in the Dreer Collection of the Historical Society
+of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, U.S.A.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+FIELDING AND LEGISLATION
+
+    "The Subject, as well as the Child, should be left without excuse
+    before he is punished: for, in that case alone, the Rod becomes
+    the Hand either of the Parent or the Magistrate."
+    _Inquiry Into the Causes of the late Increase of Robbers_.
+
+There is no Bill for the suppression of street robberies on the Statute
+Book for 1749 or 1750; so the draft which Fielding, with characteristic
+energy, despatched to the Lord Chancellor but a few months after his
+appointment to the Bench, was, presumably, pigeon-holed. Meanwhile, the
+criminal conditions of the metropolis seem to have become, if anything,
+more scandalous. In February 1750, the _Penny Post_ reports the gaols in
+and about London to be "now so full of Felons and desperate Rogues that
+the Keepers have not fetters enow to put upon them; so that in some
+Prisons two or three are chained together to prevent their escape." And on
+the fifth of the same month the _General Advertiser_ hears that "near 40
+Highwaymen, street Robbers, Burglars, Rogues, Vagabonds, and Cheats have
+been committed within a week last past by Justice Fielding." But however
+full of business the Bow Street court-room might be, that dreary routine
+[1] would make, as we have said, but equally dreary reading. And the fact
+that both John and Henry Fielding appear to have been known as 'Justice
+Fielding' during the lifetime of the latter, lessens whatever biographical
+value might be extracted from the constant newspaper paragraphs recording
+the Fielding cases. It is clear that the house in Bow Street was the
+centre of an active campaign against the thieves, murderers, professional
+gamblers, and highwaymen, who were then so rife. Military guards conducted
+thither prisoners, brought for examination from Newgate, for fear of
+rescue from gangs lurking in the neighbouring streets. All "Persons who
+have been robbed" and their servants, were desired, by public
+advertisement, to attend Justice Fielding "at his House in Bow Street," to
+identify certain prisoners under examination. And thither came the
+"porters and beggars," the composing of whose quarrels Henry Fielding
+himself has told us, occupied his days. The generous spirit in which he
+treated such poor clients, and his tenderness for those driven by want
+into crime, are eminently characteristic of the man. By adjusting, instead
+of inflaming, these squalid quarrels, and by "refusing to take a shilling
+from a man who must undoubtedly would not have had another left," he
+reduced a supposed income of L500 a year to L300. And if the picture of
+the poor wretch, driven to highway robbery by the sight of his starving
+family, whom Tom Jones relieved from his own scanty purse, be not proof
+enough of the compassion that tempered Justice Fielding's sternness, we
+have his own express pleading for these unhappy victims of circumstance:
+"what can be more shocking," he cries, "than to see an industrious poor
+Creature, who is able and willing to labour forced by mere want into
+Dishonesty, and that in a Nation of such Trade and Opulence." So justly
+could Fielding apportion the contributary negligence of society towards
+the criminals bred by its apathy.
+
+And it was not only the impoverished porter who found help at Bow Street.
+"When," says Murphy, "in the latter end of [Mr Fielding's] days he had an
+income of four or five hundred a-year, he knew no use of money but to keep
+his table open to those who had been his friends when young, and had
+impaired their own fortunes." As Mr Austin Dobson says, in commenting on
+one of Horace Walpole's scurrilous letters, [2] "it must always have been
+a more or less ragged regiment which met about that kindly Bow Street
+board." The man who parted with his own hardly won arrears of rent to
+relieve the yet greater need of a College friend, was little likely to be
+less generous when the tardy 'jade Fortune' at last put some secured
+income into his hands.
+
+No special event marks the spring and summer of 1750. On the 11th of
+January the Westminster General Quarter Sessions opened, and on the
+following day Fielding was again elected as chairman "for the two next
+Quarter Sessions"; which election was repeated, "for the two next
+Sessions, [3]" in July. The Registers of St Paul's Covent Garden record
+the baptism of a daughter, Sophia, on the 21st of January. And an
+indication that the zealous magistrate was plunged, personally, into some
+of the tumults of the time occurs in the following trifling note to the
+Duke of Bedford.
+
+
+"My Lord,
+
+"In obedience to the Commands I have the Honour to receive from your
+Grace, I shall attend tomorrow morning and do the utmost in my Power to
+preserve the Peace on that occasion.
+
+"I am, with gratitude and Respect,
+"My Lord,
+"Your Grace's most obliged
+"most obedient humble servant.
+
+"Henry Ffielding. [4]
+
+"Bow Street,
+
+"May 14, 1750."
+
+By the autumn, however, a rumour was abroad that the now famous author of
+_Tom Jones_ was engaged on pages of a very different nature. The _General
+Advertiser_, for October 9, announces:--
+
+"We hear that an eminent Magistrate is now employed in preparing a
+Pamphlet for the Press in which the several causes that have conspired to
+render Robberies so frequent of late will be laid open; the Defects of our
+Laws enquired into, and Methods proposed which may discourage and in a
+great measure prevent this growing Evil for the future."
+
+This pamphlet, in which many a later reform was urged by Fielding's
+far-sighted zeal, seems to have been still in preparation for the next two
+months. And in November the reform of the law had to give place to a more
+immediate urgency in protecting the Lord Chancellor. The keepers of three
+gaming houses, closed by his lordship's orders, were reported to be
+plotting against that exalted dignitary; and the case, as appears from the
+following letter to a lawyer, Mr Perkins, was in Fielding's hands. [5]
+
+
+"Sir
+
+"I have made full enquiry after the three Persons and have a perfect
+account of them all. Their characters are such that perhaps three more
+likely Men could not be found in the Kingdom for the Hellish Purpose
+mentioned in the Letter. As the Particulars are many and the Affair of
+such Importance I beg to see you punctually at six this evening when I
+will be alone to receive you--and am, Sir,
+
+"Yr. most obed;
+"humble servant
+
+"He Ffielding.
+
+"Bow Street. Nov. 25. 1750."
+
+When the keepers of gambling houses dared to fly at such high game as the
+person of the Lord Chancellor, there is no wonder that the safety of his
+Majesty's ordinary lieges was of small account. "Robbery," writes Horace
+Walpole, a few weeks before the date of the above letter, "is the only
+thing which goes on with any vivacity." And at the close of the year a
+Royal Proclamation was actually published, promising L100 over and above
+other rewards, and a free pardon, to any accomplice who should apprehend
+offenders committing murder, or robbery by violence, in London streets or
+within five miles of London, providing such an accomplice had not himself
+dealt a mortal wound. So startling a confession of impotence on the part
+of the Government served very fitly to introduce the pamphlet, then on the
+eve of publication. And if further proof be needed of the conditions of
+public safety at the beginning of the year 1751, it may be seen in the
+passage of the King's Speech delivered at the opening of Parliament on the
+17th of January, in which his Majesty exhorted the Commons to suppress
+outrages and violences on life and property; words representing, of
+course, the policy of the Ministry.
+
+The title of Fielding's little book, dedicated to Lord Hardwick, and
+published about January 22, is _An Enquiry into the Causes of the late
+Increase of Robbers &c. with some Proposals for remedying this growing
+Evil. In which the Present Reigning Vices are impartially exposed; and the
+Laws that relate to the Provision for the Poor and to the Punishment of
+Felons are largely and freely examined_. The _Enquiry_ opens with a
+powerful denunciation of the licence then allowed to the three great
+causes, in Fielding's opinion, of the increasing demoralisation of the
+'most useful Part' of the people. These were, first, the immense number of
+places of amusement, all seducing the working classes to squander both
+their money and their time; this being "indeed a certain Method to fill
+the Streets with Beggars and the Goals with Debtors and Thieves." Here, in
+Fielding's view, new legislation was demanded. The second cause of the
+late excessive increase of crime, according to the _Enquiry_, was an
+epidemic of gin drinking, "a new Kind of Drunkenness unknown to our
+Ancestors [which] is lately sprung up amongst us." Gin, says Fielding,
+appeared to be the principal sustenance of more than an hundred thousand
+Londoners, "the dreadful Effects of which I have the Misfortune every Day
+to see, and to smell too." The crime resulting from such drunkenness was
+obvious; but Fielding, looking far beyond the narrow confines of his
+court-room, beheld a future gin-sodden race, and he appeals to the
+legislature to put a stop to a practice, the consequences of which must
+alarm "the most sluggish Degree of Public Spirit." It is surely something
+more than a coincidence that a few weeks after these warnings were
+published, Hogarth issued his awful plate of _Gin Lane_. A third source of
+crime, in Fielding's eyes, was the gambling among the 'lower Classes of
+Life,'--a school "in which most Highwaymen of great eminence have been
+bred," and a habit plainly tending to the "Ruin of Tradesmen, the
+Destruction of Youth, and to the Multiplication of every Kind of Fraud and
+Violence." In this case the 'Eminent Magistrate' finds new legislation
+less needed than a vigorous enforcement of existing laws; such, he adds,
+"as hath lately been executed with great Vigour within the Liberty of
+Westminster." Before long the pages of _Amelia_ were to bring home yet
+more forcibly to Fielding's readers the cruel results of the pleasures (or
+speculations) of the needy gambler,--the 'Destruction of Familys,' thereby
+incurred, no less than the breeding of highwaymen. Who does not remember
+"that famous scene when Amelia is spreading, for the recreant who is
+losing his money at the Kings Arms, the historic little supper of hashed
+mutton, which she has cooked with her own hands, and denying herself a
+glass of white wine to save the paltry sum of sixpence, 'while her Husband
+was paying a Debt of several Guineas incurred by the Ace of Trumps being
+in the hands of his Adversary'--a scene which it is impossible to read
+aloud without a certain huskiness in the throat." [6] The last great cause
+of crime which the _Enquiry_ considers, and with much learning and detail,
+is the condition of the poor. Here Fielding's views on our modern problem
+of the unemployed may be read. And here occurs a splendid denunciation of
+the 'House of Correction' or Bridewell of the period, a prison for idle
+and disorderly persons where "they are neither to be corrected nor
+employed: and where with the conversation of many as bad and sometimes
+worse than themselves they are sure to be improved in the Knowledge and
+confirmed in the Practice of Iniquity." The most impudent of the wretches
+brought before him, Fielding tells us, were always "such as have been
+before acquainted with the Discipline of Bridewell." These prisons, from
+which the disorderly and idle came out, "much more idle and disorderly
+than they went in," were, says Fielding, no other than "Schools of Vice,
+Seminaries of Idleness, and Common-sewers of Nastiness and Disease." A
+fixed (and lower) rate of wages, it is curious to note, is one remedy
+advocated in the _Enquiry_, for raising the condition of the poor.
+
+Such were the 'temptations' to robbery that Fielding would have removed,
+nobly conceiving the highest office of the legislature to be that of
+prevention rather than cure. The _Enquiry_ concludes with offering some
+more immediate palliatives for the diseased state of the body politic, in
+the removing of actual 'Encouragement to Robbery.' First among such
+encouragements Fielding places the fact that "the Thief disposes of his
+goods with almost as much safety as the honestest Tradesman"; and he urged
+the need of legislation to prohibit the amazing advertisements by which
+our ancestors promised to give rewards for the recovery of stolen goods
+"_and no questions asked_." Such advertisements he declares to be "in
+themselves so very scandalous and of such pernicious Consequence, that if
+Men are not ashamed to own they prefer an old Watch or a Diamond Ring to
+the Good of [the] Society it is a pity some effectual Law was not
+contrived to prevent their giving this public Countenance to Robbery for
+the future." And, under this head, he advocates legislation either for the
+regulating of pawnbrokers, or for the entire extirpation of a "Set of
+Miscreants which, like other Vermin, harbour only about the Poor and grow
+fat sucking their Blood." The subsequent legislation by which prosecutors
+were recompensed for loss of time and money, when prosecuting the 'wolves
+in society,' may be added to the measures forseen if not actually promoted
+by Fielding's enlightened zeal. And in nothing was he more in advance of
+his age than in his denunciation of that scandal of the eighteenth
+century, the conduct and frequency of public executions. It has taken our
+legislators a hundred years to provide the swift, solemn and private
+executions urged by Henry Fielding, in place of the brutal 'Tyburn
+holiday' enacted every six weeks for the benefit of the Georgian mob.
+Another matter demanding legislation was the great probability of escape
+afforded to thieves by the narrow streets and the common-lodging houses of
+the day. Of the latter, crowded with miserable beds from the cellar to the
+garret, let out, at twopence a night the single beds, and threepence the
+double ones, Fielding draws a picture as terrible as any of his friend
+Hogarth's plates. And he concludes "Nay I can add what I myself once saw
+in the Parish of Shoreditch where two little Houses were emptied of near
+seventy Men and Women," and where the money found on all the occupants
+(with the exception of a pretty girl who was a thief) "did not amount to
+one shilling." In all these houses gin, moreover, was sold at a penny the
+quartern. Housed thus, in conditions destructive of "all Morality, Decency
+and Modesty," with the street for bed if they fall sick ("and it is almost
+a Miracle that Stench, Vermin, and Want should ever suffer them to be
+well"), oppressed with poverty, and sunk in every species of debauchery,
+"the Wonder in Fact is," cries Fielding, "... that we have not a thousand
+more Robbers than we have; indeed that all these wretches are not thieves
+must give us either a very high Idea of their Honesty or a very mean one
+of their Capacity and Courage." And, leaving for a moment legislative
+reform, Fielding delivers a vigorous attack on the national sluggishness
+of public spirit which helped to render robbery a fairly safe profession.
+With such sluggishness his ardent nature had very little sympathy. "With
+regard to Private Persons," he protests, "there is no Country I believe in
+the World where that vulgar Maxim so generally prevails that what is the
+Business of every Man is the business of no Man; and for this plain
+Reason, that there is no Country in which less Honour is gained by serving
+the Public. He therefore who commits no crime against the Public, is very
+well satisfied with his own Virtue; far from thinking himself obliged to
+undergo any Labour, expend any Money, or encounter any Danger on such
+Account." And in no part of the _Enquiry_ does the writer more truly show
+his wisdom than in the pages on 'false Compassion' that plausible weakness
+which refuses to prosecute the oppressors of the helpless and innocent,
+and which at that time, in the person of his Majesty, King George II. was,
+it appears, very active in pardoning offenders when convicted. Fielding's
+arguments are incontestable; but his apologue may have found even more
+favour in the age of wit. He hopes such good nature may not carry those in
+power so far, "as it once did a Clergyman in _Scotland_ who in the fervour
+of his Benevolence prayed to God that He would be graciously pleased to
+pardon the poor Devil."
+
+To the devil, whether in man or in society, Fielding was ever a 'spirited
+enemy'; and his first biographer tells us that "to the unworthy he was
+rather harsh." But the last page of this little book breathes that spirit
+of tenderness for hard pressed humanity which in Fielding was so
+characteristically mingled with a wholesome severity. If the legislature
+would take proper care to raise the condition of the poor, then he
+declares the root of the evil would be struck: "nor in plain Truth will
+the utmost severity to Offenders be justifiable unless we take every
+possible Method of preventing the offence ... the Subject as well as the
+child should be left without Excuse before he is punished: for in that
+Case alone the Rod becomes the Hand either of the Parent or the
+Magistrate." And his last word is one of compassion for the "many
+Cart-loads of our Fellow-creatures [who] once in six weeks are carried to
+Slaughter"; of whom much the greater part might, with 'proper care and
+Regulations' have been made "not only happy in themselves but very useful
+Members of the Society which they now so greatly dishonour in the Sight of
+all Christendom."
+
+Henry Fielding is himself his own best illustration when he declares that
+the "good Poet and the good Politician do not differ so much as some who
+know nothing of either art affirm; nor would _Homer_ or _Milton_ have made
+the worst Legislators of their Times."
+
+To the reader of to-day the _Enquiry_ betrays no party flavour, but its
+sedate pages clearly stirred up the hot feeling of the times. Early in
+February the Advertiser announced "_This Day is published A Letter to
+Henry Fielding Esqre. occasioned by his Enquiry into the causes of the
+late increase of Robbers &c_." And about the end of the month there
+appeared _Considerations_, in two numbers of the _True Briton_, "on
+Justice Fielding's 'Enquiry,' shewing his Mistakes about the Constitution
+and our Laws and that what he seems to propose is dangerous to our
+Properties, Liberties and Constitution." On March 7 was announced
+_Observations on Mr Fielding's Enquiry_, by one B. Sedgley. Some
+opposition squib, too, must have been launched, to judge by the following
+item from an advertisement column of the same date: "a Vindication of the
+Rights and Privileges of the Commonality of England, in Opposition to what
+has been advanced by the Author of the Enquiry, or to what may be
+promulgated by any Ministerial Artifices against the public Cause of Truth
+and Liberty. _By_ Timothy Beck_ the Happy Cobler of Portugal-street_."
+[7] Perhaps some collector of eighteenth century pamphlets may be able to
+reveal these comments of the '_Happy Gobler of Portugal-street_' upon the
+'artifices' of Henry Fielding. [8]
+
+In the February following the publication of the _Enquiry_ a Parlimentary
+Committee was appointed "to revise and consider the Laws in being, which
+relate to Felonies and other Offences against the Peace." [9] The
+Committee included Lyttelton and Pitt, and there is of course every
+probability that Fielding's evidence would be taken; but it seems
+impossible now to discover what share he may have had in this move by the
+Government towards fresh criminal legislation. There is, however, the
+evidence of his own hand that in the matter of prison administration his
+efforts were not limited to academic pamphlets, or to the indictment, so
+soon to be published, contained in the terrible prison scenes of _Amelia_.
+The following letter to the Duke of Newcastle [10] shows an anxious
+endeavour to secure such good government as was possible for at least one
+of the gaols.
+
+
+"My Lord
+
+"It being of the utmost consequence to the Public to have a proper Prison
+Keeper of the new Prison at the Time, I beg leave to recommend Mr William
+Pentlow a Constable of St George Bloomsbury to your Grace's Protection in
+the present Vacancy. He is a Man of whose Courage and Integrity I have
+seen the highest Proofs, and is indeed every way qualified for the
+charge. I am with the most Perfect Respect,
+
+"My Lord,
+"Your Grace's most obedient
+"and most humble servant,
+
+"Henry Ffielding
+"Bow Street Jan. 15. 1750 [1751]."
+
+A second edition of the _Enquiry_ appeared early in the spring; and
+according to the _Journals of the House of Commons_ it was resolved, in
+April, that a Bill be brought in on the resolution of the Committee
+appointed two months previously to consider criminal legislation. Again it
+can only be surmised that Fielding's assistance would be invoked in the
+drafting of this Bill. That his vigorous denunciations of the national
+danger of the gin curse were in complete accord with the feeling of the
+Government is apparent from the fact that two months later, in June 1751,
+the _Tippling Act_ [11] received the royal assent, by which Act very
+stringent restrictions were imposed on the sale of spirits.
+
+In June Fielding again appears as Chairman of the Westminster Sessions.
+[12] And in September cases occur as brought before John Fielding and
+others "at Henry Fielding's house in Bow Street," [13] from which it
+appears that Fielding's blind half-brother was already acting as his
+assistant. In the following month John Fielding appears among the Justices
+of the Westminster Quarter Sessions. [14]
+
+The year that had seen the publication of the _Enquiry_, affords proof
+enough of Fielding's active labours in criminal and social reform; but the
+last month of this year is marked by an occurrence of much greater import
+for English literature, the publication of the third great novel,
+_Amelia_.
+
+[1] Doubtless faithfully rendered in the old print, here reproduced, of
+Fielding's blind half-brother, assistant, and successor, Sir John
+Fielding, hearing a Bow Street case.
+
+[2] See Appendix.
+
+[3] Middlesex Records. _MSS. Sessions Books_. 1750.
+
+[4] From the hitherto unpublished autograph, now at Woburn Abbey.
+
+[5] This hitherto unpublished letter is now in the British Museum. It is
+addressed to "--Perkins, Esq. at his Chambers No. 7, in Lincolns Inn
+Square," and is sealed with Fielding's seal, a facsimile of which appears
+on the cover of the present volume.
+
+[6] _Fielding_. Austin Dobson. p. 156.
+
+[7] _The General Advertiser_. March 7, 1751.
+
+[8] The _London Magazine_ for February devoted five columns to an
+"Abstract of Mr Fielding's Enquiry"; and in the following month the
+_Magazine_ again noticed the book, by printing a long anonymous letter in
+which Fielding is attacked as a 'trading author' and a 'trading justice,'
+and in which the writer shows his intellectual grasp by advocating in all
+seriousness a law prohibiting the sovereign from gambling!
+
+[9] See _Journals of the House of Commons_. Vol. xxii. p. 27, and the
+_London Magazine_. Vol. xx. p. 82. The _Catalogue of Printed Papers. House
+of Commons_, 1750-51, includes "A Bill for the more effectual preventing
+Robberies Burglaries and other Outrages within the City and Liberty of
+Westminster--" &c.
+
+[10] This hitherto unpublished letter is now in the British Museum. It is
+endorsed "Jan. 15, 1750(1)."
+
+[11] 24 George II. c. 40. June 1751.
+
+[12] Middlesex Records. _Sessions Book_. 1751.
+
+[13] _General Advertiser_. Sept. 9. 1751.
+
+[14] Middlesex Records. _Sessions Book_. October, 1751.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+AMELIA
+
+    "of all my Offspring she is my favourite Child."
+    The _Covent Garden Journal_. No. 8.
+
+On the 2nd of December 1751 the _General Advertiser_ announces that
+
+    _On Wednesday the 18th of this Month will be published_
+
+    IN FOUR VOLUMES DUODECIMO
+
+    AMELIA
+
+    By HENRY FIELDING, Esq;
+    _Beati ter et amplius
+    Quos irrupta tenet Copula_. HOR.
+
+And the puff preliminary of the period may be read in the same columns,
+declaring that the "earnest Demand of the Publick" had necessitated the
+use of four printing presses; and that it being impossible to complete the
+binding in time, copies would be available "sew'd at Half-a-Guinea a
+Sett." Sir Walter Scott tells us that, at a sale to booksellers before
+publication, Andrew Millar, the publisher, refused to part with _Amelia_
+on the usual discount terms; and that the booksellers, being thus
+persuaded of a great future for the book, eagerly bought up the
+impression. Launched thus, and heralded by the popularity with which _Tom
+Jones_ had now endowed Fielding's name, the entire edition was sold out on
+the day of publication; an event which evoked the observation from Dr
+Johnson that _Amelia_ was perhaps the only book which being printed off
+betimes one morning, a new edition was called for before night. The Doctor
+gave not only unstinted praise, but also an involuntary tribute to
+_Amelia_. He read the book through, without pausing, from beginning to
+end. And he pronounced Amelia herself to be "the most pleasing heroine of
+all the romances." [1]
+
+But to the majority of readers Amelia is, assuredly, something more than
+the most charming of heroines. She is the delightful companion; the wise
+and tender friend; a woman whose least perfection was that dazzling beauty
+which shone with equal lustre in the 'poor rags' lent her by her old
+nurse, or in her own clothing, just as the happy purity of her nature only
+glows more brightly for the dark scenes through which she moves. In the
+whole range of English literature there is surely no figure more warmly
+human, and yet less touched with human imperfection; none more simply and
+naturally alive, and yet truer in every crisis (and there were few of the
+sorrowful things of life unknown to her) to the best qualities of generous
+womanhood. And if it is largely for her glowing vitality that we love
+Amelia, we love her none the less in that she is no fool. It was hardly
+necessary to tell us, as Fielding is careful to do, that her sense of
+humour was keen, and that her insight into the ridiculous was tempered
+only by the deeper insight of her heart. Her understanding of her husband
+is as perfect as her love for him; and that love is far too profound to
+allow a moment's suggestion of mere placid amiability. Amelia, whether
+quizzing the absurdities of the affected fine ladies of her own rank, or
+cooking her husband's supper in the poor lodgings of their poverty;
+whether so radiant with happiness after seeing her little children
+handsomely entertained that with flushed cheeks and bright eyes, "she was
+all a blaze of beauty," or, pale with distress, bravely carrying her own
+clothes and the children's trinkets to the pawnbroker; whether betraying
+her own noble qualities of silence and forgiveness, or losing her temper
+with Mrs Bennett,--commands equal affection and admiration. "They say,"
+wrote Thackeray, "that it was in his own home that Fielding knew her and
+loved her: and from his own wife that he drew the most charming character
+in English fiction--Fiction? Why fiction! Why not history? I know Amelia
+just as well as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu."
+
+Lady Mary, and her daughter Lady Bute, have left very definite statements
+concerning this portrait which their cousin was alleged to have hidden
+under the fair image of Amelia. Lady Bute we are told was no stranger "to
+that beloved first wife whose picture he drew in his Amelia, where, as she
+said, even the glowing language he knew how to employ did not do more than
+justice to the amiable qualities of the original...." [2] And Lady Mary
+herself writes, "H. Fielding has given a true picture of himself and his
+first wife, in the characters of Mr and Mrs Booth [Amelia and her
+husband], some compliments to his own figure excepted; and I am persuaded
+several of the incidents he mentions are real matters of fact." [3]
+Against these persuations we must place the fact that this book contains
+no such explicit statement as that which in _Tom Jones_ assures us of the
+original of the beautiful Sophia. But we shall not love Amelia the less if
+we see her, with her courage and her beauty, her happy gaiety of spirit,
+her tenderness and strength, solacing the distresses and calming the
+storms of Fielding's restless genius, rather than devoting those qualities
+to assuaging the misfortunes of Captain William Booth. For indeed Captain
+Booth has but one substantial title to our regard, and that is his
+adoration for his wife. True, he is a pretty figure of a man; he has a
+handsome face; he fights bravely, and would kick a rogue through the
+world; he believes in and loves his friends; and he plays charmingly with
+his children. But, deprive him of the good genius of his life, and Captain
+Booth would very speedily have sunk into the ruin and despair of any other
+profligate young gamester about the Town; and for this his adoration the
+culprit wins our forgiveness, even as Amelia not only forgave but forgot,
+when by virtue of her own unconscious goodness the Captain retrieved
+himself, at last, from the folly of his ways. Undoubtedly the man whom
+Amelia loved, and who had the grace to return that passion, was no
+scoundrel at heart.
+
+It is impossible, now, to discover with any certainty the incidents which
+Lady Mary was persuaded were matters of fact. The experiences of Captain
+Booth, when essaying to turn gentleman farmer, have been quoted as copies
+of Fielding's own ambitions at East Stour; but surely on very slender
+evidence. Much more personal seem many of the later scenes in the poor
+London lodgings, scenes of cruel distress and perfect happiness, of bitter
+disappointments and sanguine hope. Here, very probably, we have echoes of
+the struggles of Harry and Charlotte Fielding, in the days of hackney
+writing and of baffled efforts at the Bar; just as the dry statement by
+Arthur Murphy, that Fielding was "remarkable for ... the strongest
+affection for his children," comes to life in the many touching pictures
+of Amelia and Booth with their little son and daughter. The pursuit of
+such identity of incident may the more cheerfully be left to the
+anecdotist, in that the biographical value of _Amelia_, is far more than
+incidental. For the book is, as has been said, a one-part piece. Round the
+single figure of Amelia all the other characters revolve; and it was of
+Amelia that Fielding himself has told us, in words that are a master key
+to his own character "of all my offspring she is my favourite Child." As
+surely as a man may be known by his choice in a friend, so is the nature
+of the artist betrayed when he avows his partiality for one alone among
+all the creations of his genius.
+
+As to the remaining figures in this "model of human life," to quote
+Fielding's own descriptive phrase of his book, those which tell us most of
+their author are that worthy, authoritative, humourous clergyman, Dr
+Harrison; the good Sergeant Atkinson; and that fiery pedant Colonel Bath,
+with his kind heart hidden under a ferocious passion for calling out every
+man whom he conceived to have slighted his honour. Dr Harrison does not
+win quite the same place in our hearts as the man whom Thackeray calls
+'dear Parson Adams'; his cassock rustles a little too loudly; the saint is
+a trifle obscured in the Doctor. But yet we love him for his warm and
+protecting affection for his 'children' as he calls Amelia and Booth; for
+his dry humour; and for that generosity which was for ever draining his
+ample purse. And perhaps we like him none the less for his scholar's
+raillery of that early blue-stocking Mrs Bennet; while his dignity never
+shows to greater advantage than when he throws himself bodily on the
+villain Murphy, achieving the arrest of that felon by the strength of his
+own arm, and the nimbleness of his own legs. And to this good Doctor is
+given a saying eminently characteristic of Justice Fielding himself. We
+are told that "it was a maxim of his that no man could descend below
+himself in doing any act which may contribute to protect an innocent
+person, or to bring a rogue to the gallows." Another trait of the Doctor
+recalls Fielding's oft reiterated aversion to what he calls grave formal
+persons: "You must know then, child," said he, to poor Booth, sunk in the
+melancholy problem of supporting a wife and three children on something
+less than L40 a year, "that I have been thinking on this subject as well
+as you; for I can think, I promise you, with a pleasant countenance." Of
+Amelia's foster-brother Sergeant Atkinson (from whom Major William Dobbin
+is directly descended) it is enough to say that the noble qualities
+concealed beneath the common cloth of his sergeant's coat perfectly
+confirm a sentence written many years before by the hand of his author. "I
+will venture to affirm," Fielding declares, in his early essay on the
+_Characters of Men_, "that I have known ... _a Fellow whom no man should
+be seen to speak to_, capable of the highest acts of Friendship and
+Benevolence."
+
+Fielding's energies in this his last novel, a novel be it remembered
+written in the midst of daily contact with the squalid vices exhibited in
+an eighteenth century court-room, seem to have been almost wholly absorbed
+in creating the most perfect escape from those surroundings in the person
+of Amelia. Beside the figure of his 'favourite child,' the vicious
+criminals of his stage, the malefic My Lord, the loathsome Trent, the
+debased Justice, the terrible human wrecks in Newgate, are but dark
+figures in a shadowy back-ground. Still, the great moralist shows no lack
+of vigour in his delineations of such offspring of vice. The genius that
+knew how to rouse every reader of _Tom Jones_ to 'lend a foot to kick
+Blifil downstairs,' awards in the last pages of _Amelia_, a yet more
+satisfying justice to that nameless connoisseur in profligacy, My Lord.
+
+In his Dedication to Ralph Allen, Fielding states that his book "is
+sincerely designed to promote the Cause of Virtue, and to expose some of
+the most glaring Evils, as well public as private, which at present infest
+this Country". The statement seems somewhat needless when prefacing pages
+which enshrine Amelia; and where also are displayed Blear Eyed Moll in the
+prison yard of Newgate, as Newgate was twenty years before the prison
+reforms of Howard were heard of; Justice Thrasher and his iniquities; the
+'diabolisms' of My Lord and of his tool Trent; the ruinous miseries of
+excessive gambling; and the abuses of duelling. Indeed the avowedly
+didactic purpose of the moralist seems at times to cloud a little the fine
+perception of the artist. There are passages, in this book which, much as
+they redound to the honour of their writer, are indisputably heavy
+reading. But what shall not be forgiven to the creator of Amelia. "To have
+invented that character," cries Thackeray, also becoming didactic, "is not
+only a triumph of art, but it is a good action." And he tells us how with
+all his heart he loves and admires the 'kindest and sweetest lady in the
+world'; and how he thinks of her as faithfully as though he had
+breakfasted with her that morning in her drawing-room, or should meet her
+that afternoon in the Park.
+
+It is recorded that Fielding received from Andrew Millar L1000 for the
+copyright of _Amelia_. But the reception of the new novel, after the first
+rush for copies, seems to have done little credit either to the brains or
+to the heart of the public. And in the month following _Amelia's_
+appearance, Fielding satirises the comments of the Town, in two numbers of
+his _Covent Garden Journal_; protesting that though he does not think his
+child to be entirely free from faults--"I know nothing human that is
+so,"--still "surely she does not deserve the Rancour with which she hath
+been treated by the Public." As ironic specimens of the faults complained
+of in his heroine, he quotes the accusations that her not abusing her
+husband "for having lost Money at Play, when she saw his Heart was already
+almost broke by it, was _contemptible Meanness_"; that she condescends to
+dress her husband's supper, and to dress her children, to whom moreover
+she shows too much kindness; that she once mentions the DEVIL; that she is
+a _low_ character; and that the beauty of her face is hopelessly flawed by
+a carriage accident. Such are some of the charges brought against the
+lovely Amelia by the "Beaus, Rakes, fine Ladies, and several formal
+Persons with bushy wigs and canes at their Noses," who, in Fielding's
+satire, crowd the Court where his book is placed on trial for the crime of
+dullness. Then Fielding himself steps forward, and after pleading for this
+his 'favourite Child,' on whom he has bestowed "a more than ordinary Pains
+in her Education," he declares, with the same hasty petulance that
+characterised that previous outburst in the preface to _David Simple_,
+that indeed he "will trouble the World no more with any children of mine
+by the same Muse." Two months later the _Gentleman's Magazine_ prints a
+spirited appeal against this resolution. "His fair heroine's nose has in
+my opinion been too severely handled by some modern critics," [4] writes
+Criticulus, after a passage of warm praise for the characterisation, the
+morality, and the 'noble reflections of the book'; and he proceeds to
+point out that the writings of such critics "will never make a sufficient
+recompense to the world, if _Mr Fielding_ adheres to what I hope he only
+said in his warmth and indignation of this injurious treatment, that he
+will never trouble the public with any more writings of this kind." The
+words of the enlightened _Criticulus_ echo sadly when we remember that in
+little more than two years the great genius and the great heart of Henry
+Fielding were to be silenced.
+
+The _London Magazine_ for 1751 devotes the first nine columns of its
+December number to a resume of the novel, and continues this compliment in
+another nine columns of appendix. With a fine patronage the reviewer
+concludes that "upon the whole, the story is amusing, the characters kept
+up, and many reflections which [sic] are useful, if the reader will but
+take notice of them, which in this unthinking age it is to be feared very
+few will." Some imperfections he kindly excuses on the score of "the
+author's hurry of business in administering impartial justice to his
+majesty's good people"; but he cannot excuse what he declares to be the
+ridicule of _Liberty_ in Book viii.; and he solemnly exhorts the author
+that as "he has in this piece very justly exposed some of the private
+vices and follies of the present age" so he should in his next direct his
+satire against political corruption, otherwise 'he and his patrons' will
+be accused of compounding the same. [5] It seems incredible that any
+suggestion should ever have attached to the author of _Pasquin_ and the
+_Register_, as to one who could condone public corruption. And as for the
+accusation of tampering with "Liberty" the like charge was brought, we may
+remember, by the "Happy Cobler of Portugal Street" against Fielding's
+_Inquiry into the Encrease of Robbers_. The literary cobblers who pursued
+_Amelia_ with the abuse of their poor pens may very well be consigned to
+the oblivion of their political brother. The comment of one hostile pen
+cannot however be dismissed as coming from a literary cobbler, and that is
+the 'sickening' abuse, to use Thackeray's epithet, which Richardson
+dishonoured himself in flinging at his great contemporary. That abuse the
+sentimentalist poured out very freely on _Amelia_; but, as Mr Austin
+Dobson says, "in cases of this kind _parva seges satis est_, and Amelia
+has long since outlived both rival malice and contemporary coldness. It is
+a proof of her author's genius that she is even more intelligible to our
+age than she was to her own." [6]
+
+In Fielding's satiric description of the Court before which his Amelia
+stood her trial, he describes himself as an 'old gentleman.' The adjective
+seems hardly applicable to a man of forty five; but, to quote again from
+Mr Austin Dobson, "however it may have chanced, whether from failing
+health or otherwise, the Fielding of _Amelia_ is suddenly a far older man
+than the Fielding of _Tom Jones_. The robust and irrepressible vitality,
+the full veined delight of living, the energy of observation and strength
+of satire, which characterise the one, give place in the other to a calmer
+retrospection, a more compassionate humanity, a more benignant criticism
+of life." Murphy's Irish tongue declares a similar feeling in his
+comparison of the pages of this, the last of the three great novels, to
+the calm of the setting sun; a sun that had first broken forth in the
+'morning glory' of _Joseph Andrews_, and had attained its 'highest warmth
+and splendour' in the inimitable pages of _Tom Jones_. There is indeed a
+mature wisdom and patience in Amelia such as none but a pedant could
+demand of her enchanting younger sister Sophia. In these later pages
+Sophia has grown up into a gracious womanhood, while losing none of her
+girlhood's gaiety and charm. That Amelia, his older and wiser though
+scarce sadder child, was the nearest, as he himself tells us, to
+Fielding's own heart, is one more indication that here is the perfected
+image of that beloved wife, from whose youthful grace and beauty his
+genius had already modelled one exquisite memorial.
+
+[1] _Anecdotes_. Mrs Piozzi. p. 221.
+
+[2] Letters and Works of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Introductory
+Anecdotes, p. cxxiii.
+
+[3] Ibid. Vol. ii. p. 289.
+
+[4] It is curious that to this unlucky incident, based according to Lady
+Louisa Stuart, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's grand-daughter, on a real
+accident to Mrs Fielding, Dr Johnson attributed the failure of the book
+with the public: "that vile broken nose ruined the sale," he declared.
+Early in January Fielding himself protests in his _Covent Garden Journal_
+that every reader of any intelligence would have discovered that the
+effects of Amelia's terrible carriage accident had been wholly remedied by
+"a famous Surgeon"; and that "the Author of her History, in a hurry,
+forgot to inform his Readers of that Particular." The particular has by
+now fallen into its due insignificance, and, save for Johnson's
+explanation therein of the poor sale of the book, is scarce worth
+recalling.
+
+[5] _London Magazine_. December 1751. p. 531 and Appendix.
+
+[6] _Fielding_. Austin Dobson. p. 161.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+JOURNALIST AND MAGISTRATE
+
+    "However vain or romantic the Attempt may seem I am sanguine
+    enough to aim at serving the noble Interests of Religion, Virtue,
+    and good Sense, by these my lucubrations."
+    The _Covent Garden Journal_. No. 5.
+
+Nothing could be more characteristic of Fielding's active spirit than were
+the early months of 1752. For, no sooner had he deposited the four volumes
+of _Amelia_ in the hands of the public, essaying to win his readers over
+to a love of virtue and a hatred of vice, by placing before their eyes
+that true "model of human life," than we find him launching a direct
+attack on the follies and evils of the age, by means of his old weapon,
+the press.
+
+The first number of the _Covent Garden Journal_ appeared on the 4th of
+January, and its pages, produced under Fielding's own management and
+apparently largely written by his own pen, provided satires on folly,
+invectives against vice, and incitements to goodness and sense, delivered
+in the name of one _Sir Alexander Drawcansir, Knt. Censor of Great
+Britain_. [1] The new paper ran but for seventy-two numbers; perhaps for
+all the wit and learning, the fire and zest of its columns, the public
+were reluctant to buy their own lashings. But it may be doubted whether,
+except in the pages of his three great novels, Henry Fielding ever
+revealed himself more completely than in these his last informal
+'lucubrations.' Here, the active Justice, the accomplished scholar, the
+lawyer, and man of the world, the first wit of his day, talks to us of a
+hundred topics, chosen indeed on the spur of the moment, but discussed in
+his own incomparable words, and with the now mature authority of one, who
+had "dived into the inmost Recesses of Human Nature." No subject is too
+abstruse, none too trifling, for _Mr Censor_ to illumine. Freed from the
+political bands of the earlier newspapers, this last _Journal_, produced
+be it remembered by a man in shattered health, and distracted by the
+squalid business of a Bow Street Court-room, ranges over an amazing
+compass of life and manners.
+
+Thus, one January morning, _Sir Alexander's_ readers would open their
+paper to find him deploring the decline of "a Religion sometime ago
+professed in this Country, and which, if my Memory fails me not was called
+Christian." The following Saturday they are presented with a learned and
+pleasant argument to prove that every male critic should be eighteen years
+of age, and "BE ABLE TO READ." A few days later the pages of writers
+purveying the prevalent "Infidelity, Scurrility, and Indecency" are
+ingeniously allotted to various uses. In February the _Journal_ accords a
+noble tribute "to that great Triumvirate Lucian, Cervantes, and Swift";
+not indeed "for that Wit and Humour alone, which they all so eminently
+possesst, but because they all endeavoured with the utmost Force of their
+Wit and Humour, to expose and extirpate those Follies and Vices which
+chiefly prevailed in their several Countries." The design of Aristophanes
+and Rabelais on the other hand, appears to _Mr Censor_, if he may speak
+his opinion freely, "very plainly to have been to ridicule all Sobriety,
+Modesty, Decency, Virtue, and Religion out of the world." From such
+considerations it is an easy passage to a definition of 'real Taste' as
+derived from a "nice Harmony between the Imagination and the Judgment";
+and to these final censorial warnings:--"_Evil Communications corrupt good
+Manners_ is a quotation of St Paul from Menander. EVIL BOOKS CORRUPT AT
+ONCE BOTH OUR MANNERS AND OUR TASTE." Four days after this learned
+'lucubration' the voice of the warm-hearted magistrate speaks in a
+reminder of the prevailing abject misery of the London poor who "in the
+most miserable lingering Manner do daily perish for Want in this
+Metropolis." And in almost the next number his Honour gives his readers
+letters from the fair _Cordelia_, from _Sarah Scandal_, and from other
+correspondents, of a wit pleasant enough to drive London's poverty far
+from their minds. Two days after attending to these ladies, the _Censor_
+takes up his keenest weapons in an attack on that "detestable vice of
+slander" by which is taken away the "_immediate Jewel of a Man's Soul_,"
+his good name; a crime comparable to that of murder. Here we have _Sir
+Alexander_ speaking with the same voice as did the playwright and
+journalist of ten years previously, when he declared, in his
+_Miscellanies_, that to stab a man's character 'in the dark' is no less an
+offence than to stab his flesh in the same treacherous manner. Indeed,
+throughout these last columns of weekly satire, wit, and learning,
+Fielding remains true to the constant tenor of his genius. He exposes the
+miser, the seducer of innocence, the self-seeker, the place-hunter, the
+degraded vendor of moral poison, the 'charitable' hypocrite, with the same
+fierce moral energy as that with which, when but a lad of one and twenty,
+he first assailed the vices of the society in which his own lot was cast.
+His unconquerable energy, an energy that neither sickness nor distress
+could abate, still assaults that "cursed Maxim ... that Everybody's
+business is Nobody's." And his wit has lost none of its point when
+thrusting at the lesser follies of the day; at the fair Clara's devotion
+to her pet monkey; at the insolence of the Town Beau at the playhouse; at
+the arrogance of carters in the streets; at the vagaries of fashion
+according to which Belinda graces the theatre with yards of ruff one day,
+and on the next discards that covering so entirely that the snowy scene in
+the boxes "becomes extremely delightful to the eyes of every Beholder."
+
+It is quite impossible to convey, within the limits of a few pages, all
+that _Sir Alexander_ tells us of what he sees and hears, as the
+tragi-comedy of life passes before his Bow Street windows. For Fielding
+possessed in the highest degree the art of hearing, to use his own
+analysis, not with the ear only (an organ shared by man with "other
+Animals") but also with the head, and with the heart; just as his eye
+could penetrate beneath the velvet coat of the prosperous scoundrel, the
+reputation of the illiterate author, or the sorry rags of some honest hero
+of the gutter. And his _Covent Garden Journal_ is, in truth, his journal
+of eleven months of a life into the forty odd years of which were
+compressed both the insight of genius, and the activities of twenty
+average men. Such a record cannot be sifted into a summary. The
+acknowledged motive of this last of Fielding's newspapers is, however,
+concise enough; and does equal honour to his patriotism and his humanity.
+The age, as it seemed to him, was an age of public degradation. Religion
+was vanishing from the life of the people; politics were a petty question
+of party jealousy; literary taste was falling to the level of alehouse wit
+and backstairs scandal; the youth of the nation were completing their
+education, when fifteen or sixteen years old, by a course of the Town, and
+then qualifying for a graduate's degree in like knowledge, by a foreign
+tour; the 'mob' was gaining a dangerous excess of power; the leaders of
+society were past masters and mistresses of vice and folly; the poor in
+the streets were sunk in misery, or brutalised into reckless crime. This
+was the England that _Mr Censor_ saw from his house in Bow Street; this
+was the England which he set out to purify; and the means which he chose
+were his own familiar weapons of satire and ridicule. Of these, ridicule,
+he declares, when his _Journal_ was but four weeks old, "is commonly a
+stronger and better method of attacking Vice than the severer kind of
+Satire." In accordance with which view, _General Sir Alexander_ is
+represented, in a mock historic forecast, as having, in the space of
+twelve months, entirely cleansed his country from the evils afflicting it,
+by means of a "certain Weapon called a Ridicule." These evils moreover
+Fielding held to be most readily combated by assailing "those base and
+scandalous Writings which the Press hath lately poured in such a torrent
+upon us that the Name of an Author is in the ears of all good Men become
+almost an infamous appelation"; and, accordingly, the first number of his
+new paper discloses _Sir Alexander_ in full crusade against these
+Grub-Street writers. But that he soon perceived the quixotic impolicy of
+such a campaign, appears very clearly, as early as the fifth number of the
+_Journal_:--"when Hercules undertook to cleanse the Stables of Augeas (a
+Work not much unlike my present Undertaking) should any little clod of
+Dirt more filthy perhaps than all the rest have chanced to bedawb him, how
+unworthy his Spirit would it have been to have polluted his Hands, by
+seizing the dirty clod, and crumbling it to Pieces. He should have known
+that such Accidents were incident to such an Undertaking: which though
+both a useful and heroic office, was yet none of the cleanliest; since no
+Man, I believe, ever removed great quantities of Dirt from any Place
+without finding some of it sticking to his skirts." Such dirty clods were
+undoubtedly thrown by nameless antagonists, as unworthy of Fielding's
+steel as was one whose name has come down to us, the despicable Dr John
+Hill, who once suffered a public caning at Ranelagh; and one clod, "more
+filthy perhaps than all the rest," soiled the hands of Smollett. [2] But
+the dirt which was very freely flung on to our eighteenth-century Hercules
+has, by now, fallen back, with great justice, on to the heads of his
+abusers. Fielding has placed on record, in the _Journal_, his conviction
+that the man who reads the works of the five heroic satirists, Lucian,
+Cervantes, Swift, Moliere and Shakespeare, "must either have a very bad
+Head, or a very bad Heart, if he doth not become both a Wiser and a better
+Man." To-day, 'party and prejudice' having subsided, we are ready to say
+the same of the readers of the _Covent Garden Journal_; perceiving that,
+if _Mr Censor_, like his five great forerunners, chose to send his satire
+"laughing into the World," it was that he might better effect the
+'glorious Purpose' announced in the fifth number of his paper: "However
+vain or romantic the Attempt may seem, I am sanguine enough to aim at
+serving the noble Interests of Religion, Virtue, and good Sense, by these
+my Lucubrations."
+
+To most men the production, twice a week, of a newspaper so wide in scope
+as the _Covent Garden Journal_ (for its columns included the news of the
+day, as well as the manifold 'censorial' energies of _Sir Alexander_)
+would have been occupation enough; especially with a "constitution now
+greatly impaired and enfeebled," and when "labouring under attacks of the
+gout, which were, of course, severer than ever."
+
+But there is no hint of either editorial or valetudinarian seclusion in
+the fragmentary glimpses obtainable of Mr Justice Fielding during these
+eleven months of 1752. Thus, by an advertisement recurring throughout the
+_Journal_, he expressly invites to his house in Bow Street, "All Persons,
+who shall for the Future suffer by Robbers Burglars &c.," that they may
+bring him "the best Description they can of such Robbers, &c., with the
+Time, and Place, and Circumstances of the Fact"; and that this invitation
+was likely to bring half London within his doors appears from Fielding's
+own description of the condition of the capital at the time. "There is not
+a street," he declares, speaking of Westminster, "which doth not swarm all
+day with beggars, and all night with thieves. Stop your coach at what shop
+you will, however expeditious the tradesman is to attend you, a beggar is
+commonly beforehand with him; and if you should directly face his door the
+tradesman must often turn his head while you are talking to him, or the
+same beggar, or some other thief at hand will pay a visit to his shop!"
+And nothing could prove more conclusively the arduousness of Fielding's
+work as a magistrate than the record of the last ten days of January,
+1752. On the night of the 17th a peculiarly brutal murder had been
+perpetrated on a poor higgler in Essex; and the _Journal_ for January 28,
+tells us how Fielding "spent near eight hours," examining, separately,
+suspected persons, "at the desire of several gentlemen of Fortune in the
+County of Essex"; having on the previous Friday and Saturday, been engaged
+"above Twenty hours in taking Depositions concerning this Fact." Then, on
+the day after the arrival of the murder suspects, we find two of the
+Shoreditch constables bringing no fewer than ten "idle lewd and
+disorderly" men and women before the Justice; a woman was charged by a
+diamond seller on suspicion of feloniously receiving "three Brilliant
+Diamonds"; Mr Welch, the notable High Constable of Holborn, brought
+seventeen "idle and lewd Persons" whom he had apprehended the night
+before; and, to complete this single day's work, an Italian was brought
+in, "all over covered with [the] Blood" of a brother Italian, whose head
+he had almost cut off. Twenty-nine cases on one day, and these in the
+midst of eight hour examinations concerning a murder, were surely work
+enough to satisfy even Fielding's energies. And, as another entry in his
+_Journal_ mentions the examination of a suspected thief "very late at
+Night," there seems to have been no hour out of the twenty-four in which
+the great novelist did not hold himself at the service of the public.
+
+Meanwhile, the criminal licence of the streets was now receiving
+Ministerial attention. The King's Speech, delivered at the opening of
+Parliament in the previous November, had contained a passage which might
+have been inspired by Fielding himself: "I cannot conclude," said His
+Majesty, "without recommending to you in the most earnest manner, to
+consider seriously of some effectual provisions to suppress those
+audacious crimes of Robbery and Violence which are now become so
+frequent...and which have proceeded in great Measure from that profligate
+Spirit of Irreligion, Idleness, Gaming, and Extravagance, which has of
+late extended itself in an uncommon degree, to the Dishonour of the
+Nation, and to the great Offence and Prejudice of the sober and
+industrious Part of the People." Six weeks later the first number of the
+_Journal_, makes comment on the need of fresh legislation to suppress
+drunkenness; and on the twenty first of the month _Sir Alexander_
+announces, with something of special information in his tone, that the
+immediate suppression of crimes of violence "we can with Pleasure assure
+the Public is at present the chief attention of Parliament."
+
+It must have been with something of the pleasure which he so earnestly
+desires in one of the last utterances of his pen--"the pleasure of
+thinking that, in the decline of my health and life, I have conferred a
+great and lasting Benefit on my Country,"--that Fielding saw the royal
+assent given, in the following March, to an Act for the "_better
+preventing Thefts and Robberies and for regulating Places of Public
+Entertainment, and punishing Persons keeping disorderly Houses_."
+[3] For this Act is directed to the suppression of four of the abuses so
+strongly denounced, twelve months previously, in his own _Enquiry_; and
+when we recall the fact that he had already submitted, to the Lord
+Chancellor, draft legislation for the suppression of robberies, it is at
+least a plausible surmise that here we have a memorial of Henry Fielding's
+patriotic energy, preserved on the pages of the Statute Book itself.
+[4] The four points so specially urged in the _Enquiry_, and here made
+law, are the suppression of the "multitude of places of Entertainment" for
+the working classes; the better suppression of Gaming Houses; the
+punishment of the scandalous advertisements offering rewards 'and no
+questions asked' for stolen goods; and the payment of certain prosecutors
+for their expenses in time and trouble, when a conviction had been
+obtained.
+
+In this same month of March another Act, which closely concerned
+Fielding's official work, received the royal assent. This was an Act "for
+better preventing the horrid Crime of Murder." [5] The pressing need of
+such a measure had been already urged in the _Covent Garden journal_. In
+February the _Journal_ declares that _"More shocking Murders have been
+committed within the last Year, than for many Years before. To what can
+this be so justly imputed as to the manifest decline of Religion among the
+lower People. A matter, which even, in a Civil Sense, demands the
+attention of the Government."_ And Mr Censor returns to the subject on
+March 3: _"More Murders and horrid Barbarities have been committed within
+the last twelvemonth, than during many preceding years. This as we have
+before observed, is principally to be attributed to the Declension of
+Religion among the Common People."_ By the end of the month the
+above-named Act had received the royal assent; and the first clause
+thereof again yielded Fielding the satisfaction of seeing a measure which
+he had warmly recommended in his Enquiry now placed on the Statute Book,
+namely the clause that the execution of the criminal be made immediate on
+his conviction. This Act, moreover, provides for the abatement of another
+scandal exposed by Fielding many years previously, in the pages of
+Jonathan Wild, that of the excessive supply of drink allowed to condemned
+prisoners.
+
+In the following month Fielding carried out a scheme, conceived he tells
+us "some time since," for combating this prevalence of murder. This was
+his shilling pamphlet, published about April 14, entitled "Examples of the
+Interposition of Providence in the _Detection_ and _Punishment_ of MURDER.
+Containing above thirty cases, in which this dreadful crime hath been
+brought to light in the most extraordinary and miraculous manner." The
+advertisement describes the _Examples_ as _"very proper to be given to all
+the inferior Kind of People; and particularly to the Youth of both sexes,
+whose natural Love of Stories will lead them to read with Attention what
+cannot fail of Infusing in to their tender Minds an early Dread and
+Abhorrence of staining their Hands with the Blood of their
+Fellow-creatures"_ Low as was the price, a "large allowance" was made by
+Andrew Millar to those who bought any quantity; and Fielding distributed
+the little volume freely in Court.
+
+The thirty-three _Examples_ are introduced and concluded by Fielding's own
+denunciation of this, "the blackest sin, which can contaminate the hands,
+or pollute the soul of man." And from these pages we may learn his own
+solemnly declared belief in a peculiarly "immediate interposition of the
+Divine providence" in the detection of this crime; and also his faith in
+"the fearful and tremendous sentence of eternal punishment" as that
+divinely allotted to the murderer. He warns the murderer, moreover, that
+by hurrying a fellow-creature to a sudden and unprepared death he may be
+guilty of destroying not only his victim's body, but also his soul. And it
+may be questioned whether Fielding ever put his unrivalled mastery of
+style to a nobler intention than in the closing words of this pamphlet,
+words designed to be read by the lowest of the people: "Great courage may,
+perhaps, bear up a bad mind (for it is sometimes the property of such)
+against the most severe sentence which can be pronounced by the mouth of a
+human judge; but where is the fortitude which can look an offended
+Almighty in the face? Who can bear the dreadful thought of being
+confronted with the spirit of one whom we have murdered, in the presence
+of all the Host of Heaven, and to have justice demanded against our guilty
+soul, before that most awful judgement-seat, where there is infinite
+justice as well as infinite power?"
+
+The dedication of this pamphlet, dated Bow Street, April 8, 1752, is
+addressed to Dr Madox, Bishop of Worcester, and in it Fielding recalls a
+conversation he had some time previously had with that prelate, in which
+he had mentioned the plan of such a book, and received immediate
+encouragement from his lordship. A further appreciation of the _Examples_
+appears in a paragraph in the _Journal_ for May 5: "Last week a certain
+Colonel of the Army bought a large number of the book called _Examples of
+the Interposition of Providence in the Detection and Punishment of
+Murder_, in Order to distribute them amongst the private soldiers of his
+Regiment. An Example well worthy of Imitation!"
+
+Fielding never allows us to forget for any length of time one or another
+of his contrasting activities, however absorbed he may seem to be in some
+one field of action. Now, when he is plunged in a hand-to-hand struggle
+with the criminal conditions of London, when he is admonishing the gayer
+end of the Town with his weekly censorial satire and ridicule, and while
+he is watching the enactment of new legislation for which he had so
+strenously pleaded,--he suddenly reappears in his earlier role of
+classical scholar. On June 17, the columns of the _Journal_ advertise
+proposals for "A New Translation into English of the Works of LUCIAN. From
+the original Greek. With Notes, Historical, Critical and Explanatory. By
+Henry Fielding Esquire; and the Rev. Mr William Young." To which notice
+there is added, a few days later, the assurance that "Everything which
+hath the least Tendency to the Indecent will be omitted in this
+Translation." The most delightful, perhaps, of all the leading articles in
+the _Covent Garden Journal_ is that in which the merits of this "Father of
+True Humour" are delineated. The facetious wit, the "attic Elegance of
+Diction," the poignant satire, the virtues and abilities of Lucian are
+here so persuasively presented that scarce a reader but surely would
+hasten, as he laid his paper down, to Mr Fielding's or Mr Young's house,
+or to Millar in the Strand or Dodsley in Pall Mall, where orders (with a
+guinea to be paid on booking the same) were received. And this essay is
+also memorable for the express declaration therein contained that Fielding
+had "formed his stile" upon that of Lucian; and, again, as betraying a
+note of disappointment, an acknowledgment that worldly fortune had indeed
+treated him somewhat harshly, such as Fielding's sanguine courage very
+seldom permits him to utter. The concluding words, written on his own
+behalf and on that of Mr Young, are words of gentle protest to the public
+for their lack of support to "two gentlemen who have hitherto in their
+several capacities endeavoured to be serviceable to them without deriving
+any great Emolument to themselves from their Labours." And when he tells
+us how that 'glory of human Nature, Marcus Aurelius' employed Lucian "in a
+very considerable Post in the Government," since that great emperor "did
+not, it seems, think, that a Man of Humour was below his Notice or unfit
+for Business of the gravest Kind," we cannot but remember that the
+business on which the Government of George II. thought fit to employ the
+inimitable genius of Henry Fielding was that of a Bow Street magistrate.
+
+The onerous drudgery of that business, or else lack of response from a
+public deaf to its own interests, seems to have brought to nothing the
+project of this translation; and so English literature is the poorer for
+the loss of the works of the 'Father of Humour' translated by the
+incomparable pen of the 'Father of the English Novel.'[6]
+
+Four months after the publication of the proposals for _Lucian_, Fielding
+took formal leave of the readers of his _Covent Garden Journal_, telling
+them that he no longer had "Inclination or Leisure," to carry on the
+paper. His brief farewell words contain an assurance very like that
+solemnly made, we may remember, five years before the publication of _Tom
+Jones_. At present, he declares, he has "No intention to hold any further
+correspondence with the gayer Muses"; just as eight years before he had
+announced that henceforth the 'infamous' Nine should have none of his
+company. To this declaration is added a protest against the injustice of
+attributing abuse to a writer who "never yet was, nor ever shall be the
+author of any, unless to Persons who are or ought to be infamous." From
+the tenor of this parting speech it is clear that Fielding was, at the
+time, feeling keenly the imputation, flung by some of his contemporaries,
+of producing 'scandalous Writings'; unmindful for the moment of his own
+calmer and wiser utterance, when he declared that men who engage in an
+heroic attempt to cleanse their age will undoubtedly find some of the dirt
+thereof sticking to their coats. "As he disdained all littleness of
+spirit, where ever he met with it in his dealings with the world, his
+indignation was apt to rise," says his contemporary Murphy; and we know
+from earlier protests how cruelly Fielding suffered from the attribution
+to his pen of writings utterly alien to his character. "... really," he
+cries, in the last words of the _Journal_, "it is hard to hear that
+scandalous Writings have been charged on me for that very Reason which
+ought to have proved the Contrary namely because they have been
+Scandalous."
+
+The year 1752 closes with the birth of another daughter, born presumably
+in the house in Bow Street, as her baptism under the name of Louisa is
+entered in the registers of St Paul's, Covent Garden.
+
+The curtain that, in Fielding's case, hangs so closely over all the
+pleasant intimate details of life, lifts once or twice during this year of
+incessant activity, and discloses just those warmhearted acts of kindness
+that help us to think of Harry Fielding with an affection almost as warm
+and personal as that we keep for Dick Steele or Oliver Goldsmith.
+Fielding, we know, had "no other use for money" than to help those even
+less fortunate than himself; and several incidents of this year show how
+he turned his opportunities, both as journalist and magistrate, to like
+generous uses. Thus there is the story of how, one day in March, "A poor
+girl who had come from Wapping to see the new entertainment at Covent
+Garden Theatre had her pocket cut off in the crowd before the doors were
+opened. Tho' she knew not the Pickpocket she came immediately to lay her
+complaint before the Justice and with many tears lamented not the loss of
+her Money, but of her Entertainment. At last, having obtained a sufficient
+Passport to the Gallery she departed with great satisfaction, and
+contented with the loss of fourteen shillings, though she declared she had
+not much more in the world." [7] Another day, or night rather, it is a
+poor troup of amateur players who had good reason to be grateful to the
+kindly Justice:--"last Monday night an Information was given to Henry
+Fielding Esquire: that a set of Barber's apprentices, Journeymen
+Staymakers, Maidservants &c. had taken a large room at the Black House in
+the Strand, to act the Tragedy of the Orphan; the Price of Admittance One
+shilling. About eight o'clock the said Justice issued his Warrant,
+directed to Mr Welch, High Constable, who apprehended the said Actors and
+brought them before the said Justice, who out of compassion to their Youth
+only bound them over to their good behaviour. They were all conducted
+through the streets in their Tragedy Dresses, to the no small diversion of
+the Populace." [8] And in May both the ample energies and scanty purse of
+Justice Fielding were occupied in collecting a subscription for a young
+baker and his wife and child, who, by a disastrous fire, were suddenly
+plunged into destitution. For these poor people Fielding obtained no less
+a sum than L57, within a fortnight of his announcement of their distress
+in the columns of the _Journal_. The list of subscribers, published on May
+16, shows a guinea against his own name, and a like sum, it may be noted,
+from the wealthy Lyttelton.
+
+The splendour of Fielding's genius has shone, as Gibbon foretold,
+throughout the world. His indefatigable labours in cleansing England from
+some of the evils that then oppressed her deserve to be remembered, if not
+by all the world, at least by the citizens of that country which, in the
+decline of 'health and life,' he yet strove so eagerly to benefit.
+
+[1] A dramatic satire, advertised in March at Covent Garden Theatre and
+written (as stated by Dibdin, _History of the Stage_. Vol. v. p. 156), by
+the actor Macklin, bore for sub-title _Pasquin turned Drawcansir, Censor
+of Great Britain_. The name, and the further details of the advertisement,
+recall Fielding's early success with his political _Pasquin_: but all
+further trace of this 'Satire' seems lost. See Appendix C.
+
+[2] _A faithful Narrative..._. By Drawcansir.... Alexander. 1752.
+
+[3] 25. G II. cap 36.
+
+[4] All trace seems now lost of the actual part Fielding may have taken in
+the drafting of this Act.
+
+[5] 25. G. II. c. 37.
+
+[6] It would seem, from the following advertisement, that Fielding's
+inexhaustible pen published, about this time, a sixpenny pamphlet on 'a
+late Act of Parliament'; but all trace of it has been lost:--"A speech
+made in the Censorial Court of Alexander Drawcansir, Monday, 6th June,
+1752, concerning a late Act of Parliament. Printed for the Author. Price
+6d." _The General Advertiser_, June 27, 1752.
+
+[7] The _General Advertiser_ March 4. 1752.
+
+[8] The _General Advertiser_, April 15, 1752.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+POOR LAW REFORM
+
+  "... surely there is some Praise due to the bare Design of doing a
+  Service to the Public."--Dedication of the _Enquiry_.
+
+
+It is evident that the beginning of the year 1753 found Fielding fully
+conscious that now he could only anticipate a 'short remainder of life.'
+But neither that consciousness, nor the increasing burden of ill-health,
+availed to dull the energies of these last years. Scarcely had that
+indomitable knight, General Sir Alexander Drawcansir retired from the
+active public service of conducting the _Covent Garden Journal_ when his
+creator reappeared with an astonishingly comprehensive and detailed plan
+of poor-law reform; a plan adapted to the whole kingdom, and which
+according to a legal comment involved "nothing less than the repeal of the
+Act of Elizabeth and an entire reconstruction of the Poor Laws." [1]
+Poor-law reform was at this time occupying the attention of the
+nation, and apparently also of the legislature. And we know, from the
+_Enquiry into the Increase of Robberies_, that the question of lessening
+both the sufferings and the criminality of the poor had for years occupied
+Fielding's warm heart and active intellect. But the extent to which he
+devoted these last months of his life to the cause of the poorest and most
+degraded deserves more than a passing recognition. He tells us, in the
+_Introduction_ to the pamphlet embodying his great scheme, that he has
+applied himself long and constantly to this subject; that he has "read
+over and considered all the Laws, in anywise relating to the Poor, with
+the utmost Care and Attention," in the execution of which, moreover, he
+has been for "many Years very particularly concerned"; and that in
+addition to this exhaustive study of the laws themselves, he has added "a
+careful Perusal of everything which I could find that hath been written on
+this Subject, from the Original Institution in the 43d. of _Elizabeth_ to
+this Day." Such was the laborious preparation, extending presumably over
+many months, which the author of _Tom Jones_, and the first wit of his
+day, devoted to solving this vast problem of social reform.
+
+Fielding was far too well skilled in the art of effective construction to
+present the public with undigested note-books from his voluminous reading.
+His scheme, based on all the laws, and upon all the comments on all the
+laws, regarding the poor, enacted and made for two hundred years, is a
+marvel of conciseness and practical detail; and, together with an
+_Introduction_ and an _Epilogue_, does but occupy the ninety pages of a
+two-shilling pamphlet.
+
+The pamphlet was published at the end of January 1753, with the title _A
+Proposal for making an effectual Provision for the Poor, for amending
+their Morals, and for rendering them useful Members of the Society. To
+which is added a Plan of the Buildings proposed, with proper
+Elevations ... By Henry Fielding, Esq.; Barrister-at-Law, and one of His
+Majesty's Justices of the Peace for the County of Middlesex_. The
+dedication, dated January 19, is to Henry Pelham, then Chancellor of the
+Exchequer, and from it we learn that Fielding had personally mentioned his
+scheme to this Minister. The Introduction presents an eloquent appeal for
+some effectual remedy for the intolerably diseased state of the body
+politic as regarded the distresses and vices of the poor, their unseen
+sufferings no less than their frequent misdeeds. Fielding protests against
+the popular ignorance of these sufferings in words that might have been
+spoken by some pleader for the East End 'Settlements' of to-day. "If we
+were," he declares, "to make a Progress through the Outskirts of this
+Town, and look into the Habitations of the Poor, we should there behold
+such Pictures of human Misery as must move the Compassion of every Heart
+that deserves the Name of human. What indeed must be his Composition who
+could see whole Families in Want of every Necessary of Life, oppressed
+with Hunger, Cold, Nakedness, and Filth, and with Diseases, the certain
+Consequence of all these; what, I say, must be his Composition, who could
+look into such a Scene as this, and be affected only in his Nostrils?" As
+an instance of Fielding's personal knowledge of the London slums of his
+day, a reference made by Mr Saunders Welch to their joint work is of
+interest. Writing in the same year, 1753, he mentions assisting "Mr Henry
+Fielding in taking from under one roof upwards of seventy lodgers of both
+sexes." [2]
+
+To this little known misery of the poor, who "starve and freeze and rot
+among themselves," was added the problem of streets swarming with beggars
+during the day, and with thieves at night. And the nation groaned under
+yet a third burden, that of the heavy taxes levied for the poor, by which
+says Fielding "as woeful experience hath taught us, neither the poor
+themselves nor the public are relieved." To attack such a three-headed
+monster as this was an adventure better fitted, it might seem, for that
+club which "Captain Hercules Vinegar" had wielded thirteen years before,
+when in the full tide of his strength, than for the pen of a man in
+shattered health, and already serving the public in the daily labours of a
+principal magistrate. But nothing could restrain the ardour of Fielding's
+spirit, how frail so ever had become its containing 'crust of clay,' when
+great abuses and great misery made their call on his powers; or
+countervail against the hope, with which the _Introduction_ to his plan
+concludes. If that plan fails, he shall indeed, he declares have "lost
+much Time, and misemployed much Pains; and what is above all, shall miss
+the Pleasure of thinking that in the Decline of my Health and Life, I have
+conferred a great and lasting Benefit on my Country."
+
+The _Plan_ is that of the erection of a vast combined county workhouse,
+prison, and infirmary; where the unemployed should find, not only work but
+_skilled instruction_, the poor relief, and the sick a hospital; where
+discipline and good order should be stringently enforced; and where two
+chaplains should labour at that 'correction and amendment' of the mind
+which "in real truth religion is alone capable of effectually executing."
+The entire scheme is worked out with extraordinary detail, in fifty-nine
+clauses; and is preceded by an elaborate architectural plan of the
+proposed institution (which was to house no less than five thousand six
+hundred persons) with its workshops, its men's quarters rigorously divided
+from those for the women, its recreation ground, its provision shops, its
+cells for the refractory and for prisoners, and its whipping post. And the
+pamphlet concludes by lengthy arguments in favour of the various clauses;
+and by a personal protest concerning the disinterestedness of proposals
+which "some few enemies" might assert to show signs of a design for
+private profit. Fielding touchingly disavows any thought of occupying,
+officially, the great house raised by his imagination. To a man in his
+state of health such a project would, he says, be to fly in the face of
+the advice of his 'Master,' Horace; "it would be indeed _struere dotnos
+immemor sepulchri_." And, he adds, those who know him will hardly be so
+deceived "by that Chearfulness which was always natural to me; and which,
+I thank God, my Conscience doth not reprove me for, to imagine that I am
+not sensible of my declining Constitution." The concluding words of this,
+Fielding's last legislative effort, betray a like calm assurance that his
+day's work was drawing to its close. He has now, he tells us, "no farther
+Design than to pass my short Remainder of Life in some Degree of Ease, and
+barely to preserve my Family from being the Objects of any such Laws as I
+have here proposed."
+
+It is wholly in keeping with the genius of Henry Fielding that almost the
+last endeavour of his intellect should have been devoted to relieving the
+wretchedness and lessening the vices of the poorest and most miserable of
+his countrymen. The _Proposal for ... the Poor_ is written by the hand of
+the accomplished lawyer and indefatigable magistrate; but the energy that
+accomplished so great a labour, in spite of broken health and among a
+thousand interruptions, sprang from the heart which had already
+immortalised the ragged postilion of _Joseph Andrews_ and the starving
+highwayman of _Tom Jones_.
+
+This last January but one of Fielding's life was not only occupied by the
+publication of proposals for an 'entire reconstruction of the Poor Laws.'
+In 1753 a London magistrate, or at least Mr Justice Fielding, was at the
+service of the public on Sunday no less than during the week; and on the
+first Sunday of the New Year the Bow Street room echoed to threats that
+read strangely enough when we think of the unknown petty thief,
+threatening sudden death to 'our immortal Fielding.' "Yesterday," says the
+_General Advertiser_ for Monday, January 8, "John Simpson and James Ellys
+were commited to Newgate by Henry Fielding Esq., for shop-lifting." The
+charge was one of stealing five silk handkerchiefs, and when the two men
+"were brought before the Justice they behaved in a very impudent saucy
+manner, and one of them said hewished he had a Pistol about him, he would
+blow the Justice's Brains out; upon which a Party of the Guards was sent
+for who conducted them safe to Newgate." The Bow Street house, moreover,
+must have been full not only of prisoners and witnesses brought before the
+Justice, but also of victims of all manner of theft. For two comprehensive
+notices appear in the _Advertiser_ for this month, repeating the previous
+invitation accorded to such sufferers in the _Covent Garden Journal_. On
+January 1, all persons cognizant of any burglary robbery or theft are
+desired to communicate immediately with Mr Brogden, clerk to Justice
+Fielding, "at his office at the said Justice's in Bow Street." And again,
+towards the end of the month, "All Persons that have been robbed on the
+Highway in the County of Middlesex within this three months last past, are
+desired to apply to Mr Brogden, at Mr Justice Fielding's in Bow Street,
+Covent Garden." And here, too, came the solicitors that sought counsel's
+opinion on their client's behalf, with their fees; the magistrate of this
+period being under no disability in regard to his private practice.
+
+It was to his reputation as an advising barrister, and perhaps a little to
+the kindness of heart that must have been familiar to all who knew him,
+that Fielding owed his connection with that extraordinary popular
+excitement of 1753, the mysterious case of the servant girl Elizabeth
+Canning. On the 29th of January 'Betty Canning' presented herself, after a
+month's disappearance, at the door of her mother's house in London, in a
+deplorable state of weakness and distress, and declared that she had been
+kidnapped by two men on New Year's night, taken to a house on the Hertford
+road, and there confined by an old gipsy woman for twenty-eight days, in a
+hay loft, with a pitcher of water and a few pieces of bread for sole
+sustenance. On the twenty ninth day, according to her own account, she
+escaped through a window and made her way back to her home. Her
+neighbours, fired with pity for her sufferings, subscribed means for a
+prosecution; and, says Fielding, in the pamphlet which he published two
+months after these events, "Mr. _Salt_, the Attorney who hath been
+employed in this Cause, ... upon this Occasion, as he hath done upon many
+others, ... fixed upon me as the Council to be advised with." Then we have
+the following little domestic sketch, the only picture left to us of Henry
+Fielding as a practising barrister: "Accordingly, upon the _6th of
+February_, as I was sitting in my Room, Counsellor _Maden_ being then
+with me, my Clerk delivered me a Case, which was thus, as I remember,
+indorsed at the Top, The Case of Elizabeth Canning _for_ Mr Fielding's
+_opinion_, and at the Bottom, _Salt_, Solr. Upon the Receipt of this Case,
+with my Fee, I bid my Clerk give my Service to Mr. _Salt_ and tell him,
+that I would take the Case with me into the Country, whither I intended to
+go the next Day, and desired he would call for it the _Friday_ Morning
+afterwards; after which, without looking into it, I delivered it to my
+Wife, who was then drinking Tea with us, and who laid it by."
+
+Mr Brogden however presently returned upstairs, bringing the solicitor
+with him, who earnestly desired his counsel not only to read the case at
+once but also to undertake in his capacity of magistrate an examination of
+the injured girl, and of a supposed confederate of the gipsy. This task
+Fielding at first declined, principally on the ground that he had been
+"almost fatigued to death with several tedious examinations" at that time,
+and had intended to refresh himself with a day or two's interval in the
+country, where he had not been "unless on a Sunday, for a long time." The
+persuasions of the solicitor, curiosity as to the extrordinary nature of
+the case, and "a great compassion for the dreadful condition of the girl,"
+however induced him to yield; and the next day the eighteen year old
+heroine of a story that was soon to set all London quarrelling, was
+brought in a chair to Bow Street, and then led upstairs, supported by two
+friends, into the presence of the Justice. An issue of warrants followed
+upon her examination, and a further examination of a suspected confederate
+of the gipsy; the gipsy herself and her chief abettor having already been
+arrested by another magistrate. Some days later, Fielding being then out
+of town, "several noble Lords" sent to his house, desiring to be present
+while he examined the gipsy woman; and the matter being arranged, "Lord
+Montfort," says Fielding, "together with several gentlemen of fashion came
+at the appointed time." The company being in the Justice's room, the
+prisoners and witnesses were brought up; and apparently some charge was
+afterwards brought against Fielding as to the manner of his examination,
+for he here takes occasion to declare, what all who knew him must have
+known to be the truth, "I can truly say, that my Memory doth not charge me
+with having ever insulted the lowest Wretch that hath been brought before
+me." Public opinion became hotly divided as to whether Betty Canning had
+indeed suffered all she declared at the hands of the gipsy, Mary Squires,
+or had maliciously endeavoured to perjure away the old woman's life. The
+Lord Mayor, Sir Crisp Gascoyne, and Fielding's old antagonist the
+despicable Dr Hill ardently supported the gipsy; Fielding, in the pamphlet
+already quoted, and which was published in March, as warmly espoused the
+cause of the maid servant whom he calls "a poor, honest, innocent, simple
+Girl, and the most unhappy and most injured of all human Beings." The
+excitement of the Town over this melodramatic mystery is reflected in the
+fact that a second edition of Fielding's pamphlet (entitled _A clear state
+of the Case of Elizabeth Canning_) was advertised within a few days of its
+first publication. [3] And, also, in the appearance of the sixpenny print,
+here for the first time reproduced, in which occurs the only
+representation of Henry Fielding known to have been drawn during his life
+time. This print, which bears the inscription "drawn from the life by the
+Right Honourable the Lady Fa--y K--w," shows Fielding's tall figure, his
+legs bandaged for gout, the sword of Justice in his hand and her scales
+hanging out of his pocket, speaking on behalf of his trembling client
+Elizabeth Canning; while opposed to him are my Lord Mayor, the notorious
+Dr Hill, and the old gipsy. The background is adorned with pictures of the
+newly built Mansion House, and of the College of Surgeons. [4]
+
+But for the glimpses it affords us of Fielding as a barrister, and for his
+characteristic championship of what he was convinced was the cause of
+innocence oppressed, this once famous case might have been left
+undisturbed in the dust of the _State Trials_, had it not incidentally
+been the means of preserving two of the extremely rare letters of the
+novelist. These letters, [5] hitherto unpublished, are addressed by
+Fielding to the Duke of Newcastle, and were both written in the month
+following the publication of his pamphlet. The fact that both letters are
+dated from Ealing shows that his connection with what was then a pleasant
+country village was earlier than has been supposed; and the acute
+suggestions in the second letter seem to indicate a suspicion of some of
+Betty Canning's supporters, if his conviction in the girl's own innocence
+still remained unshaken.
+
+
+"My Lord Duke
+
+"I received an order from my Lord Chancellor immediately after the
+breaking up of the Council to lay before your Grace all the Affidavits I
+had taken since the Gipsey's Trial which related to that Affair. I then
+told the Messenger that I had taken none, as indeed the fact is the
+Affidavits of which I gave my Lord Chancellor an Abstract having been all
+sworn before Justices of the Peace in the Neighbourhood of Endfield, and
+remain I believe in the Possession of an Attorney in the City.
+
+However in Consequence of the Commands with which your Grace was pleased
+to honour me yesterday, I sent my Clerk immediately to the Attorney to
+acquaint him with these Commands, which I doubt not he will instantly
+obey. This I did from my great Duty to your Grace for I have long had no
+Concern in this Affair, nor have I seen any of the Parties lately unless
+once when I was desired to send for the Girl (Canning) to my House that a
+great Number of Noblemen and Gentleman might see her and ask her what
+Questions they pleased. I am, with the highest Duty,
+
+"My Lord,
+"Your Graces most obedient
+"and most humble servant
+"Henry Ffielding.
+"Ealing. April 14, 1753
+"His Grace the
+"Duke of Newcastle."
+
+
+"My Lord Duke,
+
+"I am extremely concerned to see by a Letter which I have just received
+from Mr Jones by Command of your Grace that the Persons concerned for the
+Prosecution have not yet attended your Grace with the Affidavits in
+Canning's Affair. I do assure you upon my Honour that I sent to them the
+Moment I first received your Grace's Commands and having after three
+Messages prevailed with them to come to me I desired them to fetch the
+Affidavits that I might send them to your Grace being not able to wait
+upon you in Person. This they said they could not do, but would go to Mr
+Hume Campbell their Council, and prevail with him to attend your Grace
+with all their Affidavits many of which, I found were sworn after the Day
+mentioned in the order of Council. I told them I apprehended the latter
+could not be admitted, but insisted in the strongest terms on their
+laying the others immediately before your Grace, and they at last
+promised me they would, nor have I ever seen them since. I have now again
+ordered my Clerk to go to them to inform them of the last Commands I have
+received, but as I have no Compulsory Power over them I can not answer
+for their Behaviour, which indeed I have long disliked, and have
+therefore long ago declined giving them any Advice, nor would I unless in
+Obedience to your Grace have anything to say to a set of the most
+obstinate Fools I ever saw; and who seem to me rather to act from a
+Spleen against my Lord Mayor, than from any Motive of protecting
+Innocence, tho' that was certainly their Motive at first. In Truth, if I
+am not deceived, I Suspect they desire that the Gipsey should be
+pardoned, and then to convince the World that she was guilty in order to
+cast the greater Reflection on him who was principally instrumental in
+obtaining such Pardon. I conclude with assuring your Grace that I have
+acted in this Affair, as I shall on all Occasions with the most dutiful
+Regard to your Commands, and that if my Life had been at Stake, as many
+know, I could have done no more.
+
+"I am, with the highest Respect,
+"My Lord Duke
+"Y Grace's most obedient,
+"and most humble servant,
+"Henry Ffielding.
+"Ealing
+"April 27. 1753.
+"His Grace the Duke of Newcastle."
+
+The dates of these letters show Fielding to have been at Ealing in the
+early spring of this year; and thus afford some confirmation of Lysons'
+remark in his _Environs of London_, published forty years later that
+"Henry Fielding had a country house at Ealing where he resided the year
+before his death." [6] In May a connection with Hammersmith is indicated,
+in the burial there of his little daughter Louisa. The entry in the
+Hammersmith Registers is as follows: "May 10th. Louisa, d. of Henry
+Fielding Esqr."
+
+The nearer Fielding's life draws to its premature close, the greater his
+physical suffering, so much the more eager seems his desire to leave
+behind him some practical achievement. We have already seen and wondered
+at his gigantic scheme for poor-law reform, published in the beginning of
+this year of fast declining 'health and life.' Six months later came the
+commission in the execution of which the remains of that health and life
+were literally sacrificed in the effort to win some provision for his
+family, in the event of his own death. Early in August the distinguished
+Court surgeon John Ranby had persuaded him to go immediately to Bath. And
+he tells us, in that _Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon_, [7] from which we
+have, from his own lips, the details of these last months, "I accordingly
+writ that very night to Mrs Bowden, who, by the next post, informed me she
+had taken me a lodging for a month certain." At this moment, when
+preparing for his journey, and while "almost fatigued to death with
+several long examinations, relating to five different murders, all
+committed within the space of a week, by different gangs of street
+robbers," Fielding received what might indeed be called a fatal summons to
+wait on the Duke of Newcastle, at his house in Lincoln's Inn Fields, to
+consult on a means for "putting an immediate end to those murders and
+robberies which were every day committed in the streets." This visit cost
+him a severe cold; but, notwithstanding, he produced, in about four days,
+a scheme for the destruction of the "then reigning gangs" of robbers and
+cut-throats, and for the future protection of the public, which was
+promptly accepted, and the execution of which was confided into Fielding's
+hands. "I had delayed my Bath-journey for some time," he proceeds,
+"contrary to the repeated advice of my physical acquaintance, and to the
+ardent desire of my warmest friends, tho' my distemper was now turned to a
+deep jaundice; in which case the Bath-waters are generally reputed to be
+almost infallible. But I had the most eager desire of demolishing this
+gang of villains and cut-throats." After some weeks the requisite funds
+were placed at Fielding's disposal; and so successful were his methods,
+that within a few days, the whole gang was dispersed, some in custody,
+others in flight. His health was by this time "reduced to the last
+extremity"; but still, he tells us, he continued to act "with the utmost
+vigour against these villains." And, amid all his 'fatigues and
+distresses,' the satisfaction he so ardently desired came to him. During
+the "remaining part of the month of November and in all December," those
+darkest of months, not only was there no such thing as a murder, but not
+one street robbery was committed. When we recall the amazing condition of
+London at this time, when street robberies and murders were of almost
+daily occurrence, we realise the magnitude of this achievement on the part
+of a dying man. "Having thus fully accomplished my undertaking," Fielding
+continues, "I went into the country in a very weak and deplorable
+condition, with no fewer or less diseases than a jaundice, a dropsy, and
+an asthma, altogether uniting their forces in the destruction of a body so
+entirely emaciated, that it had lost all its muscular flesh." It was now
+too late to apply the Bath treatment; and even had it been desirable it
+was no longer possible, for the sick man's strength was so reduced that a
+ride of six miles fatigued him intolerably. The Bath lodgings, which
+Fielding, surely with his old invincible hopefulness, had hitherto kept
+were accordingly relinquished; and even his sanguine nature realised the
+desperate condition of his case. At this point in his narration he breaks
+off with a characteristically frank disclosure of the chief motive which
+had inspired him to the heroic exertions of these later months of 1753. At
+the beginning of the winter his private affairs it seems, "had but a
+gloomy aspect." The aspect of his own tenure of life we know. And hence to
+distress of body was added that keenest of all distresses of the mind, the
+despair of putting his family beyond the reach of necessity. It was gladly
+therefore that Fielding offered up the 'poor sacrifice' of his shattered
+health, in the hope of securing a pension for his family, in case his own
+death were hastened by these last labours for the public.
+
+If sickness was not allowed to hinder Fielding's energies for the benefit
+of the public, and for the future provision of his family, neither did he
+permit it to dull the activities of friendship. Early in December, when
+his illness must have been acute, he wrote the following hitherto
+unpublished letter to the Lord Chancellor, on behalf of his friend Mr
+Saunders Welch: [8]
+
+
+"My Lord,
+
+"As I hear that a new Commission of the Peace is soon to pass the Great
+Seal for Westm'r. give me Leave to recommend the name of Saunders Welch,
+as well as to the next Commission for Middx. Your Lordship will, I hope,
+do me the Honour of believing, I should not thus presume, unless I was
+well satisfied that the Merit of the Man would justifie my Presumption.
+For this besides a universal Good Character and the many eminent services
+he hath done the Public, I appeal in particular to Master Lane; and shall
+only add, as I am positive the Truth is, that his Place can be filled
+with no other more acceptable to all the Gentlemen in the Commission, and
+indeed to the Public in general. I am with the highest Duty and Respect,
+
+"My Lord,
+"Your Lordship's most obedient
+"and most humble servant,
+"Henry Ffielding."
+"Decr 6. 1753
+"To the Lord High Chancellor"
+
+[1] _Life of Henry Fielding_. Frederick Lawrence, p. 138.
+
+[2] Saunders Welch. _A Letter on the subject of Robberies, wrote in the
+year 1753_.
+
+[3] See the _Public Advertiser_ 1753 March 17, 20, 24 &c.
+
+[4] This unique contemporary print of Fielding may be seen in the British
+Museum, Print Room, _Social Satires_, No. 3213.
+
+[5] Record Office. _State Papers. Domestic_ G. II., 127, no. 24.
+
+[6] Lysons. _Environs of London_. 1795. Vol. ii. p. 229.
+
+[7] The quotations from the _Voyage to Lisbon_ are from the edition
+recently prepared by Mr Austin Dobson, for the 'World's Classics.'
+
+[8] This letter is now in the British Museum. The endorsement on the back
+is: "Dec. 6, 1753 from Mr Fielding recommending Mr. Saunders Welch to be
+in the Com. of ye Peace for Westmr and Middx."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+VOYAGE TO LISBON--DEATH
+
+    "satisfied in having finished my life, as I have probably lost it in
+     the service of my country."
+    _Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon_.
+
+To a man dying of a complication of disorders the terrible winter of
+1753-4 brought added danger; a winter which, says Fielding, "put a lucky
+end, if they had known their own interests, to such numbers of aged and
+infirm valetudinarians." But this, too, his splendid constitution
+struggled through; and in February 1754, he was back in town, in a
+condition less despaired of, he tells us, by himself than by any of his
+friends.
+
+And if he did not allow himself to despair, neither did he, even now,
+relinquish all his magistrate's work. On the 26th of February cases are
+actually recorded as brought before him. [1] But within a few days,
+apparently, of this date treatment employed on the advice of Dr Joshua
+Ward, so weakened a body already 'enervate' and emaciated, that at first
+the patient "was thought to be falling into the agonies of death." On
+March 6, he was, he tells us, at his worst--that "memorable day when the
+public lost Mr Pelham. From that day I began slowly, as it were, to draw
+my feet out of the grave; till in two months time I had again acquired
+some little degree of strength."
+
+Before the expiration of these two months that 'little degree of strength'
+was again being expended in the drudgery of the Bow Street court-room.
+"Yesterday," states the _Public Advertiser_ of April 17, "Elizabeth Smith
+was committed to Newgate by Henry Fielding Esqre; being charged with
+stealing a great quantity of Linnen." [2] And five days later, on April
+22, a committal is recorded in the Middlesex _Sessions Book_. [3]
+
+Although Fielding could now leave his sickroom, when called thence to
+commit a thief to Newgate, a newspaper paragraph, dated a little earlier
+in this same month of April, shows that the public were apprehensive that
+the protection afforded them by their indefatigable magistrate was now of
+a very precarious duration. The writer refers to the complete success of
+Mr Fielding's _Plan_ for the subjugation of criminals, executed the
+previous winter, pointing out that "the Public who had such Reason to
+suspect the contrary have suffered fewer Outrages than have happened any
+Winter this Twenty years." And without making any direct statement as to
+the fast failing strength of the author and executor of that _Plan_, he
+continues in words that plainly indicate the abdication of those zealous
+energies: "The whole Plan we are assured is communicated to Justice John
+Fielding and Mr Welch who are determined to bring it to that perfection of
+which it is capable." This 'assurance' of the _Advertiser_ is confirmed by
+Fielding's own words in the _Voyage to Lisbon_. "I therefore" he says,
+speaking clearly of the winter or spring of 1753-4, "resigned the office
+[of principal Justice of the Peace in Westminster] and the farther
+execution of my plan to my brother, who had long been my assistant."
+
+This blind brother, who in his turn became famous as a London magistrate,
+was now a Justice of the Peace for Middlesex [4] as well as for
+Westminster; and was at this time living in the Strand, as the Resident
+Proprietor [5] of that enterprising _Universal Register Office_ which has
+won incidental immortality in his brother's pages, and which combined such
+heterogeneous activities as those of an Estate Office, Registry for
+servants of good character, Lost Property Office, Curiosity Shop and
+General Agency.
+
+Another announcement in the columns of the _Advertiser_ links this last
+Spring of Fielding's life with that earlier Spring of 1743, when as a
+popular play-wright and a struggling barrister, absorbed in anxiety for
+the health of a beloved wife and with his own health already attacked, he
+published that masterpiece of irony _Jonathan Wild_. Now, while he was
+still slowly drawing his 'feet out of the grave,' after those critical
+first days of March, a new edition of the _History_ of that "Great Man,"
+with "considerable Corrections and Additions," was advertised; the actual
+date of publication being, apparently, about March 19. The new edition
+appeared with a prefatory note, "from the Publisher to the Reader," which
+although it bears no signature conveys, undoubtedly, Fielding's intention,
+if not his actual words. There is the familiar protest against the
+"scurrility of others," the odium of which had fallen on the innocent
+shoulders of "the author of our little book"; and there is a solemn
+declaration that the said little book shows no reason for supposing any
+'personal application' to be meant in its pages "unless we will agree that
+there are without those Walls [i.e. of Newgate], some other bodies of men
+of worse morals than those within; and who have consequently, a right to
+change places with its present inhabitants." Then follows an explicit
+reference to a chapter in the _History_ of the arch-villain Wild, which is
+obviously designed to satirise the condition of English politics, if not
+the person of any one politician. The disclaimer, seems on the whole, to
+partake very properly of the ironic nature of the ensuing pages; although
+it recalls that youthful declaration of the young dramatist, prefixed to
+his first comedy acted nearly thirty years before, that no private
+character was the target of his pen.
+
+At the end of these two months of March and April, spent as we have seen
+in acquiring some little degree of strength, and in at least attempting to
+expend the same on the consignment of petty thieves to Newgate, Fielding
+again submitted his dropsy to the surgeon, the consequences of which he
+now bore much better. This improvement, he tells us, he attributed greatly
+to "a dose of laudanum prescribed by my surgeon. It first gave me the most
+delicious flow of spirits, and afterwards as comfortable a nap." Lady Mary
+Wortley Montagu has recorded how her cousin's 'happy constitution,' even
+when half-demolished, could enjoy, with undiminished zest "a venison
+pasty, or a flask of champagne." Surely none other than Henry Fielding
+could have recorded with like zest this 'delicious flow of spirits' and
+'comfortable nap' derived from a dose of laudanum.
+
+The month of May, with its promise of relief from the still lingering
+winter, had now begun. Fielding therefore resolved, he says, to visit a
+little country house of his "which stands at Ealing, in the county of
+Middlesex, in the best air, I believe, in the whole kingdom." [6] Towards
+the end of the month, he had resort to a long forgotten eighteenth century
+panacea, the tar-water discovered by Bishop Berkeley; and very soon
+experienced effects far beyond his "most sanguine hopes." Success beyond
+Fielding's most sanguine hopes must have been great indeed; and
+accordingly we hear how this tar-water, from the very first, lessened his
+illness, increased his appetite, and very slowly added to his bodily
+strength. By the end of the month a third application by his surgeon
+revealed distinctly favourable symptoms; but still both the dropsy and the
+asthma were becoming more serious; and the summer, which the doctors
+seemed to think the sick man's 'only chance of life' seemed scarce likely
+to visit England at all in that sunless year. "In the whole month of May
+the sun scarce appeared three times" we learn, from the _Voyage_. Fearing
+therefore the renewed assaults of winter, before he had recruited his
+forces so as "to be in anywise able to withstand them," Fielding resolved,
+with the approval of a very eminent physician, to put an already formed
+project into immediate execution. This was to seek further recovery in
+some warmer climate. At first Aix was thought of, but here the
+difficulties of travel in the reign of George II. for invalids of slender
+means, proved insuperable. The journey by land, "beside the expense of
+it," Fielding found to be "infinitely too long and fatiguing"; and no ship
+was announced as sailing within 'any reasonable time' for that part of the
+Mediterranean. Lisbon accordingly was decided upon; and John Fielding soon
+discovered a ship with excellent passenger accommodation, and which was
+due to sail in three days. "I eagerly embraced the offer," writes
+Fielding, as though he were starting on a pleasure cruise, instead of
+facing all the miseries of travel, when unable to make the least use of
+his limbs, and when his very appearance "presented a spectacle of the
+highest horror"; and he adds "I began to prepare my family for the voyage
+with the utmost expedition." Twice, however, the captain put off his
+sailing, and at length his passenger invited him to dinner at Ealing, a
+full week after the declared date of departure. Meanwhile Fielding's
+condition seems at least to have become no worse, for the _Public
+Advertiser_ of June 22 has "the pleasure to assure the Publick that the
+Report of the Death of Henry Fielding Esquire; inserted in an Evening
+paper of Thursday is not true, that Gentleman's Health being better than
+it has been for some Month's past."
+
+It was not till the 26th of June that, in the memorable opening words of
+the _Voyage_, "the most melancholy sun I had ever beheld arose, and found
+me awake at my house at Fordhook. By the light of this sun, I was, in my
+own opinion, last to behold and take leave of some of those creatures on
+whom I doated with a mother-like fondness, guided by nature and passion,
+and uncured and unhardened by all the doctrine of that philosophical
+school where I had learnt to bear pains and to despise death." The morning
+was spent with his children, the eldest of whom was then a boy of six; and
+"I doubt not," he writes, "whether, in that time, I did not undergo more
+than in all my distemper." At noon his coach was at the door, and this
+"was no sooner told me than I kiss'd my children round, and went into it
+with some little resolution." His wife, behaving "more like a heroine and
+philosopher, tho' at the same time the tenderest mother in the world," and
+his eldest daughter, followed him; and the invalid was swiftly driven the
+twelve miles to Rotherhithe. Here the task of embarking a man quite bereft
+of the use of his limbs had to be accomplished. This difficulty was
+overcome with the aid of Saunders Welch, the friend of whom Fielding says
+"I never think or speak of but with love and esteem" [7]; and, at last,
+the traveller was "seated in a great chair in the cabin," after fatigues,
+the most cruel of which he declares to have been the inhuman jests made
+upon his wasted and helpless condition by the rows of sailors and watermen
+through whom he had been compelled to pass.
+
+From this moment we may read of the pleasures and thoughts, the
+experiences and meditations, but scarcely ever of the sufferings of the
+dying novelist, in the pages of what has been well called "one of the most
+unfeigned and touching little tracts in our own or any other literature"
+[8] Confined for six weeks in the narrow prison of an eighteenth century
+trading vessel; unable to move save when lifted by unskilled hands; with
+food often intolerable to the healthiest appetite; with no relaxation save
+the company of the rough old sea-dog who commanded the _Queen of
+Portugal_; and fully conscious that his was a mortal illness,--the
+inexhaustible courage, the delight in man and in nature, the genius of
+Henry Fielding still triumphed over every external circumstance.
+Throughout the voyage, fortune, moreover, seemed determined to heap on the
+unhappy traveller all manner of additional discomforts; and yet when we
+lay down this little volume "begun in pain, and finished almost at the
+same period with life," [9] the pictures left on the mind glow almost as
+brightly as those which fill the pages written in the full vigour of
+Fielding's manhood, and which, as Coleridge said, breathe the air of a
+spring morning.
+
+First came a delay of three days off the squalid shores of Wapping and
+Rotherhithe, whereby opportunity was afforded of "tasting a delicious
+mixture of the air of both these sweet places," and of enjoying such a
+concord of the voices of seamen, watermen, fishwomen, oyster women and
+their like as Hogarth indicated "in that print of his which is enough to
+make a man deaf to look at." This delay, moreover, threatened to bring
+Fielding within need of a surgeon when none should be procurable. His
+friend Mr William Hunter of Covent Garden, brother of the more famous John
+Hunter, relieved this apprehension; but now fresh trouble occurred in the
+torments of toothache which befell Mrs Fielding. A servant was despatched
+in haste to Wapping, but the desired 'toothdrawer,' arrived after the ship
+had at last, on Sunday morning, the 30th of June, left her unsavoury
+moorings. That Sunday morning "was fair and bright," and the diarist
+records how, dropping down to Gravesend, "we had a passage thither I think
+as pleasant as can be conceiv'd." The yards of Deptford and Woolwich were
+'noble sights'; the Thames with its splendid shipping excelled all the
+rivers of the world; and the men of war, the unrivalled Indiamen, the
+other traders, and even the colliers and small craft, all combined to form
+"a most pleasing object to the eye, as well as highly warming to the heart
+of an Englishman, who has any degree of love for his country, or can
+recognise any effect of the patriot in his constitution." And here
+Fielding gives us a notable example of his own healthy taste in
+recreation; a taste agreeing very ill with the scurrilous popular myths
+concerning him, but entirely consonant with the manifest atmosphere of his
+genius. He deplores the general neglect of "what seems to me the highest
+degree of amusement: that is, the sailing ourselves in little vessels of
+our own"; an amusement which need not "exceed the reach of a moderate
+fortune, and would fall very short of the prices which are daily paid for
+pleasures of a far inferior rate."
+
+Fortune, as we have said, seemed to grudge every little pleasure that
+could have alleviated the condition of the helpless invalid on board the
+_Queen of Portugal_. The relief obtained from Mr Hunter, he tells us, "the
+gaiety of the morning, the pleasant sailing with wind and tide, and the
+many agreeable objects with which I was constantly entertained during the
+whole way, were all suppressed and overcome by the single consideration of
+my wife's pain, which continued incessantly to torment her." The second
+despatch of a messenger, in great haste to bring the best reputed operator
+in Gravesend recalls Murphy's words: "Of sickness and poverty he was
+singularly patient and under pressure of those evils he could quietly read
+_Cicero de Consolatione_; but if either of them threatened his wife he was
+impetuous for her relief." The remedies both of the Gravesend 'surgeon of
+some eminence,' and of yet another practitioner, who was sent for from
+Deal, were ineffectual; but about eight in the evening of the following
+day, when the ship under contrary winds, was at anchor in the Downs, Mrs
+Fielding fell asleep; and to that accident we owe one of the most
+characteristic passages in the _Voyage_. His wife's relief from pain
+would, Fielding tells us, "have given me some happiness, could I have
+known how to employ those spirits which were raised by it: but
+unfortunately for me, I was left in a disposition of enjoying an agreeable
+hour, without the assistance of a companion, which has always appeared to
+me necessary to such enjoyment; my daughter and her companion were both
+retired sea-sick to bed; the other passengers were a rude school boy of
+fourteen years old, and an illiterate Portuguese friar, who understood no
+language but his own, in which I had not the least smattering. The captain
+was the only person left, in whose conversation I might indulge myself;
+but unluckily for me, besides his knowledge being chiefly confined to his
+profession, he had the misfortune of being so deaf, that to make him hear
+my words, I must run the risque of conveying them to the ears of my wife,
+who, tho' in another room (called, I think, the state-room; being indeed a
+most stately apartment capable of containing one human body in length, if
+not very tall, and three bodies in breadth) lay asleep within a yard of
+me. In this situation necessity and choice were one and the same thing;
+the captain and I sat down together to a small bowl of punch, over which
+we both soon fell fast asleep, and so concluded the evening." In the
+record of the previous day, while sketching the humours of Jacks in
+office, Fielding incidentally shows himself as no less careful of the
+respect due to his wife than he was solicitous for her comfort. A
+ruffianly custom-house officer had appeared in their cabin, wearing a hat
+adorned with broad gold lace, and 'cocked with much military fierceness.'
+On eliciting the information that 'the gentleman' was a riding surveyor,
+"I replied," says Fielding, "that he might be a riding surveyor, but could
+be no gentleman, for that none who had any title to that denomination,
+would break into the presence of a lady, without any apology or even
+moving his hat. He then took his covering from his head, and laid it on
+the table, saying he asked pardon." To this 'riding surveyor' we owe also
+an indication that Fielding found room in the narrow confines of a cabin
+for his Plato; for the rude insolence of that functionary recalls to his
+mind the Platonic theory of the divine original of rulers, and he proceeds
+to quote a long passage from the _Laws_, which even his ready scholarship
+could scarce have had by heart.
+
+Contrary winds continued to baffle all Captain Veal's seamanship, and
+afforded his passenger opportunities for a spirited protest concerning the
+need of some regulation both of the charges of long-shore boatmen, and of
+the manners of captains in the Royal Navy. On the evening of July 8 the
+_Voyage_ records that "we beat the sea off Sussex, in sight of Dungeness,
+with much more pleasure than progress; for the weather was almost a
+perfect calm, and the moon, which was almost at the full, scarce suffered
+a single cloud to veil her from our sight"; and on the 18th of the month
+the _Queen of Portugal_ put in to Ryde, at which place she remained
+wind-bound for no less than eleven days.
+
+These eleven days Fielding spent, by his wife's persuasions, on shore, at
+the poor village inn which, together with a little church and some thirty
+houses, then constituted the village of Ryde. Of the hardships and humours
+of that sojourn the _Voyage_ affords an account worthy of a place among
+the pages of either of the three great novels. The landlady, an incredibly
+mean and heartless shrew, inflicted daily annoyances and extortions on her
+wind-bound victims. The squalid building, partly constructed of
+wreck-wood, could scarce house the party. The food supplies, other than
+those the visitors brought with them, were chiefly 'rusty bacon, and worse
+cheese,' with very bad ale to drink. And on the first afternoon, the house
+was found to be so damp from recent scrubbing that Mrs Fielding, who
+"besides discharging excellently well her own, and all the tender offices
+becoming the female character; who besides being a faithful friend, an
+amiable companion, and a tender nurse, could likewise supply the wants of
+a decrepit husband, and occasionally perform his part," hastily snatched
+the invalid from "worse perils by water than the common dangers of the
+sea," and ordered dinner to be laid in a dry and commodious barn. So
+seated, "in one of the most pleasant spots, I believe, in the kingdom,"
+and regaled on bacon, beans, and fish, "we completed," says Fielding, "the
+best, the pleasantest, and the merriest meal, with more appetite, more
+real, solid luxury, and more festivity, than was ever seen in an
+entertainment at White's."
+
+On Sunday the three ladies went to church, "attended by the captain in a
+most military attire, with his cockade in his hat, and his sword by his
+side" (Captain Veal had commanded a privateer); and Fielding, while left
+alone, pursued those researches into human nature of which he never
+wearied by conversation with the landlord, a fine example of henpecked
+humanity. On the following day the ladies, again attended by Captain Veal,
+enjoyed a four mile walk, professing themselves greatly charmed with the
+scenery, and with the courtesy of a lady who owned a great house on this
+part of the coast, and who "had slipt out of the way, that my wife and her
+company might refresh themselves with the flowers and fruits with which
+her garden abounded." Within twenty four hours this generous householder
+had sent a message to the inn, placing all that her garden or house
+afforded at the disposal of the travellers. Fielding's man-servant was
+despatched with proper acknowledgements, and returned "in company with the
+gardener, both richly laden with almost every particular which a garden at
+this most fruitful season of the year produces."
+
+That evening, on a change of wind, Captain Veal came to demand his
+passengers' instant return. This would have been "a terrible circumstance
+to me, in my decayed condition," admits Fielding, "especially as very
+heavy showers of rain, attended with a high wind, continued to fall
+incessantly; the being carried thro' which two miles in the dark, in a wet
+and open boat, seemed little less than certain death." Happily the wind
+again veered till the following morning, when Fielding and the three
+ladies, together with their manservant and maid, were safely re-embarked,
+not however without much agitation over the temporary loss of their
+tea-chest. This calamity was first compensated by the prompt aid of the
+hospitable lady aforementioned, and then averted by the diligent search of
+William the footman who at last discovered the hiding place of the missing
+'sovereign cordial,' and thus, concludes his master, "ended this scene,
+which begun with such appearance of distress, and ended with becoming the
+subject of mirth and laughter." Once more on board, Ryde and its beautiful
+prospect, its verdant elms, its green meadows, and shady lanes all
+combining in Fielding's opinion to make a most delightful habitation,
+faded from view. And, by seven o'clock, "we sat down" he says, "to regale
+ourselves with some roasted venison, which was much better drest than we
+imagined it would be, and an excellent cold pasty which my wife had made
+at Ryde, and which we had reserved uncut to eat on board our ship, whither
+we all cheerfully exulted in being returned from the presence of Mrs
+Humphreys, [the landlady] who by the exact resemblance she bore to a fury,
+seemed to have been with no great propriety settled in Paradise."
+
+It is while commenting on the charm of the view from Ryde,--"I confess
+myself so entirely fond of a sea prospect, that I think nothing on the
+land can equal it,"--that Fielding incidentally utters that extraordinary
+reference to Sir Robert Walpole as "one of the best of men and of
+ministers." The only explanation of these words at all consonant with what
+we know of Fielding's life seems to be that here he adopts once more his
+familiar use of irony.
+
+The cheerfulness of spirit with which the invalid encountered every fresh
+distress, and 'exulted' in every pleasant sight and trifling pleasure,
+during those days at Ryde, is very fully reflected in the following
+letter, happily preserved from the untoward fate which has apparently
+befallen every other intimate word from his pen. It was written to his
+brother John, on the first day of anchorage off Ryde.
+
+
+"On board the Queen of Portugal, Richd. Veal at anchor on the Mother Bank,
+off Ryde, to the care of the Post Master of Portsmouth--this is my Date
+and y'r Direction.
+
+"July 12 1754
+
+"Dear Jack, After receiving that agreeable Lre from Mess'rs. Fielding &
+Co., we weighed on monday morning and sailed from Deal to the Westward
+Four Days long but inconceivably pleasant passage brought us yesterday to
+an Anchor on the Mother Bank, on the Back of the Isle of Wight, where we
+had last Night in Safety the Pleasure of hearing the Winds roar over our
+Heads in as violent a Tempest as I have known, and where my only
+Consideration were the Fears which must possess any Friend of ours (if
+there is happily any such), who really makes our Well being the Object of
+his Concern especially if such Friend should be totally inexperienced in
+Sea Affairs. I therefore beg that on the Day you receive this Mrs Daniel
+may know that we are just risen from Breakfast in Health and Spirits this
+twelfth Instant at 9 in the morning. Our Voyage hath proved fruitful in
+Adventures all which being to be written in the Book you must postpone
+yr. Curiosity. As the Incidents which fall under yr Cognizance will
+possibly be consigned to Oblivion, do give them to us as they pass. Tell
+yr Neighbour I am much obliged to him for recommending me to the care of
+a most able and experienced Seaman to whom other Captains seem to pay
+such Deference that they attend and watch his Motions, and think
+themselves only safe when they act under his Direction and Example. Our
+Ship in Truth seems to give Laws on the Water with as much Authority and
+Superiority as you Dispense Laws to the Public and Examples to yr
+Brethern in Commission, Please to direct yr Answer to me on Board as in
+the Date, if gone to be returned, and then send it by the Post and
+Pacquet to Lisbon to
+
+"Y'r affec't. Brother
+"H. Fielding [10]
+
+"To John Fielding Esq. at his House in Bow Street Cov. Garden London."
+
+It is probable, as Mr Austin Dobson has pointed out, that the Mrs Daniel,
+whose anxieties Fielding here shows himself anxious to relieve, was his
+second wife's mother. And by this time his brother was doubtless occupying
+that house in Bow Street so frequently advertised to the public, when any
+work was on foot for their protection, as the residence of 'Henry
+Fielding, Esqre.'
+
+The almost diabolic figure of the Ryde landlady had scarcely left his
+pages, when Fielding found a new subject for his portraiture, in the
+pretentious ill-bred follies of a young officer, a nephew of the captain,
+who arrived on board to visit his uncle, and who serves as an excellent
+foil for the simple-hearted merits of the elder man. A rising wind,
+however, cut short the Lieutenant's stories, and two nights later blew a
+hurricane which Fielding declares, "would have given no small alarm to a
+man, who had either not learnt what it is to die, or known what it is to
+be miserable"; continuing, in words that need no comment, "my dear wife
+and child must pardon me, if what I did not conceive to be any great evil
+to myself, I was not much terrified with the thoughts of happening to
+them: in truth, I have often thought they are both too good, and too
+gentle, to be trusted to the power of any man." The sea he loved so well
+was not to be Fielding's grave. Early the next morning the _Queen of
+Portugal_ was at anchor in Torbay; and the whole party sat down "to a very
+chearful breakfast."
+
+For a whole week the travellers were kept wind-bound off the Devon coast,
+now at anchor, now making vain efforts to proceed. We hear of the 'fine
+clouted cream,' and the delicious cyder of the county (two hogsheads of
+which latter Fielding purchased as presents for his friends); of the
+excellence of the local fish named 'john doree,' of the scandalous need of
+legislation for the protection of sea-men when ashore from land-sharks, a
+digression which includes a pleasant interpretation of the myth of Ulysses
+and Circe as none other than the dilemma of a Homeric merchant skipper
+whose crew Circe "some good ale-wife," had made drunk "with the spirituous
+liquors of those days"; of the difficulty with which Fielding could
+persuade his wife "whom it was no easy matter for me to force from my
+side" to take a walk on shore; and of the captain's grievous lamentations,
+which "seemed to have some mixture of the Irish howl in them," [11] when
+his cat was accidentally suffocated. Also, to these last wind-bound days
+belongs that famous incident which does perhaps no less honour to the hot
+tempered tyrannical old skipper than to his illustrious passenger.
+
+Fielding, having just finished dinner, was enjoying some good claret in
+the cabin, with his wife and her friend--a cheerful moment, when
+conversation 'is most agreeable,' when Tom, the captain's general
+factotum, burst in on them and began, without saying a 'by your leave', to
+bottle half a hogshead of small beer. After requests and protests, equally
+unavailing, this functionary found himself, says Fielding, threatened
+"with having one bottle to pack more than his number, which then happened
+to stand empty within my reach." Thereupon Tom reported his version of the
+matter to the captain, who came thundering down to the cabin in a rage
+that knew no bounds of language or civility. This behaviour from a man who
+had received not only liberal payment from his passenger for
+accommodation, but also such frequent stores of fresh provisions that
+Fielding's private purse had indeed gone some way in maintaining the
+ship's crew, that passenger justly resented, and to a hasty resolve of
+quitting the ship by a hoy that should carry him to Dartmouth, he added
+threats of legal action. The 'most distant sound of law,' however, he
+tells us, "frightened a man, who had often, I am convinced, heard numbers
+of cannon roar round him with intrepidity. Nor did he sooner see the hoy
+approaching the vessel, than he ran down again into the cabin, and his
+rage being perfectly subsided, he tumbled on his knees, and a little too
+abjectly implored for mercy. I did not suffer a brave man and an old man,
+to remain a moment in this posture; but I immediately forgave him." It is
+this incident that Thackeray chooses to complete his picture of the great
+novelist; adding that memorable comparison between the "noble spirit and
+unconquerable generosity" of Fielding, and the lives of many unknown
+heroes of the sea: "Such a brave and gentle heart, such an intrepid and
+courageous spirit I love to recognise in the manly the English Harry
+Fielding."
+
+Within a week of this reconciliation the ship had made such progress
+southward that the captain 'in the redundancy of his good humour, declared
+he would go to church at Lisbon on Sunday next' (not the least pleasant of
+the pictures which Fielding gives us of the privateer is that of his
+summoning all hands on deck on a Sunday morning and then reading prayers
+'with an audible voice'); but again the wind played him false, becalming
+him near Cape Finisterre. This last calm, however, brought with it
+sufficient compensation: "tho' our voyage was retarded, we were
+entertained with a scene which as no one can behold without going to sea,
+so no one can form an idea of anything equal to it on shore. We were
+seated on the deck, women and all, in the serenest evening that can be
+imagined. Not a single cloud presented itself to our view, and the sun
+himself was the only object which engrossed our whole attention. He did
+indeed set with a majesty which is incapable of description, with which,
+while the horizon was yet blazing with glory, our eyes were called off to
+the opposite part to survey the moon, which was then at full, and which in
+rising presented us with the second object that this world hath offered to
+our vision. Compared to these the pageantry of theatres, or splendor of
+courts, are sights almost below the regard of children."
+
+Four days later, at midnight, the anchor was cast off Lisbon, after a calm
+and moonlit passage up the Tagus, a passage, Fielding writes, "incredibly
+pleasant to the women, who remained three hours enjoying it, while I was
+left to the cooler transports of enjoying their pleasures at second-hand;
+and yet, cooler as they may be, whoever is totally ignorant of such
+sensation, is, at the same time, void of all ideas of friendship."
+
+On the day following, the 24th of June, he landed, and that evening
+enjoyed the long unknown luxury of a good supper, in a kind of
+coffee-house "very pleasantly situated on the brow of a hill, about a mile
+from the city, [which] hath a very fine prospect of the River Tajo from
+Lisbon to the sea." With that pleasant prospect the Voyage closes. Begun
+as it was to while away the enforced solitude of his cabin, a condition,
+which no man, he tells us, disliked more than himself and which mortal
+sickness rendered especially irksome, these pages, some of which "were
+possibly the production of the most disagreeable hours which ever haunted
+the author," reveal Fielding to us if not as Mr Lowell has said "with
+artless inadvertence" at least with perfect fullness. The undimmed gaiety
+of spirit, the tender affection, the constant desire to remove those evils
+which he found oppressing his country-men by sea not less than on land,
+the 'enthusiasm for righteousnes,' the humour of the first of English
+novelists, burn here as brightly as though the writer were but midway in
+his life's voyage. The hand that exposed evil in its native loathsomeness
+in a Blifil and a Wild has not lost its cunning in depicting Mrs
+Humphreys; the eye that delighted in the green fields of England saw in
+the southern sunset that which made human creations 'almost below the
+regard of children.' And to the last the patriotic energies of the author
+of _Pasquin_ and of the _Champion_, of the whole hearted social reformer,
+of the tireless magistrate, knew no relaxation. Page after page of the
+_Voyage_ justify the passage in which he tells us how "I would indeed have
+this work, which, if I live to finish it (a matter of no great certainty,
+if indeed of any great hope to me), will be probably the last I shall ever
+undertake, to produce some better end than the mere diversion of the
+reader"; and manifest his desire, here explicitly stated, to finish life
+"as I have probably lost it, in the service of my country."
+
+We have no knowledge concerning the four months following the last entry
+in the pages of the _Voyage to Lisbon_. On October 8, 1754, the end so
+calmly expected came; and in the beautiful English cemetery, facing the
+great Basilica of the Heart of Jesus, was laid to rest all that an alien
+soil could claim of 'our immortal Fielding.'
+
+[1] The _Public Advertiser_, 1754, February 26.
+
+[2] The _Public Advertiser_ 1754, April 17.
+
+[3] Middlesex Records. _Sessions Book_. 1754.
+
+[4] See the Middlesex Records.
+
+[5] See the _Public Advertiser_. February, 1754.
+
+[6] This little house was apparently replaced by a larger house; and it is
+probably this second building of which a sketch is inserted in a copy of
+Lysons' _Environs_ to be seen in the Guildhall Library. It is now pulled
+down.
+
+[7] Dr Johnson spoke of Saunders Welch as "one of my best and dearest
+friends."
+
+[8] Austin Dobson. _Fielding_, p. 170.
+
+[9] "Dedication" of the _Voyage_, written possibly by John Fielding.
+
+[10] Austin Dobson. _Fielding_, p. 179. From the autograph in the
+possession of Mr Frederick Locker.
+
+[11] This and the following passage occur in the second version of the
+_Voyage to Lisbon_.
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX A
+
+_The Hapsburg genealogy_
+
+It appears that the Hapsburg descent, formerly claimed by the Denbigh
+family, must now be abandoned. The arguments against this descent,
+published by Mr Horace Round, have been accepted by Burke. Further, Dr G.
+F. Warner permits me to publish his statement that "I have myself seen
+the documents upon which it [the claim] rests, and found them to be
+unmistakeable forgeries."
+
+As regards Henry Fielding's family it is interesting to find that his
+grandfather the Rev. and Hon. John Fielding was not only Canon of
+Salisbury, and a Doctor of Divinity, but also Archdeacon of Dorsetshire.
+Canon John Fielding was buried at Salisbury. His son George (Henry
+Fielding's uncle) was Lt. Colonel of the "Royal Regiment of the Blues,"
+and Groom of the Bed-chamber to Queen Anne and to George II. He is buried
+in St George's Chapel, Windsor. (J. Nichols. _History and Antiquities
+of Leicestershire_. 1810. Vol. iv. pt. i. p. 394.)
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX B
+
+_Receipt and Assignment of "Tom Jones"_
+
+The following documents are in the possession of Alfred Huth Esq., and
+are now first published
+
+June 11 1748.
+
+Rec'd. of Mr. Andrew Millar Six hundred Pounds being in full for the sole
+Copy Right of a Book called the History of a Foundling in Eighteen Books.
+And in Consideration of the said Six Hundred Pounds I promise to asign
+over the said Book to the said Andrew Millar his Executors and assigns
+for ever when I shall be thereto demanded.
+
+L   s   d
+L600, 00, 00. Hen. Ffielding
+
+The said Work to contain Six Volumes in Duodecimo.
+
+Know all Men by these Presents that I Henry Fielding of St. Paul's Covent
+Garden in the County of Middlesex Esq'r. for & in consideration of the
+Sum of Six hundred Pounds of lawful Money of Great Britain to me in hand
+paid by Andrew Millar of St. Mary le Strand in the County afores'd.
+Bookseller the Receipt whereof is hereby acknowledged and of which I do
+Acquit the s'd. Andrew Millar his Executors & Assigns, have bargained
+sold delivered assigned & set over all that my Title Right and Property
+in & to a certain Book printed in Six Volumes, known & called by the Name
+& Title of The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, inv'd. written by me
+the s'd. Henry Fielding, with all Improvements, Additions or Alterations
+whatsoever which now are or hereafter shall at any time be made by me the
+s'd. Henry Fielding, or any one else by my authority to the s'd. Book To
+Have and to Hold the s'd. bargained Premises unto the s'd. Andrew Millar,
+his Ex'ors Adm'ors or Assigns for ever And I do hereby covenant to & with
+the s'd. Andrew Millar his Ex'ors Adm'ors & Assigns that I the s'd. Henry
+Fielding the Author of the s'd. bargained Premises have not at any time
+heretofore done committed or suffered any Act or thing whatsoever by
+means whereof the s'd bargained Premises or any part thereof is or shall
+be impeached or encumbered in any wise And I the s'd Henry Fielding for
+myself my Ex'ors Adm'ors & Assigns shall warrant & defend the s'd
+bargained Premises for ever against all Persons whatsoever claiming under
+me my Ex'ors Adm'ors or Assigns.
+
+In Witness whereof I have hereunto set my hand & seal this twenty fifth
+day of March One thousand seven hundred & forty nine.
+
+H F fielding [Illustration: Seal.]
+
+Signed sealed & delivered
+by the within named Henry
+Fielding the day and year within
+mentioned, in the presence of
+Jos. Brogden
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX C
+
+    "_Pasquin turned Drawcansir_"
+
+The _General Advertiser_ for March 13, 1752, Page 3, advertises, as
+for Macklin's Benefit, at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden,
+
+"A New Dramatic Satire of Two Acts, call'd
+Covent Garden Theatre; or Pasquin turned Drawcansir
+Censor of Great Britain
+
+Written on the Model of the Comedies of Aristophanes and the Pasquinades
+of the Italian Theatre in Paris; With Chorusses of the People after the
+manner of the Greek Drama. The Parts of the Pit, and Boxes, the Stage,
+and the Town to be performed by themselves for their Diversion; the Part
+of several dull disorderly Characters in and about St. James, to be
+performed by certain Persons for Example; and the Part of
+Pasquin-Drawcansir to be performed by his Censorial Highness, for his
+Interest.
+
+The Satire to be introduced by an Oration, and to conclude by a
+Peroration: Both to be spoken from the Rostrum, in the Manner of certain
+Orators by Signer Pasquin."
+
+This advertisement is also in the _Covent Garden Journal_, with the
+addition of "galleries" after the word _Boxes_. According to Dibdin,
+_History of the Stage_, Vol. V. (preface dated 1800) p. 156, this satire
+was _by_ Macklin.
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX D
+
+_The Walpole 'anecdote'_
+
+The following reference to Fielding occurs in a letter by Horace Walpole,
+to George Montagu, dated May 18, 1749. It may be prefaced by the
+statement that Fielding's strenuous opposition to Sir Robert Walpole was
+not likely to be overlooked by Sir Robert's son; and by Mr Austin
+Dobson's comment "his [Horace Walpole's] absolute injustice, when his
+partisan spirit was uppermost, is everywhere patent to readers of his
+Letters ... the story no doubt exaggerated when it reached him, loses
+nothing under his transforming and malicious pen." Walpole writes: "He
+[Rigby] and Peter Bathurst t'other night carried a servant of the
+latter's, who had attempted to shoot him, before Fielding; who, to all
+his other vocations, has, by the grace of Mr Lyttelton, added that of
+Middlesex justice. He sent them word he was at supper, that they must
+come next morning. They did not understand that freedom, and ran up,
+where they found him banqueting with a blind man, a whore, and three
+Irishmen, on some cold mutton and a bone of ham, both in one dish, and
+the dirtiest cloth. He never stirred nor asked them to sit. Rigby, who
+had seen him so often come to beg a guinea of Sir C. Williams, and
+Bathurst, at whose father's he had lived for victuals, understood that
+dignity as little, and pulled themselves chairs; on which he civilised."
+
+The 'blind man' was doubtless the half brother later to be knighted for
+his distinguished public services, Sir John Fielding; and, adds Mr Austin
+Dobson, "it is extremely unlikely the lady so discourteously
+characterised could have been any other than his wife, who Lady Stuart
+tells us 'had few personal charms.' There remain the 'three Irishmen' who
+may, or may not, have been perfectly presentable members of society. At
+all events, their mere nationality, so rapidly decided upon, cannot be
+regarded as a stigma." Bearing in mind, on the one hand, our knowledge of
+Fielding as he reveals himself in his own pages, and in his friendships,
+and on the other the character earned by Horace Walpole's pen, it seems
+matter for doubt whether this 'anecdote' deserves even a place in an
+appendix.
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX E
+
+_Fielding's Will_
+
+Fielding's will was discovered in the Prerogative Court of Canterbury, by
+Mr G. A. Aitken. It is undated:--
+
+IN THE NAME OF GOD AMEN--I HENRY FIELDING of the parish of Ealing in the
+County of Middlesex do hereby give and bequeath unto Ralph Allen of Prior
+Park in the County of Somerset Esqr and to his heirs executors
+administrators and assigns for ever to the use of the said Ralph his
+heirs &c all my Estate real and personal wheresoever and whatsoever and
+do appoint him sole EXECUTOR of this my last Will--Beseeching him that
+the whole (except my shares in the Register Office) may be sold and
+forthwith converted into Money and Annuities purchased thereout for the
+lives of my dear Wife Mary and my daughters Harriet and Sophia and what
+proportions my said Executor shall please to reserve to my sons William
+and Allen shall be paid them severally as they shall attain the age of
+twenty and three And as for my Shares in the Register or Universal
+Register Office I give ten thereof to my aforesaid Wife seven to my
+Daughter Harriet and three to my daughter Sophia my Wife to be put in
+immediate possession of her shares and my Daughters of theirs as they
+shall severally arrive at the Age of 21 the immediate Profits to be then
+likewise paid to my two Daughters by my Executor who is desired to retain
+the same in his Hands until that time--Witness my Hand--HENRY
+FIELDING--Signed and acknowledged as his last Will and Testament by the
+within named Testator in the presence of--MARGARET COLLIER--RICHD
+BOOR--ISABELLA ASH--
+
+Proved 14th November 1754.
+
+Extracted from the Principal Registry of the Probate Divorce and
+Admiralty Division of the High Court of Justice
+
+In the Prerogative Court of Canterbury
+
+November 1754
+
+HENRY FIELDING Esquire--On the fourteenth day Administration (with the
+Will annexed) of the Goods Chattels and Credits of Henry Fielding late of
+Ealing in the County of Middlesex but at Lisbon in the Kingdom of
+Portugal Esquire deceased was granted to John Fielding Esquire the Uncle
+and Curator or Guardian lawfully assigned to Harriet Fielding Spinster a
+Minor and Sophia Fielding an Infant the natural and lawfull Daughters of
+the said Deceased and two of the Residuary Legatees named in the said
+Will for the use and benefit of the said Minor and Infant and until one
+of them shall attain the age of twenty one years for that Ralph Allen
+Esquire the sole Executor and Residuary Legatee in Trust named in the
+said Will hath renounced as well the Execution thereof as Letters of
+Administration (with the said Will annexed) of the Goods Chattels and
+Credits of the said deceased and Mary Fielding Widow the Relict of the
+said deceased and the other Residuary Legatee named in the said Will hath
+also renounced Letters of Administration (with the said Will annexed) of
+the Goods Chattels and Credits of the said deceased--the said John
+Fielding having been first sworn duly to administer.
+
+In addition to the property mentioned here, Fielding possessed a library,
+as Mr Austin Dobson discovered, [1] which when sold six months after his
+death, "for the Benefit of his Wife and Family," realised L364, 7s. 1d. or
+"about Ll00 more than the public gave in 1785 for the books of Johnson."
+[2] Also according to the _Recollections of the Late John Adolphus_, by
+Henderson, Fielding purchased a 90 years' lease of a house near
+Canterbury, for one of his daughters.
+
+Of the children mentioned in this will, William became, a contemporary
+writer tells us, "an eminent barrister at law and inherits the integrity
+of his father and a large share of his brilliant talents." [3] Mr Austin
+Dobson refers to William Fielding as being like his father "a strenuous
+advocate of the poor and unfortunate," and adds that the obituary notice
+in the _Gentleman's Magazine_ records his worth and piety. [4] Harriet
+Fielding is said to have been of "a sweet temper and great understanding."
+[5] Allen Fielding became Vicar of S6. Stephens Canterbury, and was
+"greatly beloved by all, especially the little children," writes a
+descendant. Allen Fielding's four sons all took Orders, and of the second,
+Charles, it was written on his death, that "he had not only a heart that
+could feel for others, but a heart that lived in giving." [6] The noble
+qualities of Henry Fielding found their echo in his descendants.
+
+[1] Austin Dobson. _Fielding_. Appendix IV. p. 212-13; _and Eighteenth
+Century Vignettes_, 1896, pp. 164-178.
+
+[2] Austin Dobson. _Fielding_. Appendix IV. p. 212-13; _and Eighteenth
+Century Vignettes_, 1896, pp. 164-178.
+
+[3] J. Nichols. _History and Antiquities of Leicestershire_. 1810. Vol.
+iv. Pt. I. p. 594.
+
+[4] Austin Dobson. _Fielding_, p. 192.
+
+[5] T. Whitehead. _Original Anecdotes of the late Duke of Kingston_, 1795.
+p. 95.
+
+[6] _Some Hapsburghs, Fieldings, Denbighs and Desmonds_, by J. E. M. F.
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX F
+
+_Fielding's Tomb and Epitaph_
+
+Fielding's present tomb, in the beautiful English cemetery at Lisbon, was
+erected in 1830. On one side is inscribed:
+
+    LUGET BRITANNIA GREMIO NON DARI
+    FOVERE NATUM
+
+On the other side are the following lines:
+
+    Henrici Fielding
+    A Somersetensibus apud Glastoniam oriundi
+    Viri summo ingenio
+    en quae restant:
+    Stylo quo non alius unquam
+    Intima qui potuit cordis reserare mores hominum excolendos
+    suscepit
+    Virtuti decorum, vitio foeditatem asseruit, suum cuique tribuens;
+    Non quin ipse subinde irritaretur evitandis
+    Ardensin amicitia, in miseria sublevanda effusus
+    Hilaris urbanus et conjux et pater adamantus.
+    Aliis non sibi vixit
+    Vixit sed mortem victricem vincit dum natura durat dum saecula
+    currunt
+    Naturae prolem scriptis prae se ferens
+    Suam et sua genlis extendet famam. [1]
+
+[1] _Somerset and Dorset Notes and Queries_. Vol. viii. p. 353.
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX G
+
+_Fielding's posthumous play "The Fathers"_
+
+Fielding's play _The Fathers_ or _The Good-natured Man_ seems to have been
+lost (apparently after being submitted to Sir Charles Hanbury Williams)
+till twenty years after Fielding's death. It was discovered by M'r Johnes,
+M.P. for Cardigan, in 1775, or 1776, who sent it to Garrick. Garrick
+recognised it as "Harry Fielding's Comedy"; and, after revision, it was
+produced at Drury Lane on November 30, 1778. Garrick not only appeared in
+the cast, but also wrote both prologue and epilogue. A note, in the
+Morrison Manuscripts, from Garrick to D'r John Hoadley, dated January 3,
+1776, concludes thus "We have found the lost sheep, Henry Fielding's Good
+Natured Man which was mislaid near twenty years." [1] In the following
+pleasant letter Sir John Fielding commends Mrs Fielding's Benefit night to
+Dr Hunter.
+
+"Sir John Fielding presents his compliments to Dr. Hunter, and acquaints
+him that the Comedy of 'The Good-natured Man' written by the late Mr.
+Henry Fielding will be performed at Drury Lane next Monday being the
+Author's Widow's night.
+
+"He was your old and sincere friend. There are no other of his Works left
+unpublished. This is the last opportunity you will have of shewing any
+respect to his Memory as a Genius, so that I hope you will send all your
+Pupils, all your Patients, all your Friends, & everybody else to the Play
+that Night, by which Means you will indulge your benevolent feelings and
+your Sentiments of Friendship. [2]
+
+"Bow Street, Dec'r 4, 1778."
+
+[1] Morrison Manuscripts. Catalogue.
+
+[2] _The Athenaeum_. February 1. 1890.
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX H
+
+_Undated Accounts of Fielding at Salisbury and at Barnes_
+
+Research has so far failed to identify the period of Fielding's
+traditional residence in Salisbury. According to the following passage in
+_Old and New Sarum or Salisbury_, by R. Benson and H. Hatcher, 1843, he
+occupied three houses in or near Salisbury. "It is well known that
+Fielding the Novelist married a lady of Salisbury named Craddock [sic] and
+was for a time resident in our City. From tradition we learn that he first
+occupied the house in the Close at the south side of St Anne's Gate. He
+afterwards removed to that in St Anne's Street next to the Friary; and
+finally established himself in the Mansion at the foot of Milford Hill,
+where he wrote a considerable portion of his _Tom Jones_." [1]
+
+Fielding's residence in Barnes is no less illusive. The following passage
+occurs in the edition of 1795 of _Lyson's Environs of London_: "Henry
+Fielding, the celebrated Novelist, resided at Barnes, in the house which
+is now the property of Mr Partington." [2] In the edition of 1811 the
+house is described as "now the property of Mrs Stanton, widow of the late
+Admiral Stanton." [3] In Manning and Bray's _Surrey_ the name of the house
+is given: "On Barnes Green is a very old house called Milbourne House....
+It was once the residence of Henry Fielding the celebrated novel writer.
+The widow of Admiral Stanton is the present owner of this house." [4] The
+Barnes Rate-books appear to throw no light on the date of Fielding's
+residence at Milbourne House. It is noteworthy that both the Barnes and
+Salisbury statements indicate a man of some means, living as befitted a
+Fielding.
+
+[1] _History of Wiltshire_. Sir R. C. Hoare; volume entitled "Old and New
+Sarum or Salisbury," by R. Benson and H. Hatcher, 1843. p 602.
+
+[2] Lysons. _Environs of London_, edition of 1795. Vol. i. part iii. p.
+544.
+
+[3] _Ibid_. Edition 1811. Vol. i. p. 10.
+
+[4] Manning and Bray. _History of Surrey_, 1814, vol. iii. p. 316.
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX I
+
+_An undated letter of Fieldings to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu_
+
+The following undated letter is printed in _The Letters and Works of
+Lady Mary Wortley Montagu_ edited by Lord Wharncliffe and W. M.
+Thomas. Lord Wharncliffe includes it with the letters from originals
+among the Wortley papers. [1]
+
+
+Wednesday evening
+
+Madam,--I have presumed to send your ladyship a copy of the play which
+you did me the honour of reading three acts of last spring, and hope it
+may meet as light a censure from your ladyship's judgment as then; for
+while your goodness permits me (what I esteem the greatest, and indeed
+only happiness of my life) to offer my unworthy performances to your
+perusal, it will be entirely from your sentence that they will be
+regarded, or disesteemed by me. I shall do myself the honour of calling
+at your ladyship's door to-morrow at eleven, which, if it be an improper
+hour, I beg to know from your servant what other time will be more
+convenient. I am with the greatest respect and gratitude, madam,
+
+Your ladyship's most obedient, most devoted humble servant.
+
+[1] Letters and Works of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, edited by Lord
+Wharncliffe and W. M. Thomas. Vol. ii. p. 3, note I, and p. 22.
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX J
+
+FIELDING'S _Tom Thumb_
+
+This play appears to have carried some political significance in
+Fielding's day; if it was not, indeed, written with a political intention.
+This may be gathered from an article in the _Daily Post_ of March 29,
+1742, apropos of a performance of the _Tragedy of Tragedies_, that night,
+at Drury Lane. The article attributes, in detail, political intentions to
+the _Tragedy_--"a Piece at first calculated to ridicule some particular
+Persons and Affairs in Europe (at the Time it was writ) but more
+especially in this Island."
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Henry Fielding: A Memoir, by G. M. Godden
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Henry Fielding: A Memoir, by G. M. Godden
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+Title: Henry Fielding: A Memoir
+
+Author: G. M. Godden
+
+Release Date: May, 2005 [EBook #8136]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on June 17, 2003]
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-Latin-1
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HENRY FIELDING: A MEMOIR ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Charles Aldarondo, Tiffany Vergon, Robert Connal
+and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
+
+
+
+
+HENRY FIELDING
+
+_A MEMOIR_
+INCLUDING NEWLY DISCOVERED LETTERS
+AND RECORDS WITH ILLUSTRATIONS
+FROM CONTEMPORARY PRINTS
+
+BY
+
+G. M. GODDEN
+
+
+
+
+"I am a man myself, and my heart is interested in whatever can befall the
+rest of mankind."
+
+JOSEPH ANDREWS.
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+New material alone could justify any attempt to supplement the _Fielding_
+of Mr Austin Dobson. Such material has now come to light, and together
+with reliable facts collected by previous biographers, forms the subject
+matter of the present volume. As these pages are concerned with Fielding
+the man, and not only with Fielding the most original if not the greatest
+of English novelists, literary criticism has been avoided; but all
+incidents, disclosed by hitherto unpublished documents, or found hidden in
+the columns of contemporary newspapers, which add to our knowledge of
+Fielding's personality, have been given.
+
+The new material includes records of Fielding's childhood; documents
+concerning his estate in Dorsetshire; the date and place, hitherto
+undiscovered, of that central event in his life, the death of his beloved
+wife, whose memorial was to be the imperishable figure of "Sophia
+Western"; letters, now first published, adding to our knowledge of his
+energies in social and legislative reform, and of the circumstances of his
+life; many extracts from the columns of the daily press of the period;
+notices, hitherto overlooked, from his contemporaries; and details from
+the unexplored archives of the Middlesex Records concerning his strenuous
+work as a London magistrate. The few letters by Fielding already known to
+exist have been doubled in number; and a reason for the extraordinary
+rarity of these letters has been found in the unfortunate destruction,
+many years ago, of much of his correspondence. The charm of the one
+intimate letter that we possess from the pen of the 'Father of the English
+Novel,' that written to his brother John, during the voyage to Lisbon,
+enhances regret at the loss of these letters.
+
+Among the contemporary prints now first reproduced that entitled the
+_Conjurors_ is of special interest, as being the only sketch of Fielding,
+drawn during his lifetime, known to exist. Rough as it is, the
+characteristic figure of the man, as described by his contemporaries and
+drawn from memory in Hogarth's familiar plate, is perfectly apparent. The
+same characteristics may be distinguished in a small figure of the
+novelist introduced into the still earlier political cartoon, entitled the
+_Funeral of Faction_.
+
+Such in brief are the reasons for the existence of this volume. It remains
+to express my warmest acknowledgment of Mr Austin Dobson's unfailing
+counsel and assistance. My thanks are also due to Mr Ernest Fielding for
+permission to reproduce the miniature which appears as the frontispiece;
+to Mr Aubrey Court, of the House of Lords; to Mr E. S. W. Hart, for his
+help throughout the necessary researches among the Middlesex Records; to
+Mrs Deane of Gillingham; and to Mr Frederick Shum of Bath. And I am
+indebted to Mr Sidney Colvin, Keeper of the Department of Prints and
+Drawings in the British Museum, in regard to almost every one of the
+thirty-two rare prints and cartoons now reproduced.
+
+G. M. GODDEN.
+
+_October_ 26, 1909.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+YOUTH
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+PLAY-HOUSE BARD
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+MARRIAGE
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+POLITICAL PLAYS
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+HOMESPUN DRAMA
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+BAR STUDENT--JOURNALIST
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+COUNSELLOR FIELDING
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+_Joseph Andrews_
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+THE _Miscellanies_ AND _Jonathan Wild_
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+PATRIOTIC JOURNALISM
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+_Tom Jones_
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+MR JUSTICE FIELDING
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+FIELDING AND LEGISLATION
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+_Amelia_
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+JOURNALIST AND MAGISTRATE
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+POOR LAW REFORM
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+VOYAGE TO LISBON--DEATH
+
+
+
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
+_From photographs by Marie Léon_.
+
+Henry Fielding
+_From a miniature now in the possession of Mr Ernest Fielding._
+
+Sharpham House, showing the room in which Fielding was born
+_from a print published in 1826_.
+
+Sir Henry Gould
+_From a mezzotint by J. Hardy_.
+
+Eton--1742
+_From an engraving of a drawing by Cozens_.
+
+Anne Oldfield
+_From a mezzotint of a painting by J. Richardson_.
+
+Leyden--1727
+_From an engraving of a drawing by C. Pronk_.
+
+Kitty Clive as Philida
+_From a mezzotint of a painting by Veter van Bleeck, junr. 1735._
+
+Frontispiece to Fielding's "Tom Thumb"
+_By Hogarth_.
+
+The Close, Salisbury--1798
+_From an acquatint of a drawing by E. Dayes_.
+
+Charlcombe Church, near Bath
+_From an engraving of a drawing made in 1784_.
+
+Fielding's house, East Stour, Dorsetshire
+_From a print published in Hutchins' "History of Dorsetshire," 1813_.
+
+Sir Robert Walpole--1740
+_From a contemporary cartoon_.
+
+"Pasquin"
+_From a cartoon depicting a scene in "Pasquin" in which Harlequinades,
+etc., triumph aver legitimate drama. Pope is leaving a box. The Signature
+"W. Hogarth" is doubtful_.
+
+Cartoon celebrating the success of "Pasquin"
+_From a contemporary cartoon showing Fielding, supported by
+Shakespeare, receiving an ample reward, while to Harlequin and his other
+opponents is accorded a halter_.
+
+The Little Theatre in the Haymarket
+_From an engraving by Dale, showing the demolition of the Little
+Theatre in 1821_.
+
+The Green Room, Drury Lane
+_From the painting by Hogarth, in the possession of Sir Edward
+Tennant_.
+
+The Temple--1738
+_From an engraving of a drawing by J. Nicholas_.
+
+Henry Fielding holding the Banner of the "Champion" newspaper
+_From a contemporary cartoon showing Sir Robert Walpole laughing at the
+"Funeral" of an Opposition Motion in Parliament_.
+
+Cartoon showing Fielding, in Wig and Gown, as a supporter of the
+Opposition
+_From a print of 1741_.
+
+Henry Fielding reading at the Bedford Arms
+_From the frontispiece to Sir John Fielding's "Jests."_
+
+Assignment for "Joseph Andrews"
+_From the autograph now in the South Kensington Museum_.
+
+Beaufort Buildings, Strand, in 1725
+_From a watercolour drawing by Paul Sandby, 1725_.
+
+Prior Park, near Bath, the seat of Ralph Allen, 1750
+_From an engraving of a contemporary drawing_.
+
+George, First Baron Lyttelton
+_From a portrait by an unknown artist_.
+
+Theatre Ticket for Fielding's "Mock Doctor"
+_The signature "W. Hogarth" is doubtful_.
+
+Lady Mary Wortley Montagu--1710
+_From an engraving by Caroline Watson, from a miniature in the
+possession of the Marquis of Bute_.
+
+The Bow Street Police Court, Sir John Fielding presiding
+_From the "Newgate Calendar"_, 1795.
+
+Edward Moore
+_From a frontispiece in Chalmers' "British Essayists"_ 1817.
+
+Sir John Fielding
+_From a mezzotint of a painting by Nathaniel Hone, R.A._
+
+Ralph Allen
+_From a chalk drawing by W. Hoare, R.A._
+
+Henry Fielding
+_From an engraving of a pen and ink sketch, made by Hogarth after
+Fielding's death_.
+
+Henry Fielding, defending Betty Canning from her accusers, the Lord
+Mayor, Dr Hill, and the Gipsy
+_From a contemporary print, now first reproduced, and the only known
+sketch of Fielding made during his lifetime_.
+
+Justice Saunders Welch
+_From an engraving of a sketch by Hogarth_.
+
+Ryde--1795
+_From an engraving of a drawing by Charles Tomkins_.
+
+Lisbon--1793
+_From a mezzotint of a drawing by Noel_.
+
+The design on the cover is a copy, slightly enlarged, of an impression of
+Fielding's seal, attached to an autograph letter in the British Museum.
+
+
+
+
+HENRY FIELDING
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+YOUTH
+
+    "I shall always be so great a pedant as to call a man of no
+    learning a man of no education."--_Amelia_.
+
+
+Henry Fielding was born at Sharpham Park, near Glastonbury, on the 22nd
+of April 1707. His birth-room, a room known as the Harlequin Chamber,
+looked out over the roof of a building which once was the private chapel
+of the abbots of Glastonbury; for Sharpham Park possessed no mean
+history. Built in the sixteenth century by that distinguished prelate,
+scholar, and courtier Abbot Richard Beere, the house had boasted its
+chapel, hall, parlour, chambers, storehouses and offices; its fishponds
+and orchards; and a park in which might be kept some four hundred head of
+deer. It was in this fair demesne that the aged, pious, and benevolent
+Abbot Whiting, Abbot Richard's successor, was seized by the king's
+commissioners, and summarily hung, drawn, and quartered on the top of the
+neighbouring Tor Hill. Sharpham thereupon "devolved" upon the crown; but
+the old house remained, standing in peaceful seclusion where the pleasant
+slope of Polden Hill overlooks the Somersetshire moors, till the birth of
+the 'father of the English Novel' brought a lasting distinction to the
+domestic buildings of Abbot Beere. In the accompanying print, published
+in 1826, the little window of the Harlequin Chamber may be seen, above
+the low roofs of the abbots' chapel.
+
+That Henry Fielding should have been born among buildings raised by
+Benedictine hands is not incongruous; for no man ever more heartily
+preached and practised the virtue of open-handed charity; none was more
+ready to scourge the vices of arrogance, cruelty and avarice; no English
+novelist has left us brighter pictures of innocence and goodness. And it
+was surely a happy stroke of that capricious Fortune to whom Fielding so
+often refers, to allot a Harlequin Chamber for the birth of the author of
+nineteen comedies; and yet more appropriate to the robust genius of the
+Comic Epic was the accident that placed on the wall, beneath the window
+of his birth-room, a jovial jest in stone. For here some
+sixteenth-century humorist had displayed the arms of Abbot Beere in the
+form of a convivial rebus or riddle--to wit, a cross and two beer flagons.
+
+Soon after the Civil Wars, Sharpham passed into the hands of the
+'respectable family' of Gould. By the Goulds the house was considerably
+enlarged; and, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, was in the
+possession of a distinguished member of the family, Sir Henry Gould,
+Knight, and Judge of the King's Bench. Sir Henry had but two children, a
+son Davidge Gould, and a daughter Sarah. This only daughter married a
+well-born young soldier, the Hon. Edmund Fielding; a marriage which,
+according to family assertions, was without the consent of her parents and
+"contrary to their good likeing." [1] And it was in the old home of the
+Somersetshire Goulds that the eldest son of this marriage, Henry Fielding,
+was born.
+
+Thus on the side of his mother, Sarah Gould, Fielding belonged to just
+that class of well-established country squires whom later he was to
+immortalise in the beautiful and benevolent figure of Squire Allworthy,
+and in the boisterous, brutal, honest Western. And the description of
+Squire Allworthy's "venerable" house, with its air of grandeur "that
+struck you with awe," its position on the sheltered slope of a hill
+enjoying "a most charming prospect of the valley beneath," its
+surroundings of a wild and beautiful park, well-watered meadows fed with
+sheep, the ivy-grown ruins of an old abbey, and far-off hills and sea,
+preserves, doubtless, the features of the ancient and stately domain
+owned by the novelist's grandfather.
+
+If it was to the 'respectable' Goulds that Fielding owed many of his
+rural and administrative characteristics, such as that practical zeal and
+ability which made him so excellent a magistrate, it is in the family of
+his father that we find indications of those especial qualities of
+vigour, of courage, of the generous and tolerant outlook of the well-born
+man of the world, that characterise Henry Fielding. And it is also in
+these Fielding ancestors that something of the reputed wildness of their
+brilliant kinsman may be detected.
+
+For in her wilful choice of Edmund Fielding for a husband, Sir Henry
+Gould's only daughter brought, assuredly, a disturbing element into the
+quiet Somersetshire home. The young man was of distinguished birth, even
+if he was not, as once asserted, of the blood royal of the Hapsburgs.
+[2] His ancestor, Sir John Fielding, had received a knighthood for bravery
+in the French wars of the fourteenth century. A Sir Everard Fielding led a
+Lancastrian army during the Wars of the Roses. Sir William, created Earl
+of Denbigh, fell fighting for the king in the Civil Wars, where, says
+Clarendon, "he engaged with singular courage in all enterprises of
+danger"; a phrase which recalls the description of Henry Fielding "that
+difficulties only roused him to struggle through them with a peculiar
+spirit and magnanimity." Lord Denbigh fell, covered with wounds, when
+fighting as a volunteer in Prince Rupert's troop; while his eldest son,
+Basil, then a mere youth, fought as hotly for the Parliament. Lord
+Denbigh's second son, who like his father was a devoted loyalist, received
+a peerage, being created Earl of Desmond; and two of his sons figure in a
+wild and tragic story preserved by Pepys. "In our street," says the
+Diarist, writing in 1667, "at the Three Tuns Tavern I find a great hubbub;
+and what was it but two brothers had fallen out and one killed the other.
+And who s'd. they be but the two Fieldings; one whereof, Bazill, was page
+to my Lady Sandwich; and he hath killed the other, himself being very
+drunk, and so is sent to Newgate." It was a brother of these unhappy
+youths, John Fielding, a royal chaplain and Canon of Salisbury, who by his
+marriage with a Somersetshire lady, became father of Edmund Fielding.
+
+Such was Henry Fielding's ancestry, and it cannot be too much insisted on
+that, throughout all the vicissitudes of his life, he was ever a man of
+breeding, no less than a man of wit. "His manners were so gentlemanly,"
+said his friend Mrs Hussey, "that even with the lower classes with which
+he frequently condescended to chat, such as Sir Roger de Coverley's old
+friends, the Vauxhall watermen, they seldom outstepped the limits of
+propriety." And a similar recognition comes from the hand of a great, and
+not too friendly, critic. To "the very last days of his life," wrote
+Thackeray, "he retained a grandeur of air, and although worn down by
+disease his aspect and presence imposed respect on the people around him."
+
+This Denbigh ancestry recalls a pleasant example of Fielding's wit,
+preserved in a story told by his son, and recorded in the pages of that
+voluminous eighteenth-century anecdotist, John Nichols. "Henry Fielding,"
+says Nichols, "being once in company with the Earl of Denbigh, and the
+conversation's turning on Fielding's being of the Denbigh family, the
+Earl asked the reason why they spelt their names differently; the Earl's
+family doing it with the E first (Feilding), and Mr Henry Fielding with
+the I first (Fielding). 'I cannot tell, my Lord,' answered Harry, 'except
+it be that my branch of the family were the first that knew how to
+spell.'"
+
+In accordance with the fighting traditions of his race, Edmund Fielding
+went into the army; his name appearing as an ensign in the 1st Foot
+Guards. Also, as became a Fielding, he distinguished himself, we are
+told, in the "Wars against France with much Bravery and Reputation"; and
+it was probably owing to active service abroad that the birth of his
+eldest son took place in his wife's old Somersetshire home. The date fits
+in well enough with the campaigns of Ramilies, Oudennarde and Malplaquet.
+Soon after Henry's birth, however, his father had doubtless left the Low
+Countries, for, about 1709, he appears as purchasing the colonelcy of an
+Irish Regiment. This regiment was ordered, in 1710, to Spain; but before
+that year the colonel and his wife and son had a separate home provided
+for them, by the care of Sir Henry Gould. At what precise date is
+uncertain, but some time before 1710, Sir Henry had purchased an estate
+at East Stour in Dorsetshire, consisting of farms and lands of the value
+of £4750, intending to settle some or the whole of the same on his
+daughter and her children. And already, according to a statement by the
+colonel, the old judge had placed his son-in-law in possession of some or
+all of this purchase, sending him oxen to plough his ground, and
+promising him a "Dairye of Cows." Sir Henry moreover had, said his
+son-in-law, declared his intention "to spend the vacant Remainder of his
+life," sometimes with his daughter, her husband, and children at Stour,
+and sometimes with his son Davidge, presumably at Sharpham. But in March,
+1710, Sir Henry's death frustrated his planned retirement in the Vale of
+Stour; although three years later, in 1713, his intentions regarding a
+Dorsetshire home for his daughter were carried out by the conveyance to
+her [3] and her children of the Stour estate, for her sole enjoyment. The
+legal documents are careful to recite that the rents and profits should be
+paid to Mrs Fielding or her children, and her receipt given, and that the
+said Edmund "should have nothing to do nor intermeddle therewith."
+
+In this settlement of the East Stour farms, to the greater part of which
+Henry Fielding, then six years old, would be joint heir with his sisters,
+Colonel Fielding himself seems to have had to pay no less than £1750,
+receiving therefor "a portion of the said lands." So by 1713 both Edmund
+Fielding and his wife were settled, as no inconsiderable landowners,
+among the pleasant meadows of Stour; and there for the next five years
+Henry's early childhood was passed. Indeed, Mrs Fielding must have been
+at Stour when her eldest son was but three years old, for the baptism of
+a daughter, Sarah, appears in the Stour registers in November 1710. This
+entry is followed by the baptism of Anne in 1713, of Beatrice in 1714, of
+Edmund in 1716, and by the death of Anne in the last-named year, Henry
+being then nine years old.
+
+According to Arthur Murphy, Fielding's earliest and too often inaccurate
+biographer, the boy received "the first rudiments of his education at
+home, under the care of the Revd. Mr Oliver." Mr Oliver was the curate of
+Motcombe, a neighbouring village; and we have the authority of Murphy and
+of Hutchins, the historian of Dorset, for finding 'a very humorous and
+striking portrait' of this pedagogue in the Rev. Mr Trulliber, the
+pig-breeding parson of _Joseph Andrews_. If this be so, Harry Fielding's
+first tutor at Stour was of a figure eminently calculated to foster the
+comic genius of his pupil. "He" (Trulliber), wrote that pupil, some thirty
+years later, "was indeed one of the largest Men you should see, and could
+have acted the part of Sir _John Falstaff_ without stuffing. Add to this,
+that the Rotundity of his Belly was considerably increased by the
+shortness of his Stature, his shadow ascending very near as far in height
+when he lay on his Back, as when he stood on his Legs. His Voice was loud
+and hoarse, and his Accents extremely broad; to complete the whole he had
+a Stateliness in his Gait when he walked, not unlike that of a Goose, only
+he stalked slower." It appears that the widow of the Motcombe curate
+denied the alleged portrait; but the house where Mr Oliver lived, "seemed
+to accord with Fielding's description ... and an old woman who remembered
+him observed that 'he dearly loved a bit of good victuals, and a drop of
+drink.'" Bearing in mind the great novelist's own earnest declaration that
+he painted "not men but manners," we may fairly assume that his
+Dorsetshire tutor belonged to that class of coarse farmer-parson so justly
+satirised in the person of Trulliber. According to another sketch of
+Fielding's life, his early education was also directed by the rector of
+Stour Provost, "his Parson Adams." [4]
+
+While Harry Fielding was thus learning his first rudiments, his father,
+the colonel, seems to have been engaged in less useful pursuits in
+London. The nature of these pursuits appears from a _Bill of Complaint_,
+which by a happy chance has been preserved, between "Edmund Fielding of
+East Stour, Dorsetshire," and one Robert Midford, pretending to be a
+captain of the army. In this _Bill_ [5] the said Edmund declares that in
+1716, being then resident in London, he often frequented Princes
+Coffee-house in the Parish of St James. At Princes he found his company
+sought by the reputed Captain Robert Midford, who "prevailed upon him to
+play a game called 'Faro' for a small matter of diversion, but by degrees
+drew him on to play for larger sums, and by secret and fraudulent means
+obtained very large sums, in particular notes and bonds for £500."
+Further, the colonel entered into a bond of £200 to one Mrs Barbara
+Midford, "sister or pretended sister of the said Robert"; and so finally
+was threatened with outlawry by 'Captain' Midford for, presumably, payment
+of these debts. How Colonel Edmund finally escaped from the clutches of
+these rogues does not appear; but it is clear enough that his Dorsetshire
+meadows were a safer place than Princes Coffee-house for a gentleman who
+could lose £500 at faro to a masquerading army captain. Also Sir Henry
+Gould's wisdom becomes apparent, in bequeathing his daughter an
+inheritance with which her husband was to have "nothing to doe."
+
+In 1718, two years after Colonel Fielding's experience at Princes, Mrs
+Fielding died, leaving six young children to her husband's care, two sons
+and four daughters, Henry, the eldest being but eleven years old. Her
+death is recorded in the East Stour registers as follows:--"Sarah, Wife
+of the Hon. Edmund Fielding Esqre. and daughter of Sir Henry Gould Kt.
+April 18 1718."
+
+About this time (the dates vary between 1716 and 1719) Edmund Fielding
+was appointed Colonel of the Invalids, an appointment which he appears to
+have held until his death. And within two years of the death of his first
+wife, Colonel Fielding must have married again, for in 1720 we find him
+and his then wife, _Anne_, selling some 153 acres with messuages,
+barns and gardens, in East and West Stour, to one Awnsham Churchill,
+Esquire. What relation, if any, this land had to the property of the
+colonel's late wife and her children does not appear.
+
+Some time in 1719, the year after his mother's death, or early in 1720,
+Henry was sent to Eton, as appears from his father's statement, made in
+February 1721, that his eldest son "who is now upwards of thirteen yeares
+old is and for more than a yeare last past hath been maintained ... at
+Eaton schoole, the yearely expence whereof costs ... upwards of £60." And
+the boy must have been well away from the atmosphere of his home, in
+these first years after his mother's death, if the allegations of his
+grandmother, old Lady Gould, may be believed.
+
+These hitherto unknown records of Henry Fielding's boyhood are to be
+found in the proceedings of a Chancery suit begun by Lady Gould, on
+behalf of her six grandchildren, Henry, Edmund, [6] Katherine, Ursula,
+Sarah and Beatrice, three years after the death of their mother--namely,
+on the 10th of February 1721, and instituted in the name of Henry Fielding
+as complainant. Lady Gould opens her grandchildren's case with a
+comprehensive indictment of her son-in-law. After reciting that her
+daughter Sarah had married Edmund Fielding "without the consent of her
+Father or Mother and contrary to their good likeing," Lady Gould mentions
+her husband's bequest to their daughter, Sarah Fielding, of £3000 in trust
+to be laid out in the purchase of lands for the benefit of her and her
+children "with direction that the said Edmund Fielding should have nothing
+to do nor intermeddle therewith." And how Sir Henry did in his lifetime
+purchase "Eastover" estate for his daughter, but died before the trust was
+completed; and that in 1713 his trustees, Edmund Fielding consenting,
+settled the said estate upon trust for Sarah Fielding and her children
+after her, the rents and profits to be paid for her, and acknowledged by
+her receipt "without her Husband." And that if Sarah Fielding died
+intestate the estate be divided among her children. The bill then shows
+that Sarah Fielding did die intestate; and that then Henry and his sisters
+and brother "being all Infants of tender years and uncapable of managing
+their own affairs and to take Care thereof, well hoped that ... their
+Trustees would have taken Care to receive the Rents of the said premises,"
+and have applied the same for their maintenance and education. One of
+these trustees, we may note, was Henry Fielding's uncle, Davidge Gould.
+This reasonable hope of the six "Infants" was however, according to their
+grandmother, wholly disappointed. For their uncle Davidge and his
+co-trustee, one William Day, allowed Edmund Fielding to receive the rents,
+nay "entered into a Combination and Confederacy to and with the said
+Edmund Fielding," refusing to intermeddle with the said trust, whereby the
+children were in great danger of losing their means of maintenance and
+education. And this was by no means all. Lady Gould proceeds to point out
+that her son-in-law had, since his wife's death, "intermarried with
+one ... Rapha ... Widow an Italian a Person of the Roman Catholick
+Profession who has severall children of her own and one who kept an eating
+House in London, and not at all fitt to have the care of [the
+complainants'] Education and has now two daughters in a Monastery beyond
+Sea." It is not difficult to conceive the attitude of Lady Gould of
+Sharpham Park to an Italian widow who kept an eating-house; but worse yet,
+in the view of those 'No Popery' days, was to follow. "Not only so," says
+her ladyship, "the said Edmund Fielding ... threatens to take your
+[complainants] from school into his own custody altho' [their] said
+Grandmother has taken a House in the City of New Sarum with an intent to
+have [her granddaughters] under her Inspection and where ... Katherine,
+Ursula and Sarah are now at school"; and "the said Mr Fielding doth give
+out in speeches that he will do with [the complainants] what he thinks
+fitt, and has openly commended the Manner of Education of young persons in
+Monasteryes."
+
+This comprehensive indictment against Colonel Fielding received a prompt
+counter, the "Severall Answere of Edmund Fielding Esqre ... to the Bill
+of Complaint of Henry Fielding, Katherine Fielding, Ursula Fielding,
+Sarah Fielding, and Beatrice Fielding, Infants, by Dame Sarah Gould,
+their Grandmother and next Friend," being dated February 23 1721, but
+thirteen days after Lady Gould had opened her attack. Out of "a dutiful
+Regard to the said Lady Gould his Mother-in-Law," Colonel Fielding
+declares himself unwilling to "Controvert anything with her further than
+of necessity." But he submits that, in the matter of his marriage, he was
+"afterwards well approved of and received" by Sir Henry Gould and his
+family; that he was also so happy as to be in favour with Lady Gould
+"till he marryed with his now wife"; which he believes "has Occasioned
+some Jealosye and Displeasure in the Lady Gould, tho' without Just
+Grounds." Edmund Fielding then draws a pastoral picture of himself in
+occupation of the East Stour estate, placed there by his father-in-law;
+of his oxen and dairy; and of the judge's intention of spending half the
+remainder of his days with his son-in-law on this Dorsetshire farm. He
+admits his share in the trust settlement after Sir Henry's death; and
+points out that his brother-in-law, Davidge Gould, made him pay heavily
+on a portion of the estate. And he believes that, as his wife died
+intestate, all his children are "Intituled to the said Estate in Equall
+proportions."
+
+Then follows the colonel's main defence. His eldest son Henry not being
+yet fourteen years of age, he has, ever since the death of his wife,
+continued in possession of the premises, taking the rents and profits
+thereof, which amount to about £150; and he positively declares that he
+has expended more annually on the maintenance and education of the said
+complainants, ever since the death of their mother, than the clear income
+of the said estate amounts to, and that he shall continue to take "a
+Tender and affectionate care of all his said Children." Further, he
+professes himself a "protestant of the Communion of the Church of
+England," and asserts that he shall and will breed his said children
+Protestants of that communion. He protests that his second wife is not an
+Italian; nor did she keep an eating-house. He suggests that Lady Gould
+took her house at Salisbury "as well with an Intent to convenience
+herselfe by liveing in a Towne" as for the inspection of his children. He
+"denyeth that he ever Comended the Manner of Education of young persons
+in monasterys if it be meant in Respect of Religion." Finally, he says
+that he has spent much money on improving the estate; that the income
+from the estate is hardly sufficient to maintain his children according
+to their station in the world since he is "nearly related to many Noble
+Familys"; and he "veryly believes in his conscience he can better provide
+for his said Children by reason of his relation to and Interest in the
+said noble Familys than their said Grandmother (who is now in an advanced
+age, being seventy yeares old or thereabouts)."
+
+Here, it is plain, was a very pretty family quarrel. No man likes his
+mother-in-law to say that he has married the keeper of an Italian
+eating-house, especially if the fact is correct; or that he is perverting
+his young children's trust money. Neither was Lady Gould likely to be
+pacified by her son-in-law's remark that she was now "in an advanced
+age"; while his suggestion that his "noble" family would be of far more
+advantage to his children than that of the respectable Goulds would have
+the added sting of undeniable truth.
+
+The next extant move in the fray bears date five months later, July 18
+1721, and includes a petition by 'Dame Sarah Gould' that the children be
+not removed from the places where they then were until the case be heard;
+and Lady Gould adds that if the children's persons or estates be "under
+ye management or power of ye said Mr Fielding and his now wife ye Estate
+would not be managed to ye best advantage and their Education would not
+be taken care of and there would be a great hazard that ye children might
+be perverted to ye Romish Religion." Then follows an order in Chancery,
+under the same date, "that ye eldest son of ye Defend't. Fielding ... be
+continued at Eaton School where he now is and that ye rest of ye children
+be continued where they now are."
+
+The next document merely records the inclusion of Henry's five-year-old
+brother Edmund among the plaintiffs. And this is followed by a brief
+Chancery order of November 30 1721, that "ye, plaintiff Henry Fielding
+who is not [_sic_] at Eaton Schoole be at liberty to go to ye said Dame
+Sarah Gould, his Grandmother and next friend during ye usual time of
+recess from School at Xmas."
+
+After these Christmas holidays spent by Henry Fielding with Lady Gould,
+doubtless at her house in Salisbury, the Chancery records pass on to the
+April following, 1722, when the boy's uncle and trustee Davidge Gould
+makes a statement "sworn at Sharpham Park," which concludes that the
+witness hears and believes that Edmund Fielding "has already three
+children by his present wife who is reputed to be of the Romish church."
+In this same month comes another order from the court that Henry be at
+liberty to leave Eton for the Whitsun holidays 1722, and to go to Lady
+Gould's house. In May Edmund Fielding appears as "of the Parish of Saint
+James, in the County of Middlesex," and also as his children's "next
+Friend and Guardian." But two days later the long suit is concluded by
+the decision of the court, and here Colonel Fielding is, as heretofore,
+defendant, Lady Gould being the children's "next friend."
+
+The case came before the Lord Chancellor on the 28th of May 1722, and was
+"debated in the presence of learned Counsels." The trust was upheld, and
+Edmund Fielding was required to deliver possession of the estate,
+rendering account of the rents and profits thereof since the death of his
+first wife; but he was to have "any and what" allowance for improvements,
+and for the children's maintenance and education. And it was further
+ordered that the children then at school continue at such schools till
+further order, and that "upon any breaking up at ye usuall times they do
+go and reside with ye Lady Gould their Grandmother that they may not be
+under the influence of ye Defendant Fielding's Wife, who appeared to be a
+papist." [7]
+
+So Lady Gould, for all her seventy years, won her case at every point.
+And Colonel Edmund Fielding did not only lose the guardianship of his six
+children, and the administration of their estate. For there was, we
+learn, in court, during the hearing, one Mrs Cottington, the plaintiffs
+aunt, "alleadging that there was a debt of £700 due from ye Defendant
+Fielding to her"; which debt she offered should be applied for the
+benefit of her nephews and nieces. Whereupon the court ordered that if
+Mrs Cottington proved the same, a Master in Chancery should purchase
+therewith lands to be settled for the "Infants" in like manner as the
+trust estate.
+
+It may be only a coincidence, but £700 is the sum specifically mentioned
+in the proceedings brought by Colonel Fielding in October 1722, five
+months after the loss of his Chancery suit, against the cardsharper,
+Robert Midford, who was then apparently threatening him with outlawry for
+the recovery of the gambling debt begun, as we have seen, at Princes'
+Coffee-house six years before. Had the colonel borrowed the £700 from Mrs
+Cottington, with intent to discharge those debts; and, on being brought
+to law by her (on her nephews' and nieces' behalf) for that debt, did it
+occur to him to escape from the clutches of the psuedo "Captain" Midford
+by pleading, as he now does in this Bill of 1722, that he "was tricked,"
+and also "that gaming is illegal"? The latter plea has something of
+unconscious humour in the mouth of a gentleman who had lately lost £500
+at faro. With this last echo of the coffee-house of St James's, and of
+the colonel's financial difficulties, that brave soldier, if somewhat
+reckless gambler, the Hon. Edmund Fielding vanishes from sight, as far as
+the life of his eldest son is concerned.
+
+At the triumphant conclusion of his grandmother's suit Henry Fielding
+would be just fifteen years of age, and it is impossible not to wonder
+what side he took in these spirited family conflicts. No evidence,
+however, on such points appears in the dry legal documents; and all that
+we have for guide as to the effect in this impressionable time of his
+boyhood of the long months of contest, and of his strictly ordered
+holidays with his grandmother, is the declaration on the one hand that
+"filial piety ... his nearest relations agree was a shining part of his
+character," and on the other, the undeniably strong Protestant bias that
+appears in his writing. Of his aunt, Mrs Cottington, we get one later
+glimpse, when in 1723 she is made his trustee, in place of his uncle,
+Davidge Gould, Mrs Cottington being then resident in Salisbury. At the
+end of the following year, however, in December 1724, Davidge Gould
+resumes his trusteeship, and with the record of that fact the disclosures
+yielded by these ancient parchments as to Henry Fielding's stormy boyhood
+come to an end.
+
+From these records it becomes possible to gain some idea of the
+surroundings of the great novelist's early youth. Before his mother's
+death, indeed, when he was a boy of eleven, we already knew him as
+suffering the rough jurisdiction of his Trulliberian tutor, Parson Oliver
+of Motcombe village, and perhaps as under the wise and kindly guidance of
+the good scholar-parson, who was later to win the affection and respect
+of thousands of readers under the name of "Parson Adams." But now, for
+the first time, we learn of the disastrous second marriage by which
+Colonel Fielding, within two years of his first wife's death, placed a
+lady of at least disputable social standing at the head of his household,
+and one, moreover, whose Faith roused the bitter religious animosities of
+that day. What wonder that the old Lady Gould strove fiercely to remove
+Henry Fielding, and his sisters and young brother, from East Stour, when
+a Madame Rasa was installed in her daughter's place. And accordingly, as
+we have seen, even before the conclusion of the suit, Henry was
+provisionally ordered by the Court of Chancery to spend his holidays with
+his grandmother. Fielding would then be fourteen years old; and the
+judge's decision six months later that future holidays should be passed
+with Lady Gould, away from the influence of the second Mrs Fielding,
+doubtless severed the lad's connection with his dubious stepmother for
+the next six years. His home life, then, during the latter part of his
+Eton schooling would be under Lady Gould's care; and was probably spent
+at Salisbury.
+
+Of his Eton life, from his entrance at the school, when twelve years old,
+we know practically nothing. From the absence of his name on the college
+lists, it may be inferred that he was an Oppidan. It is said that he gave
+"distinguished proofs of strong and peculiar parts"; and that he left the
+school with a good reputation as a classical scholar. And it is not
+surprising to learn that here, as he himself tells us, his vigorous
+energies made acquaintance with that 'birchen altar' at which most of the
+best blood in England has been disciplined. "And thou," he cries, "O
+Learning (for without thy Assistance nothing pure, nothing correct, can
+Genius produce) do thou guide my Pen. Thee, in thy favourite Fields,
+where the limpid gently rolling _Thames_ washes thy _Etonian_ banks, in
+early Youth I have worshipped. To thee at thy birchen Altar, with true
+_Spartan_ Devotion, I have sacrificed my Blood." [8] That the sacrifice
+was not made in vain appears from the reputation with which Fielding left
+Eton of being "uncommonly versed in the Greek authors and an early master
+of the Latin classics"; and also from the yet better evidence of his own
+pages. Long after these boyish days we find him, in the words of "The man
+of the Hill," thus eloquently acknowledging the debt of humanity, and
+doubtless his own, to those inestimable treasures bequeathed to the world
+by ancient Greece: "These Authors, though they instructed me in no Science
+by which Men may promise to themselves to acquire the least Riches, or
+worldly Power, taught me, however, the Art of despising the highest
+Acquisitions of both. They elevate the Mind, and steel and harden it
+against the capricious Invasions of Fortune. They not only instruct in the
+Knowledge of Wisdom, but confirm Men in her Habits, and demonstrate
+plainly, that this must be our Guide, if we propose ever to arrive at the
+greatest worldly Happiness; or to defend ourselves, with any tolerable
+Security, against the Misery which everywhere surrounds and invests us."
+[9] And that this was no mere figure of speech appears from that touching
+picture which Murphy has left us of the brilliant wit, the 'wild' Harry
+Fielding, when under the pressure of sickness and poverty, quietly reading
+the _De Consolations_ of Cicero. His Plato accompanied him on the last sad
+voyage to Lisbon; and his library, when catalogued for sale on behalf of
+his widow and children, contained over one hundred and forty volumes of
+the Greek and Latin classics.
+
+Thus, supreme student and master as he was of "the vast authentic book of
+nature," there is abundant proof that Fielding fulfilled his own axiom
+that a "good share of learning" is necessary to the equipment of a
+novelist. Let the romance writer's natural parts be what they may,
+learning, he declared, "must fit them for use, must direct them in it,
+lastly must contribute part at least of the materials." [10] Looking back
+on such utterances by the 'father of the English Novel,' written at the
+full height of his power, it is but natural to wonder if the boy's eager
+application to Greek and Latin drudgery had in it something of
+half-conscious preparation for the great part he was destined to play in
+the history of English literature.
+
+It is clear that Henry Fielding flung his characteristic energies
+zealously into the acquirement of the classical learning proffered him at
+Eton; but a fine scholarship, great possession though it be, was not the
+only gain of his Eton years. Here, says Murphy in his formal
+eighteenth-century phrasing, young Fielding had "the advantage of being
+early known to many of the first people in the kingdom, namely Lord
+Lyttelton, Mr Fox, Mr Pitt, Sir Charles Hanbury Williams, and the late Mr
+Winnington, etc."
+
+Of these companions at Eton, George Lyttelton, afterwards known as the
+"good Lord Lyttelton," statesman and orator, stands foremost by virtue of
+the generous warmth of a friendship continued throughout the novelist's
+chequered life. To Lyttelton _Tom Jones_ was dedicated; it was his
+generosity, as generously acknowledged, that supplied Fielding, for a
+time, with the very means of subsistence; and to him was due the
+appointment, subsequently discharged with so much zealous labour, of
+Magistrate for Westminster and Middlesex. It is recorded that George
+Lyttelton's school exercises "were recommended as models to his
+schoolfellows." Another Eton friend, Thomas Winnington, made some figure
+in the Whig political world of the day; he was accredited by Horace
+Walpole with having an inexhaustible good humour, and "infinitely more wit
+than any man I ever knew." Of the friendship with Sir Charles Hanbury
+Williams, of which we first hear at Eton, little is known, save the
+curious episode of the recovery, many years after its author's death, of
+Fielding's lost play _The Good-Natured Man>_, which had apparently been
+submitted to Sir Charles, whose celebrity was great as a brilliant
+political lampoonist. Of the acquaintance with Henry Fox, first Baron
+Holland, we hear nothing in later life; but the name of the greatest of
+all these Eton contemporaries, that of the elder Pitt, recurs in after
+years as one of the party at Radway Grange, in Warwickshire, to whom
+Fielding, after dinner, read aloud the manuscript of _Tom Jones_.
+[11] A reference to his fellow-Etonian may be found in one of the
+introductory chapters of that masterpiece, where Fielding, while again
+advocating the claims of learning, takes occasion to pay this sonorous
+tribute to Pitt's oratory: "Nor do I believe that all the imagination,
+fire, and judgment of Pitt, could have produced those orations that have
+made the senate of England in these our times a rival in eloquence to
+Greece and Rome, if he had not been so well read in the writings of
+Demosthenes and Cicero, as to have transferred their whole spirit into his
+speeches and, with their spirit, their knowledge too."
+
+However excellent a knowledge of the classics the youthful scholar took
+away with him from Eton, the rigours of his studies do not appear to have
+diminished that zest for life with which the very name of Henry Fielding
+is invested. For the obscurity of these early years is for a moment
+lifted to disclose the young genius as having already, before he was
+nineteen, fallen desperately in love with a beautiful heiress in
+Dorsetshire; and, moreover, as threatening bodily force to accomplish his
+suit. The story, as indicated in the surviving outlines, might be the
+draft for a chapter of _Tom Jones_. The scene is Lyme Regis. The chief
+actors are Harry Fielding, scarce more than a schoolboy; a beautiful
+heiress, Miss Sarah Andrew; [12] and her uncle, one Mr Andrew Tucker, a
+timorous and crafty member of the local corporation. The handsome Etonian,
+who had been for some time resident in the old town, fell madly in love,
+it seems, with the lady, who is stated to have been his cousin on his
+mother's side. The views of her guardian were, however, opposed to the
+young man's suit, Mr Andrew Tucker mercenarily designing to secure the
+heiress for his own son. Thereupon Harry Fielding is said to have made a
+desperate attempt to carry the lady off by force, and that, moreover, "on
+a Sunday, when she was on her way to Church." Further, the efforts of the
+impetuous youth would seem to have extended to threatened assaults on the
+person of his fair cousin's guardian, Mr Tucker; for we find that
+affrighted worthy flying for protection to the arm of the law, as recorded
+in the _Register Book_ of Lyme Regis, under date of the 14th November
+1725:--"... Andrew Tucker, Gent., one of the Corporation, caused Henry
+Fielding, Gent., and his servant or companion, Joseph Lewis--both now for
+some time past residing in the borough--to be bound over to keep the
+peace, as he was in fear of his life or some bodily hurt to be done or to
+be procured to be done to him by H. Fielding and his man. Mr A. Tucker
+feared that the man would beat, maim, or kill him." No words could more
+aptly sum up this delightful story than those of Mr Austin Dobson: "a
+charming girl, who is also an heiress; a pusillanimous guardian, with
+ulterior views of his own; a handsome and high-spirited young suitor; a
+faithful attendant ready to 'beat, maim or kill' on his master's behalf; a
+frustrated elopement and a compulsory visit to the mayor--all these with
+the picturesque old town of Lyme for a background, suggest a most
+appropriate first act to Harry Fielding's biographical tragi-comedy."
+[13] It is possible that Fielding's own pen supplied the conclusion to
+this first act. For he tells us, in the preface to the _Miscellanies_,
+that a version, in burlesque verse, of part of Juvenal's sixth satire was
+originally sketched out before he was twenty, and that it was "all the
+Revenge taken by an injured Lover." The story loses none of its zest,
+moreover, when we remember that Harry Fielding was at this time still a
+Ward of Chancery.
+
+[1] Chancery Proceedings 1720 sqq. _Fielding_ v. _Fielding_. From the
+records of this Chancery suit, instituted on behalf of Henry Fielding and
+his brother and sisters, as minors, by their grandmother Lady Gould, are
+taken the hitherto unpublished facts concerning the novelist's boyhood,
+contained in this chapter. The original documents are preserved in the
+Record Office.
+
+[2] See Appendix A.
+
+[3] By means of a legacy of £3000 left by her father for his daughter's
+sole use, "her husband having nothing to doe with it."
+
+[4] _History and Antiquities of Leicestershire_. J. Nichols. 1810. Vol.
+iv. Part i. p. 292. Nichols does not state his authority for this
+statement, and it is not confirmed by local records. See Hutchins'
+_History of Dorset_ for the list of Stour Provost rectors.
+
+[5] Chancery Proceedings, 1722. _Fielding_ v. _Midford_. Record Office.
+
+[6] Edmund's name was added in October following.
+
+[7] _Chancery Decrees and Order Books_. Record Office.
+
+[8] Tom Jones, Book xiii. Introduction.
+
+[9] Ibid., Book viii., ch. xiii.
+
+[10] _Tom Jones_, Book ix. Introduction.
+
+[11] See _infra_, chap. xi.
+
+[12] Fifty years ago a portrait of the beautiful heiress, in the character
+of Sophia Western, was still preserved at the house of Bellairs, near
+Exeter, then the property of the Rhodes family. The present ownership of
+the picture has, so far, eluded inquiry.
+
+[13] _Fielding_, Austin Dobson, p. 202.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+PLAYHOUSE BARD
+
+    "I could not help reflecting how often the greatest abilities lie
+    wind-bound, as it were, in life; or if they venture out, and
+    attempt to beat the seas, they struggle in vain against wind and
+    tide."--_Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon_.
+
+It was but three years after the Lyme Regis episode that Henry Fielding,
+then a lad of one and twenty, won attention as a successful writer of
+comedy. Of this his first entry into the gay world there are little but
+generalities to record; but, inaccurate as Murphy is in some matters of
+fact, there seems no reason to doubt the truth of the engaging picture
+which he draws of the young man's _début_ upon the Town. We read of the
+gaiety and quickness of his fancy; the wild flow of his spirits; the
+brilliancy of his wit; the activity of his mind, eager to know the world.
+To the possession of genius allied to the happiest temper, a temper "for
+the most part overflowing into wit, mirth, and good-humour," young
+Fielding added a handsome face, a magnificent physique (he stood over six
+feet high), and the fullest vigour of constitution. "No man," wrote his
+cousin, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, "enjoyed life more than he did." What
+wonder that he was soon "in high request with the men of taste and
+literature," or that report affirms him to have been no less welcome in
+ranks of society not at all distinguished by a literary flavour.
+
+That a youth so gifted, so "formed and disposed for enjoyment," should
+find himself his own master, in London, almost presupposes a too liberal
+indulgence in the follies that must have so easily beset him. When the
+great and cold Mr Secretary Addison, no less than that "very merry
+Spirit," Dick Steele, and the splendid Congreve, drank more than was good
+for them, what chance would there be for a brilliant, ardent lad of
+twenty, suddenly plunged into the robust society of that age? If
+Fielding, like his elders, indisputably loved good wine, let us remember
+that none of the heroes of his three great novels, neither that rural
+innocent Joseph Andrews, nor the exuberant youth Tom Jones, nor erring,
+repentant Captain Booth are immoderate drinkers. The degradation of
+drinking is, in Fielding's pages, accorded to brutalised if honest
+country squires, and cruel and corrupt magistrates; and there is little
+evidence throughout his life to indicate that the great novelist drank
+more freely than did the genial heroes of his pen. As regards Murphy's
+general assertion that, at this his entrance into life, young Fielding
+"launched wildly into a career of dissipation" no other reputable
+contemporary evidence is discoverable of the "wildness" popularly
+attributed to Fielding. That his youth was headlong and undisciplined is
+a plausible surmise; but justice demands that the charge be recognised as
+a surmise and nothing more. How keenly, twenty years later, he could
+appreciate the handicap that such early indulgences impose on a man's
+future life may be gathered from a passage in _Joseph Andrews_ which is
+not without the ring of personal feeling. The speaker is a generous and
+estimable country gentleman, living in Arcadian retirement with his wife
+and children. Descended of a good family and born a gentleman, he narrates
+how his education was acquired at a public school, and extended to a
+mastery of the Latin, and a tolerable knowledge of the Greek, language.
+Becoming his own master at sixteen he soon left school, for, he tells his
+listeners, "being a forward Youth, I was extremely impatient to be in the
+World: For which I thought my Parts, Knowledge, and Manhood thoroughly
+qualified me. And to this early Introduction into Life, without a Guide, I
+impute all my future Misfortunes; for besides the obvious Mischiefs which
+attend this, there is one which hath not been so generally observed. The
+first Impression which Mankind receives of you, will be very difficult to
+eradicate. How unhappy, therefore, must it be to fix your Character in
+Life, before you can possibly know its Value, or weigh the Consequences of
+those Actions which are to establish your future Reputation?" [1] That the
+wise and strenuous Fielding of later years, the energetic student at the
+Bar, the active and patriotic journalist, the merciless exponent of the
+hypocrite, the spendthrift, and the sensualist, the creator of the most
+perfect type of womanhood in English fiction (so said Dr Johnson and
+Thackeray) should look back sadly on his own years of hot-blooded youth is
+entirely natural; but even so this passage and the well-known confession
+placed in the mouth of the supposed writer of the _Journey from this World
+to the Next_, [2] no more constitute direct evidence than do Murphy's
+unattested phrases, or the anonymous scurrilities of eighteenth-century
+pamphleteers.
+
+By birth and education Fielding's natural place was in the costly society
+of those peers and men of wealth and fashion who courted the brilliant
+young wit; but fortune had decreed otherwise, and at this his first
+entrance on the world he found, as he himself said, no choice but to be a
+hackney writer or a hackney coachman. True, his father allowed him a
+nominal £200 a year; but this, to quote another of his son's
+observations, "anybody might pay that would." The fact was that Colonel
+Fielding's marriage with Madame Rasa had resulted in a large and rapidly
+increasing family; and this burden, together with "the necessary demands
+of his station for a genteel and suitable expence," made it impossible
+for him to spare much for the maintenance of his eldest son. Launched
+thus on the Town, with every capacity for spending an income the receipt
+of which was denied to him, the young man flattered himself that he
+should find resources in his wit and invention; and accordingly he
+commenced as writer for the stage. His first play, a comedy entitled
+_Love in Several Masks_, was performed at Drury Lane in February 1728,
+just before the youthful dramatist had attained his twenty-first year. In
+his preface to these 'light scenes' he alludes with some pride to this
+distinction--"I believe I may boast that none ever appeared so early on
+the stage";--and he proceeds to a generous acknowledgment of the aid
+received from those dramatic stars of the eighteenth-century, Colley
+Gibber, Mr Wilks and Mrs Oldfield, all of whom appeared in the cast. Of
+the two former he says, "I cannot sufficiently acknowledge their civil and
+kind behaviour previous to its representation"; from which we may
+conclude, as his biographer Laurence points out, that Harry Fielding was
+already familiar with the society of the green-room. To Mrs
+Oldfield,--that charming actress
+
+  "In publick Life, by all who saw Approv'd
+  In private Life, by all who knew her Lov'd"--
+
+the young man expresses yet warmer acknowledgments. "Lastly," he
+declares, "I can never express my grateful sense of the good nature of
+Mrs Oldfield ... nor do I owe less to her excellent judgment, shown in
+some corrections which I shall for my own sake conceal." The comedy is
+dedicated, with the graceful diction and elaborate courtesies of the
+period, to Fielding's cousin, that notable eighteenth-century wit, the
+Lady Mary Wortley Montagu; and from the dedication we learn that to Lady
+Mary's approval, on her first perusal, the play owed its existence. What
+the approval of a great lady of those times meant for the young writer
+may be measured by the fact that Fielding concludes his dedication by
+solemnly 'informing the world' that the representation of his comedy was
+twice honoured with Her Ladyship's presence.
+
+In view of the frequent accusation of coarseness brought against
+Fielding, we may quote a few lines of the prologue with which he made his
+literary entry into the world. Here his audience are promised
+
+  "Humour, still free from an indecent Flame,
+  Which, should it raise your Mirth, must raise your Shame:
+  Indecency's the Bane to Ridicule,
+  And only charms the Libertine, or Fool:
+  Nought shall offend the Fair One's Ears to-day,
+  Which they might blush to hear, or blush to say.
+  No private Character these Scenes expose,
+  Our Bard, at Vice, not at the Vicious, throws."
+
+Thus it was with an honourable declaration of war against indecency and
+libel that the young wit and man of fashion, began his career as "hackney
+writer." If to modern taste the first promise lacks something of
+fulfilment, it is but just to remember that to other times belong other
+manners.
+
+In the play, rustic and philosophic virtue is prettily rewarded by the
+possession of a beautiful heiress, while certain mercenary fops withdraw
+in signal discomfiture; and that Fielding, at one and twenty, had already
+passed judgment on that glittering 'tinsel' tribe, is clear enough from
+his portrait of the "empty gaudy nameless thing," Lord Formal. Lord
+Formal appears on the stage with a complexion much agitated by a day of
+business spent with "three milleners, two perfumers, my bookseller's and
+a fanshop." In the course of these fatigues he has "rid down two brace of
+chairmen"; and had raised his colour to "that exorbitancy of Vermeille"
+that it will hardly be reduced "under a fortnight's course of acids." It
+is the true spirit of comedy which introduces into this closely perfumed
+atmosphere the bluff country figure of Sir Positive Trap, with his
+exordiums on the rustic ladies, and on "the good old English art of
+clear-starching." Sir Positive hopes "to see the time when a man may
+carry his daughter to market with the same lawful authority as any other
+of his cattle"; and causes Lord Formal some moments' perplexity, his
+lordship being "not perfectly determinate what species of animal to
+assign him to, unless he be one of those barbarous insects the polite
+call country squires." In this production of a youth of twenty we may
+find a foretaste of that keen relish in watching the human comedy, that
+vigorous scorn of avarice, that infectious laughter at pretentious folly,
+which accompanied the novelist throughout his life.
+
+To this same year is attributed a poem called the _Masquerade_, which need
+only be noticed as again emphasising its author's lifelong war against the
+evils of his time. The _Masquerade_ is a satire on the licentious
+gatherings organised by the notorious Count Heidegger, Master of the
+Revels to the Court of George II.
+
+Many years later Fielding reprinted [3] two other poetical effusions
+bearing the date of this his twenty-first year. Of these the first,
+entitled "A Description of U----n G----(alias _New Hog's Norton_) in
+_Com-Hants_" identified by Mr Keightley as Upton Grey in Hampshire, is
+addressed to the fair _Rosalinda,_ by her disconsolate _Alexis_. Alexis
+bewails his exile among
+
+  "Unpolish'd Nymphs and more unpolish'd Swains,"
+
+and describes himself as condemned to live in a dwelling half house, half
+shed, with a garden full of docks and nettles, the fruit-trees bearing
+only snails--
+
+  "Happy for us had Eve's this Garden been
+  She'd found no Fruit, and therefore known no Sin,"--
+
+the dusty meadows innocent of grass, and the company as innocent of wit.
+This sketch of rural enjoyments recalls a later utterance in _Jonathan
+Wild_, concerning the votaries of a country life who, with their trees,
+"enjoy the air and the sun in common and both vegetate with very little
+difference between them." With one or two eloquent exceptions there is
+scarce a page in Fielding's books devoted to any interest other than that
+of human nature.
+
+The second fragment is a graceful little copy of verse addressed to
+_Euthalia_, in which we may note, by the way, that the fair Rosalinda's
+charms are ungallantly made use of as a foil to Euthalia's dazzling
+perfections. As Fielding found these verses not unworthy of a page in his
+later _Miscellanies_ they are here recalled:
+
+  TO EUTHALIA.
+
+  WRITTEN IN THE YEAR 1728.
+
+  "Burning with Love, tormented with Despair,
+  Unable to forget or ease his Care;
+  In vain each practis'd art _Alexis_ tries;
+  In vain to Books, to Wine or Women flies;
+  Each brings _Euthalia's_ Image to his Eyes.
+  In _Lock's_ or _Newton's_ Page her Learning glows;
+  _Dryden_ the Sweetness of her Numbers shews;
+  In all their various Excellence I find
+  The various Beauties of her perfect Mind.
+  How vain in Wine a short Relief I boast!
+  Each sparkling Glass recalls my charming Toast.
+  To Women then successless I repair,
+  Engage the Young, the Witty, and the Fair.
+  When _Sappho's_ Wit each envious Breast alarms,
+  And _Rosalinda_ looks ten thousand Charms;
+  In vain to them my restless Thoughts would run;
+  Like fairest Stars, they show the absent Sun."
+
+_Love in Several Masks_ was produced, as we have seen, in February, 1728;
+and it is a little surprising to find the young dramatist suddenly
+appearing, four weeks later, as a University student. He was entered at
+the University of Leyden, as "Litt. Stud," on the 16th of March 1728. The
+reason of this sudden change from the green-room of Drury Lane to the
+ancient Dutch university must be purely matter of conjecture, as is the
+nature of Fielding's undergraduate studies, Murphy having lately been
+proved to be notably erroneous as to this episode. [4] His name occurs as
+staying, on his entry at Leyden, at the "Casteel von Antwerpen"; and
+again, a year later, in the _recensiones_ of the University for February
+1729, as domiciled with one Jan Oson. As all students were annually
+registered, the omission of any later entry proves that he left Leyden
+before 1730; with which meagre facts and his own incidental remark that
+the comedy of _Don Quixote in England_ was "begun at Leyden in the year
+1728," our knowledge of the two years of Fielding's university career
+concludes. In February 1730 he was presumably back in London, that being
+the date of his next play, the _Temple Beau_, produced by Giffard, the
+actor, at the new theatre in Goodman's Fields.
+
+The prologue to the _Temple Beau_ was written by that man of many parts,
+James Ralph, the hack writer, party journalist and historian, who was in
+after years to collaborate with Fielding, both as a theatrical manager and
+as a journalist. Ralph's opening lines are of interest as bearing on
+Fielding's antagonism to the harlequinades and variety shows, then
+threatening the popularity of legitimate drama:
+
+  "Humour and Wit, in each politer Age,
+  Triumphant, rear'd the Trophies of the Stage:
+  But only Farce, and Shew, will now go down,
+  And HARLEQUIN'S the Darling of the Town."
+
+Ralph bids his audience turn to the 'infant stage' of Goodman's Fields
+for matter more worthy their attention; and his promise that there
+
+  "The Comick Muse, in Smiles severely gay,
+  Shall scoff at Vice, and laugh its Crimes away"
+
+must surely have been inspired by the young genius from whom twenty years
+later came the formal declaration of his endeavour, in _Tom Jones,_
+"to laugh mankind out of their favourite follies and vices."
+
+The special follies of the _Temple Beau_ have, for background, of course,
+those precincts in which Fielding was later to labour so assiduously as a
+student, and as a member of the Middle Temple; but where, as the young
+Templar of the play observes, "dress and the ladies" might also very
+pleasantly employ a man's time. But except for an oblique hit at duelling,
+a custom which Fielding was later to attack with curious warmth, this
+second play seems to yield few passages of biographical interest. Of very
+different value for our purpose is the third play, which within only two
+months appeared from a pen stimulated, presumably, by empty pockets. This
+was the comedy entitled the _Author's Farce_, being the first portion of a
+medley which included the '_Puppet Show call'd the Pleasures of the Town_;
+the whole being acted in the Little Theatre in the Haymarket, long since
+demolished in favour of the present building.
+
+In the person of Harry Luckless, the hero of the _Author's Farce_, it is
+impossible not to surmise the figure of young Fielding himself; a figure
+gay and spirited as those of his first comedy, but, by now, well
+acquainted with the hungers and the straits of a 'hackney writer.' Mr
+Luckless wears a laced-coat and makes a handsome figure (we remember that
+Fielding had always the grand air), whereby his landlady, clamouring for
+her rent, upbraids him for deceiving her: "Cou'd I have guess'd that I had
+a Poet in my House! Cou'd I have look'd for a Poet under lac'd Clothes!"
+The poor author offers her the security of his (as yet unacted) play;
+whereupon Mrs Moneywood (lineal ancestress of Mrs Raddles) pertinently
+cries out: "I would no more depend on a Benefit-Night of an unacted Play,
+than I would on a Benefit-Ticket in an undrawn Lottery." Luckless next
+appeals to what should be his landlady's heart, assuring her that unless
+she be so kind as to invite him "I am afraid I shall scarce prevail on my
+Stomach to dine to-day." To which the enraged lady answers: "O never fear
+that: you will never want a Dinner till you have dined at all the
+Eating-houses round.--No one shuts their Doors against you the first time;
+and I scarce think you are so kind, seldom to trouble them a second." And
+that the good landlady had some grounds for her wrath is but too apparent
+when she announces: "Well, I'm resolv'd when you are gone away (which I
+heartily hope will be very soon) I'll hang over my Door in great red
+Letters, _No Lodging for Poets_ ... My Floor is all spoil'd with Ink, my
+Windows with Verses, and my Door has been almost beat down with Duns.'
+While the landlady is still fuming, enters our author's man, Jack.
+
+    "_Jack_. An't please your Honour, I have been at my Lord's,
+    and his Lordship thanks  you for the Favour you have offer'd of
+    reading your Play to him; but he has such a  prodigious deal of
+    Business he begs to be excus'd. I have been with Mr _Keyber_
+    too: he made no Answer at all...."
+
+    "_Luckless_. Jack.
+
+    "_Jack_. Sir.
+
+    "_Luckless_. Fetch my other Hat hither.  Carry it to the
+    Pawnbroker's.
+
+    "_Jack_. To your Honour's own Pawnbroker.
+
+    "_Luckless_. Ay And in thy way home call at the Cook's Shop.
+    So, one way or other I find, my Head must always provide for my
+    Belly."
+
+At which moment enters the caustic, generous Witmore, belabouring the
+profanity, the scurrility, the immodesty, the stupidity of the age with
+one hand, the while he pays his friend's rent with the other; and who,
+incidentally, is requested by that irascible genius to kick a worthy
+publisher down the stairs, on the latter's refusal to give fifty
+shillings "no, nor fifty farthings" for his play. Once mollified by the
+settlement of her bill, we have the landlady playing advocate for her
+hapless lodger in words that sound very like the apologia of Mr Harry
+Fielding himself: "I have always thought, indeed, Mr _Luckless_ had a
+great deal of Honesty in his Principles; any Man may be unfortunate: but I
+knew when he had Money I should have it...." And the good woman's
+reminiscence that while her lodger had money her doors were thundered at
+every morning between four and five by coachmen and chairmen; and her wish
+that that pleasant humour'd gentleman were "but a little soberer,"
+finishes, we take it, the portrait of the Fielding of 1730. "Jack call a
+coach; and d'ye hear, get up behind it and attend me," cries the
+improvident poet, the moment his generous friend has left him; and so we
+are sure did young Mr Fielding put himself and his laced coat into a
+coach, and mount his man behind it, whenever the exigencies of duns and
+hunger were for a moment abated. And with as gallant a humour as that of
+his own Luckless did he walk afoot, when those "nine ragged jades the
+muses" failed to bring him a competency.
+
+Such failure on the part of the Muses was due to no want of wooing on his
+part. During the six years between Fielding's first appearance as dramatic
+author in 1728, and his marriage in 1734, there stand no fewer than
+thirteen plays to his name. Of these none have won any lasting reputation;
+and to this period of the great novelist's life may doubtless be applied
+Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's description, when lamenting that her kinsman
+should have been "forced by necessity to publish without correction, and
+throw many productions into the world he would have thrown into the fire,
+if meat could have been got without money, and money without scribbling."
+Lady Mary's account moreover is reinforced by Murphy's classical periods:
+"Mr Fielding's case was generally the same with that of the poet described
+by Juvenal; with a great genius, he must have starved if he had not sold
+his performance to a favourite actor. _Esurit, intactam Paridi, nisi
+vendit Agaven_." A complete list of all these ephemera will be found in
+the bibliography at the end of this volume; here we need but notice those
+to which a special interest attaches. Thus, that incomparable comic
+actress, Kitty Clive, was cast for a part in the _Lottery_, a farce
+produced in 1731; and three years later Fielding is adapting for her,
+especially, the _Intriguing Chambermaid_. It was in these two plays, and
+that of the _Virgin Unmasked_, that the town discovered the true comic
+genius of Kitty Clive "the best player I ever saw," in Dr Johnson's
+opinion. For this discovery Fielding takes credit to himself, in the
+dedication addressed to Mrs Clive, which he prefixed to the _Intriguing
+Chambermaid_; and in which he finds opportunity to pay a noble tribute to
+the private life of that inimitable hoyden of the stage. "I cannot help
+reflecting" he writes, "that the Town hath one great obligation to me, who
+made the first discovery of your great capacity, and brought you earlier
+forward on the theatre, than the ignorance of some and the envy of others
+would have otherwise permitted.... But as great a favorite as you at
+present are with the audience you would be much more so were they
+acquainted with your private character ... did they see you, who can charm
+them on the stage with personating the foolish and vicious characters of
+your sex, acting in real life the part of the best Wife, the best
+Daughter, the best Sister, and the best Friend." That this splendid praise
+was as sincere as it was generous need not be doubted. No breath of
+slander, even in that slanderous age, seems ever to have dulled the
+reputation of the queen of comedy, and "better romp than any I ever saw in
+nature"--to quote Dr Johnson again,--Kitty Clive.
+
+So few of Fielding's letters have been, to our knowledge, preserved, that
+the following note addressed to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and concerning
+the _Modern Husband_, a comedy produced in 1731 or 1732, must here be
+given, though containing little beyond the fact that the dramatist of
+three years' standing seems still to have placed as high a value on his
+cousin's judgment, as when recording her approval of his first effort for
+the stage. The play was a piece of admittedly moral purpose, and was
+dedicated to Sir Robert Walpole. The first line of the autograph is,
+apparently, missing.
+
+
+"I hope your Ladyship will honour the Scenes, which I presume to lay
+before you, with your Perusal. As they are written on a Model I never yet
+attempted, I am exceedingly anxious least they should find least Mercy
+from you than my lighter Productions. It will be a slight compensation to
+the modern Husband, that your Ladyship's censure will defend him from the
+Possibility of any other Reproof, since your least Approbation will
+always give me a Pleasure, infinitely superior to the loudest Applauses
+of a Theatre. For whatever has past your judgment, may, I think without
+any Imputation of Immodesty, refer Want of Success to Want of Judgment in
+an Audience. I shall do myself the honour of waiting on your Ladyship at
+Twickenham next Monday to receive my Sentence, and am, Madam, with the
+most devoted Respect
+
+"Your Ladyship's
+"most Obedient most humble Servant
+"Henry Ffielding. [5]
+
+"London 7'br 4."
+
+In 1731-32 the burlesque entitled the _Tragedy of Tragedies; or the Life
+and Death of Tom Thumb the Great_, took the Town. The _Tragedy_ parodies
+the absurdities of tragedians; and so far won immortality that in 1855 it
+was described as still holding the stage. But its chief modern interest
+lies in the tradition that Swift once observed that he "had not laughed
+above twice" in his life,--once at the tricks of a merry-andrew, and again
+when Fielding's Tom Thumb killed the ghost. The design for the
+frontispiece of the edition of 1731, here reproduced, is from the pencil
+of Hogarth; and is the first trace of a connexion between Fielding and the
+painter who was to be honoured so frequently in his pages. An adaptation
+from Molière, produced in 1733, under the title of the _Miser_, won from
+Voltaire the praise of having added to the original "quelques beautes de
+dialogue particulières a sa [Fielding's] nation." The leading character in
+the _Miser_, Lovegold, became a stock part, and survived to our own days,
+having been a favourite with Phelps. In _Don Quixote in England_, produced
+in 1733 or 34, [6] Fielding reappears in the character of patriotic censor
+with the design, as appears from the dedication to Lord Chesterfield, of
+representing "the Calamities brought on a Country by general Corruption."
+No less than fifteen songs are interspersed in the play, and it is matter
+for curious conjecture why none of them was chosen for a reprint among the
+collected verses published ten years later in the _Miscellanies_. Time has
+almost failed to preserve even the hunting-song beginning finely--
+
+  "The dusky Night rides down the Sky,
+    And ushers in the Morn;
+  The Hounds all join in glorious Cry,
+    The Huntsman winds his Horn:"
+
+But a happier fate has befallen the fifth song, now familiar as the first
+verse of the _Roast Beef of Old England_. It is eminently appropriate that
+the most distinctly national of English novelists should have written:
+
+  "_When mighty Rost Beef was the_ Englishman's _food,
+  It ennobled our Hearts, and enriched our Blood;
+  Our Soldiers were brave and our Courtiers were good.
+    Oh, the Rost Beef of old England,
+    And old_ England's _Rost Beef!_
+
+  "_Then_, Britons, _from all nice Dainties refrain,
+  Which effeminate_ Italy, France, _and_ Spain;
+  _And mighty Rost Beef shall command on the Main.
+    Oh, the Rost Beef_, etc."
+
+To this truly prolific period of the young 'hackney writer's' pen belongs
+an _Epilogue_, hitherto overlooked, written for Charles Johnson's five-act
+play _Caelia or the Perjur'd Lover_, and spoken by Kitty Clive. The lines,
+which are hardly worth reprinting, consist of an ironic attack on the
+laxity of town morals, where "Miss may take great liberties upon her," and
+each woman is virtuous till she be found out.
+
+An average of two plays a year is a record scarcely conducive to literary
+excellence; any more than is the empty cupboard, and the frequent recourse
+to 'your honour's own pawnbroker,' so often and so honourably familiar to
+struggling genius. "The farces written by Mr Fielding," says Murphy"...
+were generally the production of two or three mornings, so great was his
+facility in writing"; and we have seen Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's
+assertion that much of his work would have been thrown into the fire had
+not his dinner gone with it. Of the struggles of these early years [7]
+(struggles never wholly remitted, for, to quote Lady Mary again, Fielding
+would have wanted money had his hereditary lands been as extensive as his
+imagination) we get further suggestions in the _Poetical Epistle_
+addressed to Sir Robert Walpole when the young poet was but twenty-three.
+The lines go with a gallant spirit, but it is not difficult to detect a
+savour of grim hardship behind the jests:
+
+  "While at the Helm of State you ride,
+  Our Nation's Envy and its Pride;
+  While foreign Courts with Wonder gaze,
+  And curse those Councils which they praise;
+  Would you not wonder, Sir, to view
+  Your Bard a greater Man than you?
+  Which that he, is you cannot doubt,
+  When you have heard the Sequel out.
+  .    .    .    .    .
+  "The Family that dines the latest,
+  Is in our Street esteem'd the greatest;
+  But latest Hours must surely fall
+  Before him who ne'er dines at all.
+
+  Your Taste in Architect, you know,
+  Hath been admir'd by Friend and Foe;
+  But can your earthly Domes compare
+  With all my Castles--in the Air?
+
+  "We're often taught it doth behove us
+  To think those greater who're above us;
+  Another Instance of my Glory,
+  Who live above you, twice two Story,
+  And from my Garret can look down
+  On the whole Street of Arlington." [8]
+
+Not to depend too greatly on Mr Luckless for our picture of Fielding as a
+playwright, we will conclude it with the well-known passage from Murphy:
+"When he had contracted to bring on a play, or a farce, it is well known,
+by many of his friends now living, that he would go home rather late from
+a tavern, and would the next morning deliver a scene to the players,
+written upon the papers which had wrapped the tobacco in which he so much
+delighted." Would that some of those friends had recorded for our delight
+the wit that, alas! has vanished like the smoke through which it was
+engendered. What would we not give for the table-talk of Henry Fielding.
+
+[1] _Joseph Andrews_, Book iii. Chap. iii.
+
+[2] _Miscellanies_, ed. 1743, vol. ii. p. 62.
+
+[3] In the _Miscellanies_ of 1743.
+
+[4] _Fielding_, Austin Dobson, 1907. App. iv.
+
+[5] What appears to be the original autograph of the above letter is now
+(1909) in the library of the Boston Athenaeum, having been presented by Mr
+C. P. Greenough.
+
+[6] _Notitia Dramatica_ (British Museum. MSS. Dept.) and Genest give 1734
+as the date of Don Quixote; Murphy, edition of 1766, vol. iii p. 249,
+gives 1733.
+
+[7] For the refutation of Genest's confusion of Timothy Fielding, a
+strolling player, with Henry Fielding, see Austin Dobson, _Fielding_, pp.
+28, 29.
+
+[8] The _Miscellanies_. Edition 1743.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+MARRIAGE
+
+
+    "What happiness the world affords equal to the possession of such
+    a woman as Sophia I sincerely own I have never yet discovered."
+    --_Tom Jones_.
+
+Out of the paint and powder of the green-room, the tobacco clouds of the
+tavern, the crowded streets where hungry genius went afoot one day, and
+rode in a coach the next--in a word, out of the Town as Harry Fielding
+knew it--we step, in the year 1734, into the idyll of his life, his
+marriage with Charlotte Cradock. For to Fielding the supreme gift was
+accorded of passionate devotion to a woman of whose charm and virtue he
+himself has raised an enduring memorial in the lovely portrait of Sophia
+Western. It is this portrait, explicitly admitted [1], that affords almost
+our only authentic knowledge of Charlotte Cradock, beyond the meagre facts
+that her home was in Salisbury, and that there she and her sisters reigned
+as country belles. For it was not in the gay world of 'Riddoto's, Opera's,
+and Plays,' nor among the humbler scenes of the great city in which he
+delighted to watch the humours of simple folk (the highest life being in
+his opinion 'much the dullest'), that Fielding found his wife. Doubtless
+his six years about town, as hackney author, with his good birth, his
+brilliant wit, and his scanty means, had made him well acquainted with
+every phase of society, "from the Minister at his Levee, to the Bailiff at
+his spunging-house; from the Duchess at her drum, to the Landlady behind
+her bar"; but it was in the rural seclusion of an old cathedral town that
+he wooed and won the beautiful Miss Cradock. Indeed it is impossible to
+conceive of Sophia as for ever domiciled in streets. The very apostrophe
+which heralds her first appearance in _Tom Jones_ is fragrant with
+flower-enamelled meadows, fresh breezes, and the songs of birds "whose
+sweetest notes not even Handel can excel"; and it is thus, with his
+reader's mind attuned to the appropriate key, that Fielding ushers in his
+heroine: "... lo! adorned with all the Charms in which Nature can array
+her; bedecked with Beauty, Youth, Sprightliness, Innocence, Modesty, and
+Tenderness, breathing Sweetness from her rosy Lips, and darting Brightness
+from her sparkling Eyes, the lovely _Sophia_ comes." Of middle size, but
+rather inclining to tall, with dark hair "curled so gracefully on her neck
+that few could believe it to be her own," a forehead rather low, arched
+eyebrows, and lustrous black eyes, a mouth that "exactly answered Sir John
+Suckling's description in those lines
+
+  'Her lips were red and one was thin,
+  Compar'd to that was next her chin.
+    Some bee had stung it newly,'"
+
+with a dimple in the right cheek, and a complexion rather more of the
+lily than the rose unless increased by exercise or modesty when no
+vermilion could equal it--such was the appearance of Sophia, who, most of
+all "resembled one whose image never can depart from my breast."
+
+Nor was the beautiful frame, Fielding hastens to add, disgraced by an
+unworthy inhabitant. He lingers on the sweetness of temper which
+"diffused a glory over her countenance which no regularity of features
+can give"; on her perfect breeding, "though wanting perhaps a little of
+that ease in her behaviour which is to be acquired only by habit, and
+living within what is called the polite circle"; on the "noble, elevated
+qualities" which outshone even her beauty.
+
+The only facts recorded concerning Miss Cradock are that her home was in
+Salisbury, or New Sarum as the city was then called, and that she
+possessed a small fortune. It is said, but on what authority is not
+stated, that she was one of three beautiful sisters, the belles of the
+country town; and it is in accordance with this tradition that Fielding
+should celebrate in some verses "writ when the Author was very young,"
+the beauty and intellectual charm of the Miss Cradocks. When printing
+these verses many years afterwards, in his _Miscellanies_ he describes the
+poem as originally partly filled in with the 'Names of several young
+Ladies,' which part he now omits, "the rather, as some Freedoms, tho'
+gentle ones, were taken with little Foibles in the amiable Sex, whom to
+affront in Print, is, we conceive, mean in any Man, and scandalous in a
+Gentleman." Certainly the Miss Cradocks suffered no affront in the lines
+retained, wherein the young poet affirms that of all the famed nymphs of
+Sarum, that favoured city,
+
+  "Whose Nymphs excel all Beauty's Flowers,
+  As thy high Steeple doth all Towers"
+
+the 'C----cks' were the best and fairest. Nay, has not great Jove himself
+apportioned a 'celestial Dower' to these most favoured of maidens,
+
+  "To form whose lovely Minds and Faces
+  I stript half Heaven of its Graces."
+
+From this charming sisterhood Harry Fielding won his bride, but not until
+four years of waiting had been accomplished. So much may be assumed from
+the early date of the verses entitled "Advice to the Nymphs of _New
+S---m_. Written in the Year 1730." Here the newly returned student from
+Leyden, the successful dramatist from Drury Lane, bids the Salisbury
+beauties cease their vain endeavours to contend with the matchless charms
+of his Celia. And here, in a pretty compliment introduced to the great Mr
+Pope, then at the height of his fame, we are reminded that Celia's lover
+is already a man of letters, for all his mere three and twenty years. When
+Celia meets her equal, then, he declares, farthing candles shall eclipse
+the moon, and "sweet _Pope_ be dull."
+
+It is these youthful love-verses, verses as he himself was the first to
+admit, that were 'indeed Productions of the Heart rather than the Head,'
+that afford our only record of Fielding's wooing. Thus, he sings his
+passion for _Celia_ in the declaration
+
+  "I hate the Town, and all its Ways;
+  Ridotto's, Opera's, and Plays;
+  The Ball, the Ring, the Mall, the Court;
+  Where ever the Beau-Monde resort....
+  All Coffee-houses, and their Praters;
+  All Courts of Justice, and Debaters;
+  All Taverns, and the Sots within 'em;
+  All Bubbles, and the Rogues that skin 'em,"
+
+in short, the whole world 'cram'd all together,' because all his heart is
+engrossed for Celia. Again, Cupid is called to account, in that the
+careless urchin had left Celia's house unguarded from thieves, save for
+an old fellow "who sat up all Night, with a Gun without any Ammunition."
+Celia, it seems, had apprehended robbery, and her poet's rest is troubled:
+
+  "For how should I Repose enjoy,
+  While any fears your Breast annoy?
+  Forbid it Heav'n, that I should be
+  From any of your Troubles free."
+
+
+Cupid explains his desertion by ingeniously declaring that a sigh from
+Celia had blown him away
+
+  "_to Harry Fielding's breast_,"
+
+in which lodging the 'wicked Child' wrought unconscionable havoc. Again,
+Celia wishes to have a "Lilliputian to play with," so she is promptly
+told that her lover would doff five feet of his tall stature, to meet her
+pleasure, and
+
+  "Then when my Celia walks abroad
+  I'd be her pocket's little Load:
+  Or sit astride, to frighten People,
+  Upon her Hat's new fashion'd Steeple."
+
+Nay, to be prized by Celia, who would not even take the form of her
+faithful dog Quadrille.
+
+Jove, we may remember, had dowered the lovely Miss Cradocks with minds as
+fair as their persons; and the excellence of Celia's understanding is
+again celebrated in a neatly turned verse upon her 'having blamed Mr Gay
+for his Severity on her Sex.' Had other women known a tenderness like
+hers, cries the poet, Gay's darts had returned into his own bosom; and
+last of all should such blame come from her
+
+  "in whose accomplish'd Mind
+  The strongest Satire on thy Sex we find."
+
+
+The love story that first ran to such pleasant rhymes, in the old
+cathedral town, was destined to know many a harsh chapter of poverty and
+sickness; but throughout it all the affection of the lovers remained
+true; and there is no reason to doubt that, had it been in Harry
+Fielding's power to achieve it, the promise of perhaps the most charming
+of his love verses would have been fulfilled:
+
+  "Can there on Earth, my _Celia_, be,
+  A Price I would not pay for thee?
+  Yes, one dear precious Tear of thine
+  Should not be shed to make thee mine."
+
+To read Swift's _Journal to Stella_ is almost a sacrilege; the little
+notes that Dick Steele would write to his 'dearest Prue' at all hours of
+day and night, from tavern and printing office, are scarce less private;
+no such seals have been broken, no such records preserved, of the love
+story of Harry Fielding. But to neither Swift nor Steele was it given to
+raise so perfect and imperishable a memorial of the women loved by them,
+as that reared by the passionate affection and grief of Fielding for
+Charlotte Cradock. To this day the beautiful young figure of Sophia
+Western, all charm and goodness, is alive in his immortal pages. And if,
+as her friend Lady Bute asserts, Amelia also is Mrs Fielding's portrait,
+then we know her no less intimately as wife and mother. We watch her brave
+spirit never failing under the most cruel distresses and conflicts; we
+play with her children in their little nursery; we hear her pleasant wit
+with the good parson; we feel her fresh beauty, undimmed in the poor
+remnants of a wardrobe that has gone, with her trinkets, to the
+pawnbroker; we see a hundred examples of her courage and tenderness and
+generosity. There is nothing in Fielding's life that is more to his honour
+than the brief words in which so competent an observer as Lady Bute summed
+up his marriage with Charlotte Cradock, "he loved her passionately and she
+returned his affection."
+
+It was in the little country church of St Mary Charlcombe, a remote
+village some two miles from Bath, that "Henry Fielding, of ye Parish of St
+James in Bath, Esq., and Charlotte Cradock of ye same Parish, spinster"
+were married, on the 28th of November 1734. [2] Fifty years later the
+village was described as containing only nine houses, the church, well
+fitted for the flock, being but eighteen feet wide. The old Somerset
+historian, Collinson, tells us how the hamlet stood on rising ground, in a
+deep retired valley, surrounded by noble hills, and with a little stream
+winding through the vale.
+
+In the January following Fielding and his wife were presumably back in
+town; for in this month he produced, at Drury Lane, the brisk little
+farce called _An Old Man taught Wisdom_, a title afterwards changed to the
+_Virgin Unmasked_. It is probable that this farce was especially written
+to suit Kitty Clive in her excelling character of hoyden; and to it, as we
+have seen, together with two of its predecessors, is assigned the credit
+of having first given that superb comic actress an opportunity of
+revealing her powers. Mrs Clive here played the part of Miss Lucy, a
+forward young lady who after skittishly interviewing a number of suitors
+proposed by her father, finally runs away with Thomas the footman. The
+little piece is said to have achieved success; but scarce had it been
+staged when "the prolific Mr Fielding," as a newspaper of the day styles
+him, brought out a five-act comedy, named the _Universal Gallant: or The
+different Husbands_, which wholly failed to please the audience, and
+indeed ran but for three nights.
+
+The dedication of this play is dated from "Buckingham Street, Feb. 12,"
+and assuming Buckingham Street, Strand, to be the district meant, it is
+probable that the newly married 'poet' and his wife were then living with
+Mrs Fielding's relatives; for although the rate-books for Buckingham
+Street fail to show the name of Fielding, they do show that a Mr Thomas
+Cradock was then a householder in the street. In an _Advertisement_,
+prefixed to the published copies of this ill-fated comedy, the
+disappointed author deprecates the hasty voice of the pit in words that
+suggest the anxiety of a man now responsible for a happiness dearer than
+his own. "I have heard," he writes, "that there are some young Gentlemen
+about this Town who make a Jest of damning Plays--but did they seriously
+consider the Cruelty they are guilty of by such a Practice, I believe it
+would prevent them"; the more, that if the author be "so unfortunate to
+depend on the success of his Labours for his Bread, he must be an inhuman
+Creature indeed, who would out of sport and wantonness prevent a Man from
+getting a Livelihood in an honest and inoffensive Way, and make a jest of
+starving him and his Family." There is other evidence that young men about
+town were wont to amuse themselves by damning plays 'when George was
+King.' In the _Prologue_ to this same condemned play, spoken by the actor
+Quin, and said to have been written after the disastrous first night's
+performance, a more elaborate indictment is laid against the audiences of
+the day. The _Critick_, it seems, is grown so captious that if a poet
+seeks new characters he is denounced for dealing in monsters; if they are
+known and common, then he is a plagiarist; if his scenes are serious they
+are voted dull; if humorous they are 'low' (a true Fielding touch). And
+not only the critic but also the brainless beau stands, as we have seen,
+ready to make sport of the poor author. For such as these
+
+  _"'Tis not the Poet's wit affords the Jest,
+  But who can Cat-call, Hiss, or Whistle best."_
+
+In previous years the brilliant Leyden student might have merely derided
+his enemies; to the Fielding of February 1735, struggling to support
+himself and his beautiful country bride, this 'cruel usage' of his 'poor
+Play' assumed a graver aspect:
+
+  _"Can then another's Anguish give you Joy?
+  Or is it such a Triumph to destroy?
+  We, like the fabled Frogs, consider thus,
+  This may be Sport to you, but it is Death to us."_
+
+This note of personal protest recalls an indisputably reminiscent
+observation in _Amelia_, to the effect that although the kindness of a
+faithful and beloved wife compensates most of the evils of life, it
+"rather serves to aggravate the misfortune of distressed circumstances,
+from the consideration of the share which she is to bear in them." We all
+know how bravely Amelia bore that share; how cheerfully she would cook the
+supper; how firmly she confronted disaster. To realise how deeply Fielding
+felt the pain of such struggles when falling upon "the best, the worthiest
+and the noblest of women" we need but turn again to his own pages. If,
+cries Amelia's husband, when his distresses overwhelm him, "if I was to
+suffer alone, I think I could bear them with some philosophy"; and again
+"this was the first time I had ever felt that distress which arises from
+the want of money; a distress very dreadful indeed in the married state
+for what can be more miserable than to see anything necessary to the
+preservation of the beloved creature and not be able to supply it?"
+
+To supply for his Celia much less than the necessities of life Harry
+Fielding would undoubtedly have stripped his coat, and his shirt with it,
+off his back; but, at the end of this same month of February, fortune
+made the young couple sudden amends for the anxieties that seem to have
+surrounded them. This turn of the wheel is reflected with curious
+accuracy by an anonymous satirist of 1735:
+
+  "F---g, who _Yesterday_ appear'd so rough,
+  Clad in coarse Frize, and plaister'd down with _Snuff_,
+  See how his _Instant_ gaudy _Trappings_ shine;
+  What _Play-house_ Bard was ever seen so fine!
+  But this, not from his _Humour_ glows, you'll say
+  But mere _Necessity_;--for last Night lay
+  In pawn the Velvet which he wears to Day." [3]
+
+This relief, for a time at least, from the pressing anxieties of a
+'play-house bard,' befell by the death of Charlotte Fielding's mother,
+Mrs Elizabeth Cradock of Salisbury, who died in February, but a week or
+two after the execution of a will wholly in favour of that 'dearly
+beloved' daughter. As the details of Mrs Fielding's inheritance have not
+hitherto been known, some portions of her mother's will may be quoted.
+"... I Elizabeth Cradock of Salisbury in the County of Wilts ... do make
+this my last will and testament ... Item I give to my daughter Catherine
+one shilling and all the rest and residue of my ready money plate jewels
+and estate whatsoever and wheresoever after my debts and funeral charges
+are fully paid and satisfied I give devize and bequeath the same unto my
+dearly beloved daughter Charlott Ffeilding wife of Henry Ffeilding of
+East Stour in the County of Dorset Esqre." Mrs Cradock proceeds to revoke
+all former wills; and appoints her said daughter "Charlott Ffeilding" as
+her sole executrix. The will is dated February 8 1734, old style, viz.
+1735; and was proved in London on the 25th of the same month, 'Charlott
+Ffeilding,' as sole executrix, being duly sworn to administer. The
+provision of one shilling for another, and apparently _not_ dearly
+beloved, daughter, Catherine, recalls the wicked sister in _Amelia_ who
+"had some way or other disobliged her mother, a little before the old lady
+died," and who consequently was deprived of that inheritance which
+relieved Amelia and her husband from the direst straits.
+
+As no plays are credited to Fielding's name for the ensuing months of
+1735, it is a reasonable inference that the young Salisbury heiress, whose
+experience of London had, doubtless, included a pretty close acquaintance
+with the hardships of struggling genius, employed some of her inheritance
+to enable her husband to return to the home of his boyhood, on the
+"pleasant Banks of sweetly-winding Stour." There is no record of how the
+Stour estate, settled on Henry Fielding and his brother and sisters, was
+apportioned; but an engraving published in 1813 shows the old stone
+"farmhouse," which Fielding occupied, the kitchen of which then still
+remained as it was in the novelist's time, when it served as a parlour.
+Behind the house stood a famous locust tree; and close by was the village
+church served at this time, as the parish registers show, by the Rev.
+William Young, the original of the immortal Parson Adams of _Joseph
+Andrews_. [4] From a subsequent deed of sale we know that the estate
+consisted of at least three gardens, three orchards, eighty acres of
+meadow, one hundred and forty acres of pasture, ten acres of wood, two
+dove-houses, and "common of pasture for all manner of cattle." To the
+stone farmhouse, and to these orchards and meadows, commons and pastures,
+Fielding brought his wife, probably in this year of 1735; and memories of
+their sojourn at Stour surely inspired those references in _Amelia_ to the
+country life of 'love, health, and tranquillity,' a life resembling a calm
+sea which "must appear dull in description; for who can describe the
+pleasures which the morning air gives to one in perfect health; the flow
+of spirits which springs up from exercise; the delights which parents feel
+from the prattle and innocent follies of their children; the joy with
+which the tender smile of a wife inspires a husband; or lastly the
+cheerful solid comfort which a fond couple enjoy in each others'
+conversation.--All these pleasures, and every other of which our situation
+was capable we tasted in the highest degree."
+
+That a man endowed with Fielding's intense joy in living--he was "so
+formed for happiness," wrote his cousin Lady Mary, "it is a pity he was
+not immortal"--should eagerly taste all the pleasures of life as a country
+gentleman, and that in 'the highest degree,' is entirely consonant with
+his character. At the very end of his life, when dying of a complication
+of diseases, his happy social spirit was still unbroken; for we find him
+even then writing of his inability to enjoy an agreeable hour "without the
+assistance of a companion which has always appeared to me necessary to
+such enjoyment." [5] Nor would the generous temper, which was ever ready
+to share his most needed guinea with a friend scarce poorer than himself,
+be infected with niggardliness by the happy enjoyment of that position to
+which he was by birth entitled. The well-known account therefore, given by
+Murphy, of the East Stour episode is exactly what we might have expected
+of Harry Fielding in the part of country gentleman: "To that place [_i.e._
+his estate of East Stour]," says Murphy, "he retired with his wife, on
+whom he doated, with a resolution to bid adieu to all the follies and
+intemperances to which he had addicted himself in the career of a town
+life. But unfortunately a kind of family pride here gained an ascendant
+over him, and he began immediately to vie in splendour with the
+neighbouring country 'squires. With an estate not much above two hundred
+pounds a year, and his wife's fortune, which did not exceed fifteen
+hundred pounds, he encumbered himself with a large retinue of servants,
+all clad in costly yellow liveries. For their master's honour, these
+people could not descend so low as to be careful of their apparel, but in
+a month or two were unfit to be seen; the 'squire's dignity required that
+they should be new-equipped; and his chief pleasure consisting in society
+and convivial mirth, hospitality threw open his doors, and, in less than
+three years, entertainments, hounds, and horses, entirely devoured a
+little patrimony...." This account is prefaced by gross inaccuracies of
+fact, inexplicable in a biographer writing but ten years after the death
+of his subject; but, as Mr Austin Dobson says, "there can be little doubt
+that the rafters of the old farm by the Stour, with the great locust tree
+at the back, which is figured in Hutchins's _History of Dorset_, rang
+often to hunting choruses, and that not seldom the 'dusky Night rode down
+the Sky' over the prostrate forms of Harry Fielding's guests."
+Petty-minded moralists like Murphy have gravely admonished the great
+novelist's memory for not having safely bestowed his estate in the consols
+of the period; they forget that a spirit of small economy is generally the
+compensation awarded to the poor average of humanity. The genius of
+Fielding knew how to enjoy splendidly, and to give lavishly.
+
+[1] _Tom Jones_. Book xiii. Introduction.
+
+[2] See the registers of St Mary Charlcombe. As Sarah Fielding, the
+novelist's sister, was buried in the entrance to the chancel of this
+church, it would appear that some connection existed between Charlcombe
+and the Fielding family.
+
+[3] _Seasonable Reproof--a Satire in the manner of Horace_, 1735.
+
+[4] The entry in the East Stour Registers is "W'm. Young, Curate
+1731-1740."
+
+[5] _Voyage to Lisbon_.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+POLITICAL PLAYS
+
+    "Whoever attempteth to introduce corruption into any community,
+    doth much the same thing, and ought to be treated in much the
+    same manner with him who poisoneth a fountain."
+    --Dedication of the _Historical Register_.
+
+A prolonged retirement into Dorsetshire, however pleasant were the banks
+of Stour with a beautiful young wife, and a sufficient estate, could
+scarce be expected of Fielding's restless genius. He was now thirty-five;
+his splendid physique was as yet unimpaired by the gout that was so soon
+to attack him; his powers were still hardly revealed; and, as far as we
+can discover, he was, at the moment, under no pressure for money. Still,
+the hunting choruses of the Squire Westerns of Dorsetshire can hardly
+have long sufficed for one whom Lyttelton declared to have had "more wit
+than any man I ever knew"; and the social and political conditions of the
+country were increasingly calculated to inflame into practical activity
+that "enthusiasm for righteousness," which Mr Gosse has so well detected
+in Fielding. [1] The distracted state of the London stage, divided by the
+factions of players and managers, afforded moreover an excellent
+opportunity for a dramatist of some means to essay an independent venture.
+And accordingly, at the beginning of 1736, we find the Harry Fielding of
+the green-room and the poet's garret, the Henry Fielding Esqre of East
+Stour, suddenly throwing the full force of his energies into political
+life, as the manager of, and writer for, a theatre with indisputable
+political aims. For the next eight years of his short life Fielding was
+largely occupied in the lively turmoil of eighteenth-century politics; and
+here, first by means of the stage, and later as journalist, he played a
+part which has perhaps been somewhat unduly overshadowed by the surpassing
+achievements of his genius as father of the English novel. But if we would
+perceive the full figure of the man this time of boisterous political
+warfare is of no mean account. In the dedication of his first party play,
+the amazingly successful _Pasquin_, Fielding subscribes himself as "the
+most devoted Servant of the public"; and no more appropriate keyword could
+be found for the energies which he threw into those envenomed political
+struggles of 1736-41.
+
+At the date of his first plunge into these struggles England stood sorely
+in need of a pen as biting, as witty and as fearless, as that of Henry
+Fielding. For over ten years the country had been ruled by one of those
+"peace at any price" Ministers who have at times so successfully inflamed
+the baser commercial instincts of Englishmen. Sir Robert Walpole, the
+reputed organiser of an unrivalled system of bribery and corruption, the
+Minister of whom a recent apologist frankly declares that to young members
+of Parliament who spoke of public virtue and patriotism he would reply
+"you will soon come off that and grow wiser," the autocrat enamoured of
+power who could brook no colleague within measurable distance, the man of
+coarse habits and illiterate tastes, above all the man who induced his
+countrymen to place money before honour, and whose administration even an
+admirer describes as one of unparalleled stagnation--such a man must have
+roused intense antagonism in Fielding's generous and ardent nature. For,
+from the days of his first boyish satires to the last energetic acts of
+his life as a London magistrate, for Fielding to see an abuse was to set
+about reforming it. To his just sense of the true worth of money, the
+wholesale corruption of English political life accredited to Walpole, the
+poisoning, to adopt his own simile, of the body politic, must have seemed
+the vilest national crime. There could never have been the least sympathy
+between the mercenary and apathetic methods of Walpole and the
+open-hearted genius of Fielding. And, added to such fundamental opposition
+of character, the influence of Fielding's old school friend, George
+Lyttelton, would, at this juncture especially, draw him into the active
+ranks of the Opposition.
+
+Lyttelton was then rising into celebrity as a ready parliamentary speaker;
+a celebrity as yet not wholly eclipsed by the youthful oratory of William
+Pitt, the young cornet of the horse, who also had lately taken his seat on
+the Opposition benches. It was the burning patriotism, the lofty character
+and the towering genius of Pitt, the fluency and personal integrity of
+Lyttelton, that led the younger members of the Opposition in the House of
+Commons; while in the Lords another friend from whom Fielding was to
+receive "princely benefactions," the young Duke of Bedford, a man of
+"inflexible honesty and goodwill to his country," attacked Walpole's
+alleged corrupt practices in the election of Scottish peers. With leaders
+such as William Pitt and Lyttelton on the one hand, and the corrupt figure
+of Walpole on the other, there is no wonder that Fielding flung all his
+generous force into the effort to free England from so degrading a
+domination. Accordingly, in 1736, when the young Pitt's impassioned
+eloquence was soon to alarm the _Great Man_--"we must muzzle that terrible
+Cornet of the Horse," Sir Robert said--and when fierce and riotous
+hostility to the government had broken out in the country over an
+attempted Excise Bill, Fielding appears as a frankly political manager of
+the "New Theatre" in the Haymarket. This small theatre stood precisely
+adjoining the present Palladian structure, as may be seen from a print of
+1820, showing the demolition of the old building and the adjacent façade
+of the modern "Haymarket." According to Tom Davies, who, as an actor in
+Fielding's company and as an author of some pretensions should be
+reliable, Fielding was a managing partner of this "New Theatre," in
+company with James Ralph, "about the year 1735." [2] And apparently early
+in 1736 [3] his political, theatrical, and social satire of _Pasquin_
+appeared on the little stage, and immediately captured the town.
+
+In _Pasquin_ a perfectly outspoken attack on Walpole's corrupt methods is
+united with a comprehensive onslaught on abuses in the stage, law,
+divinity, physic, society, and on the odes of Colley Cibber, sufficient
+one might suppose to satisfy even Fielding's zeal. In an exuberant
+newspaper advertisement of the 5th of March Mr Pasquin is announced as
+intending to "lay about him with great impartiality," and throughout the
+play Fielding's splendid figure may be felt, swinging his satiric club
+with a boisterous enjoyment. The immediate success achieved by the piece
+was certainly not due to any great dramatic excellence; and that so
+loosely knit a medley as _PASQUIN, a Dramatic Satire on the Times: Being
+the Rehearsal of Two Plays, viz. A Comedy call'd THE ELECTION and a
+Tragedy, call'd The Life and Death of COMMON-SENSE_ should have achieved
+almost as long a run as the _Beggars Opera_, shows that the public
+heartily sympathised with the satirist. _Pasquin_ begins with the
+rehearsal of a comedy, called _The Election_, consisting of a series of
+broadly humorous scenes in which the open and diverse bribery at
+elections, the equally open immorality of fashionable town life, the
+connivance of country dames, and the inanity of the beau monde, are
+satirised. The country Mayor, the Ministerial candidates and the
+Opposition squire drink, bribe and are bribed with complete impartiality.
+A scene devoted to the political young lady of the day affords opportunity
+for a hit at the sickly and effeminate Lord 'Fanny' Hervey, that
+politician whom Pope described as a "mere white curd of Asse's milk," and
+of whom Lady Mary Wortley Montagu observed that "the world consisted of
+men, women, and Herveys." Pope had stigmatised Hervey as _Lord Fanny_, and
+Fielding obviously plays on the nickname by references to the value
+attached by certain young ladies to their fans. "Faith," says his comic
+author, "this incident of the fan struck me so strongly that I was once
+going to call this comedy by the name of the Fan." The comedy ends with
+the successful cooking of the election returns by Mr Mayor in favour of
+the Ministerial candidates, for which "return" he is promised a "very good
+turn very soon"; and by the precipitate marriage of one of the said
+candidates to the Mayor's daughter "to strengthen his interest with the
+returning officer."
+
+Having settled the business of the corrupt and corrupting Ministry in his
+comedy, Mr Pasquin proceeds to exhibit the rehearsal of his tragedy, _The
+Life and Death of Common Sense_. Here the satirist, leaving politics,
+applies his cudgel mainly to the prevailing taste for pantomime, a form of
+entertainment introduced it was said some thirty years previously by one
+Weaver, a country dancing master, and already lashed by Sir Richard Steele
+in his couplet:
+
+  "Weaver, corrupter of the present age,
+  Who first taught silent sins upon the stage."
+
+That the Covent Garden manager, John Rich, [4] could engage four French
+dancers, and a German with two dogs, taught to dance the _Louvre_ and the
+_Minuet_, at ten pounds a night, and clear thereby "above 20 good houses,"
+while the Othello of Booth and the Wildair of Wilkes were neglected, was
+sufficient to rouse the indignation alike of moralists, dramatists and
+playgoers. Fielding in turn took the matter up with all his natural
+warmth; and in _Pasquin_ he represents the kingdom of the Queen of Common
+Sense as invaded by a vast army of "singers, fidlers, tumblers, and
+ropedancers," who moreover fix their standard in Covent Garden, the
+headquarters of Rich.
+
+Not content with assailing this public folly, the 'Tragedy' of _Pasquin_
+strikes a higher note by ranging among the foes of Common Sense three
+unworthy professors of Law, Medicine, and Religion; callings, as Fielding
+is careful to point out,
+
+  "in themselves designed
+  To shower the greatest blessings on Mankind."
+
+Queen Common Sense seemingly receives her deathblow; but her ghost finally
+rises victorious, and so justifies the author's contention that his "is
+almost the only play where she has got the better lately." The vigour with
+which Mr Pasquin here 'laid about him,' in such matters as the legal
+abuses relating to imprisonment for debt, may be inferred from the
+following passage. Queen Common Sense is speaking to the representative of
+_bad_ Law, and tells him she has heard that men
+
+  "unable to discharge their debts
+  At a short warning, being sued for them,
+  Have, with both power and will their debts to pay,
+  Lain all their lives in prison, for their costs.
+
+  _Law_. That may perhaps be some poor person's case
+  Too mean to entertain your royal ear.
+
+  _Q.C.S_. My Lord, while I am Queen I shall not think
+  One man too mean, or poor, to be redress'd."
+
+So too, the great genius of Fielding, when in long after years harnessed
+to the drudgery of a London magistrate, held no porter's brawl or beggar's
+quarrel too mean "to be redress'd."
+
+The immediate success of _Pasquin_ attests, as we have said, the readiness
+of London audiences in 1736 to applaud an honest and humorous presentation
+of wicked Ministers, corrupt clergy, lawyers, and doctors, inane
+Laureates, and degrading public entertainments. Mrs Delany, gathering
+London news for Dean Swift, writes on April 22, "When I went out of Town
+last Autumn, the reigning madness was Farinelli; I find it now turned on
+_Pasquin_, a dramatic satire on the times. It has had almost as long a run
+as the Beggar's Opera; but in my opinion not with equal merit, though it
+has humour." [5] We are told how the piece drew numerous enthusiastic
+audiences "from _Grosvenor_, _Cavendish_, _Hanover_, and all the other
+fashionable Squares, as also from _Pall Mall_ and the _Inns of Court_" And
+on the 26th of May a benefit performance for the author was announced as
+the "60th. Day." The vogue of the satire even demanded a key, as may be
+seen in an advertisement in the _London Daily Post_ for May 17: _This Day
+is published, Price Four-Pence. A Key to Pasquin, address'd to Henry
+Fielding Esqre._
+
+Mr Pasquin's own advertisements for his little theatre are not without the
+zest with which our beef-eating ancestors attacked politics, social abuses
+and one another. The announcement for March 5, ran as follows:--
+
+    "_By the_ Great Mogul's _Company of_ English
+    _Comedians, Newly Imported_. At the New Theatre in the
+    Haymarket, this Day, March 5, will be presented
+
+    PASQUIN,
+
+    A Dramatick SATYR on the times.
+
+    Being a Rehearsal of two PLAYS, viz. a Comedy call'd The
+    ELECTION; and a Tragedy, call'd The Life and Death of COMMON
+    SENSE....
+
+    N.B.--Mr Pasquin intending to lay about him with great
+    Impartiality, hopes the Town will all attend, and very civilly
+    give their Neighbours what the find belongs to 'em.
+
+    N.B.--The Cloaths are old, but the Jokes entirely new...."
+
+In the following month the Opposition was busy over the marriage of their
+chief supporter, the Prince of Wales; and Mr Pasquin duly chronicles the
+event in his advertisements of the 28th of April, observing that his
+company "by reason of the Royal Wedding expecting no Company but
+themselves, are obliged to defer Playing till tomorrow." A few days
+later, on the 12th of May, Sir Robert Walpole celebrated the royal
+marriage by a grand evening entertainment given at his house in St James
+Park; and on the same night 'Pasquin' had the audacity to advertise a
+special performance, in the following terms (the "country party," it
+should be understood, was a usual name for Walpole's opponents):--
+
+"For the Benefit of Miss Burgess, who has so zealously espoused the
+Country Interest.... Miss Burgess hopes all Patriots and Lovers of their
+Country will appear in her favour and give all encouragement to one who
+has so early distinguished herself on the side of Liberty." In Pasquin's
+_Election_ scenes, this lady played the part of Miss Stitch, a political
+damsel, opposed to Walpole's candidate. Next day appeared an ironic
+counter-advertisement of a performance for "the Benefit of Miss Jones (the
+Mayor's daughter who hath so furiously espoused the Court [_i.e._
+Walpole's] Interest....) _N.B._--Miss Jones does not doubt that all true
+loyal People will give her all Encouragement in their Power, as she has
+engaged in so unpopular a Side and even given away her FAN (which very few
+young ladies would) for the service of the Country: she hopes the
+Courtiers will not let her be out of pocket by the Bargain." Here, again,
+is doubtless a hit at Lord 'Fanny' Hervey; as well as a plain hint that
+those who espoused Walpole's cause might expect ample payment for their
+trouble.
+
+Is there any wonder that a wrathful and uneasy Minister, not yet
+overthrown, shortly took stringent measures against the 'liberty' of the
+stage; measures by which a political stage censorship was formally
+established, and the topical gaiety of our theatre, and the pungency of
+our theatrical announcements, henceforth immeasurably dulled.
+
+A few further points of minor interest remain to be noted concerning that
+popular and scathing personage Mr Pasquin. By May the company styled
+themselves "Pasquin's Company of Comedians"; a fresh indication of the
+credit attaching to the performance. In the previous month a contributor
+to _The Grub Street Journal_ tells "Dear Grub" that he has seen Pope
+applauding the piece; and, although the statement was promptly denied, a
+rare print by Hogarth lends some colour to a very likely story; for the
+great Mr Pope, the terror of his enemies, the autocrat of literature, was
+warmly on the side of the Opposition. Hogarth depicts the stage of
+Fielding's theatre, and thereon a scene in the fifth act of _Pasquin_, in
+which the foes of Queen Common Sense are for the moment triumphant. The
+side boxes are well filled; and in one of them Mr Pope's deformed figure,
+apparently, turns away, declaring: "There is no whitewashing this stuff."
+The curious may find another plate by Hogarth in which Pope _is_ busy
+whitewashing Lord Burlington; but the drift of the remark for the
+Opposition drama of _Pasquin_ seems obscure. The gains that accrued to
+Fielding from the success of _Pasquin_ are indicated by another rare
+print, that entitled the _Judgement of the Queen o' Common Sense.
+Addressed to Henry Fielding Esqre._ Here, again, it is _Pasquin's_ satire
+on the prevailing furore for pantomime that is chiefly illustrated; as
+Common Sense gives to Rich, the harlequin, a halter, while to Fielding she
+accords an overflowing purse. Supporting Fielding are a long lean
+Shakespeare, and two figures, possibly the distinguished players Kitty
+Clive and Quin; on the opposite side, behind Harlequin, are figures
+representing the bad clergy, lawyers, and doctors satirised in the
+_Tragedy_; and the whole is balanced by the emergence of the ghost in
+Hamlet, from a trap door in the foreground. Doggerel verses, at the foot
+of the print, celebrate the arrival of a bard, "from ye Great Mogul,"
+bringing with him _Wit, Humour, and Satyr_, and receiving the Queen's
+"honest favour," in "show'rs of gold."
+
+Under those golden showers, and with the applause of 'all the fashionable
+Squares' ringing in his ears, we may leave Mr Pasquin. Fielding's first
+venture as political dramatist and theatrical manager had proved
+brilliantly successful; his little theatre, like his own Tom Thumb, had
+assailed a dozen giant abuses, an all-powerful Minister among them, and
+the town had applauded the courage and wit of the performance. In the
+following season, those same boards were to witness the author of
+_Pasquin_ "laying about him" with an even greater political audacity.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Content, doubtless, with the success of _Pasquin_, Fielding does not seem
+to have launched any further political attacks during the remaining months
+of 1736. A newspaper advertisement of June announces the intention of the
+'Great Mogul's Company of Comedians' to continue "playing twice a week
+during the summer season," and _Pasquin_ remained occasionally in the
+bills as late as the 2nd of July. The public were advised that "This is
+much the coolest House in Town"; and audiences must have been drawn even
+in August, for in that month one small and presumably party play was
+performed, the _New Comi-Tragical Interlude call'd the Deposing and Death
+of Queen Gin_. This little piece consisted of only two scenes, and was
+probably a skit on a Bill "against spirituous liquors" which Walpole had
+supported earlier in the year. The measure met with violent opposition,
+including petitions from the Liverpool and Bristol merchants; and in view
+of Sir Robert's own notorious excesses with the bottle a temperance Bill
+from his hands may well have roused Fielding's ironic laughter. The
+authorship of the satire is unknown; but the moral appears to have been
+unexceptionable, as _Queen Gin_, in the final scene, "drinks a great
+quantity of liquor and at last dies."
+
+Fielding clearly began his second year at the 'little theatre' with some
+social or political exhortation, as the following bill appears for
+January:--"By a Company of Comedians, At the New Theatre in the Haymarket,
+this Day, January 26, will be presented a Dramatick Satire on the Times
+(never performed before) call'd The Mirrour." By February "the Original
+Company who perform'd _Pasquin_" are notified on the bills; and on the 2nd
+of March a performance is announced of a _Dramatick Tale of the King and
+the Miller of Mansfield_, presumably the same _Miller of Mansfield_ openly
+declared by one of Walpole's "hired scribblers" to be aimed at the
+overthrow of the Ministry. [6] All such preliminary skirmishes, however,
+served but to introduce the grand attack of the _Historical Register for
+the Tear 1736_, the first performance of which may be assigned to the end
+of March 1737. [7]
+
+In the _Register_ we have the most complete display of Fielding's vigour
+as a fighting politician. Here, to recur to Mr Pasquin's characteristic
+phrase, he "lays about him" with a gusto and honest frankness quite lost
+among our own tepid conventions. But however hard the hitting, however
+boisterous the broad humour, however biting the irony, it is noteworthy
+that in this his chief political satire, written moreover for a yet
+unregulated stage, Fielding never stoops to the shameless personalities of
+his day. The fashion of the eighteenth-century permitted even the great
+and classical genius of Pope to hurl lines at the persons of his opponents
+that, to modern ears, scarcely bear quotation. Fielding, as we know,
+constantly asserted his intention of throwing not at the vicious but at
+vice; and accordingly, even in this party play, flung openly in the face
+of the Minister, there is but one reference (and that only a fling at his
+"lack of any the least taste in polite literature") to the notorious
+personal failings of Sir Robert. It is against the Minister, and not the
+man, that the hot-blooded Opposition dramatist directs his humour and his
+irony. Fielding's manly and generous nature here permitted no virulent
+personalities to blacken his pages. [8]
+
+The irony of the _Register_ is chiefly reserved for the _Dedication to the
+Public_, designed for the reader at leisure; though here Walpole is
+indicated broadly enough, first in the figure of an ass hung out on a
+signpost, and again as "Old Nick," for "who but the devil could act such a
+part." Here the attacks of the Ministerial papers are parried by ironic
+explanations that "The Register is a ministerial pamphlet calculated to
+infuse into the minds of the people a great opinion of their ministry,"
+explanations full of admirable fencing and excellent hits. And in these
+dedicatory pages Fielding utters a sonorous warning to his countrymen
+concerning the insidious policy that was undermining their very
+constitution: "... Here is the danger, here is the rock on which our
+constitution must, if it ever does split. The liberties of a people have
+been subdued by conquests of valour and force, and have been betrayed by
+the subtle and dexterous arts of refined policy, but these are rare
+instances; for geniuses of this kind are not the growth of every age,
+whereas if a general corruption be once introduced, and those, who should
+be the guardians and bulwarks of our liberty, once find or think they find
+an interest in giving it up, no great capacity will be required to destroy
+it. On the contrary the meanest, lowest, dirtiest fellow, if such an one
+should ever have the assurance in future ages to mimick power, and
+browbeat his betters, will be as able as Machiavel himself could have
+been, to root out the liberties of the bravest people." From the
+solemnities of the _Dedication_ we come to the "humming deal of satire,"
+and the boisterous action, of the play itself. As in the case of _Pasquin_
+the form of the drama is that of a rehearsal, a form which affords
+excellent opportunities for such explanatory asides as that addressed to
+the critic who complains of the attempt to review a year's events in a
+single play: "Sir," says the author, "if I comprise the whole actions of a
+year in half an hour, will you blame me, or those who have done so little
+in that time?" The long years of Walpole's power were admittedly "years
+without parallel in our history, for political stagnation." Scene one
+discovers five 'blundering blockheads' of politicians, in counsel with one
+silent "little gentleman yonder in the chair;" who knows all and says
+nothing, and whose politics lie so deep that "nothing but an inspir'd
+understanding can come at 'em." The blockheads, however, have capacity
+enough to snatch hastily at the money lying on their council table.
+Walpole's jealousy of power, it may be remembered, had driven almost every
+man of ability out of his ministry. Then comes a vivacious parody on the
+fashionable auctions of the day. Lots comprising "a most curious remnant
+of Political Honesty," a "delicate piece of Patriotism," and a "very clear
+Conscience which has been worn by a judge and a bishop" and on which no
+dirt will stick, go for little or nothing, while Lot 8, "a very
+considerable quantity of Interest at Court," excites brisk bidding, and is
+finally knocked down for one thousand pounds. From the excellent fooling
+of the auction, the action suddenly changes to combined satire on the
+Ministry and on the two Cibbers, father and son. The Ministry are
+ingeniously implied to have been damn'd by the public; to give places with
+no attention to the capacity of the recipient; and to laugh at the dupes
+by whose money they live. A like weakness for putting blockheads in office
+and for giving places to rogues, and a like contempt of the public, is
+allegorically conveyed in the third act, in which 'Apollo' casts the parts
+for a performance among sundry unworthy actors, and declares that the
+people may grumble 'as much as they please, as long as we get their
+money.' "There sir," cries the author to the critic of the rehearsal, "is
+the sentiment of a great man." The _Great Man_ was a phrase, to use Pope's
+words, "by common use appropriated to the first minister"--that is, to
+Walpole. In the next scene the effrontery of the piece culminates in a
+ballet where the Prime Minister appears, leading a chorus of false
+patriots, who, to use Fielding's own words, are set in the 'odious and
+contemptible light' of a set of "cunning self-interested fellows who for a
+little paltry bribe would give up the liberties and properties of their
+country." These worthy patriots are of four types, the noisy, the
+cautious, the self-interested (he whose shop is his country) and the
+indolent ("who acts as I have seen a prudent man in company, fall asleep
+at the beginning of a fray and never wake 'till the end o't"). To them
+enters Quidam, unblushingly announced in the play bill as "Quidam, Anglice
+a Certain Person," in other words Walpole himself. Quidam pours gold into
+the pockets of the four patriots, drinks with them, and then, when the
+'bottle is out' (a too frequent occurrence at Sir Robert's table) takes up
+his fiddle, strikes up a tune and dances off, the patriots dancing after
+him. But even this is not all. "Sir," says the author, "every one of these
+patriots have a hole in their pockets as Mr Quidam the fiddler there
+knows; so that he intends to make them dance 'till all the money is fall'n
+through, which he will pick up again and so not lose one halfpenny by his
+generosity...." We may suppose that the final scene lost nothing in
+breadth by the acting of Quidam; and it is not surprising that the
+immediate result was the subjugation not, alas! of the Ministry, but of
+the liberty of the stage. Walpole's fall was delayed for three years; the
+destruction of the political stage was accomplished in three months.
+
+It is difficult to imagine that any party, in those days of comparatively
+arbitrary power, would venture a public satire so unveiled and so menacing
+as that of the _Register_, unless supported by some confidence in the
+immediate fall of their opponents. Without such confidence the political
+tactics of such an onslaught would be simple foolhardiness. Signs of these
+false hopes are not wanting in the slight, but equally bold, satire on the
+sycophants represented as composing Walpole's _levée_, which was shortly
+added to the _Register_. This little sketch, in which a protest concerning
+the damning, early in the year, of Fielding's ballad farce _Eurydice_ is
+combined with the political satire, was advertised as follows:--
+
+    "EURYDICE HISS'D: or, a Word to the Wise, giving an Account of
+    the Rise, Progress, Greatness, and Downfal of Mr Pillage, ... with
+    the dreadful Consequence and Catastrophe of the whole." [9]
+
+We have the authority of Tom Davies, at7 this time a member of Fielding's
+company, for the statement that "Fielding in his _Eurydice Hiss'd_ had
+brought on the Minister [Walpole] in a _levée_ scene" [10]; and as Pillage
+is the "very great man" who holds the _levée_ in the fragment, the above
+allusion to an expected downfall of Walpole's Ministry seems obvious.
+Passages of similar import to the advertisement occur in the piece itself.
+Thus the play is declared to convey a "beautiful image of the instability
+of human greatness"; and the spectacle is promised of the 'author of a
+mighty farce' at the pinnacle of human greatness and adored by a crowd of
+dependants, become by a sudden turn of fortune, scorned, "deserted and
+abandon'd."
+
+The single scene of the play opens when Pillage is at the zenith of his
+power; a stage direction orders that "The Lèvee enters, and range
+themselves to a ridiculous tune"; a partition of places ensues under the
+allegory of the business arrangements of a theatrical manager; and the
+author explains that by this _levée_ scene he hopes that persons greater
+than author-managers may learn to despise sycophants. Close on the heels
+of the _levée_ comes the catastrophe. Not one honest man, Pillage sadly
+admits, is on his side; as his 'shallow plot' opens out the first applause
+changes to hisses; his farce is damn'd; and he himself is left consoling
+the solitude of his downfall by getting exceedingly drunk on a third
+bottle.
+
+The figure of a fallen Minister boozing away his own intolerable
+reflections, was not calculated to pacify that notoriously hard drinker,
+Sir Robert, already soundly pilloried in the _Register_, and severely
+indited by _Pasquin_. By the end of April the _Register_ had reached its
+thirty-first performance, a good run at that date; and according to an
+advertisement in the _Craftsman_ the satire was still being played on the
+7th of May. In little more than four weeks, and after the alleged
+perpetration of a treasonable and profane farce called _The Golden Rump_,
+a Bill for stifling the liberty of the stage under a censorship was
+introduced, had passed through both Houses, and received the royal assent.
+Well might Lord Chesterfield exclaim in the brilliant speech which, in
+Smollet's words, "will ever endear his character to all the friends of
+genius and literature, to all those who are warmed with zeal for the
+liberties of their country," that the Bill was not only "of a very
+extraordinary nature, but has been brought in at a very extraordinary
+season and pushed with very extraordinary despatch." Concerning the nature
+of the measure Chesterfield had no doubt. He saw its tendency towards
+restraining the "liberty of the Press which will be a long stride towards
+the destruction of Liberty itself"; he pointed out that a Minister who has
+merited the esteem of the people will neither fear the wit nor feel the
+satire of the theatre; he denounced the subjugation of the stage under "an
+arbitrary Court license" which would convert it into a canal for conveying
+the vices and follies of "great men and Courtiers" through the whole
+kingdom; he protested against the Bill as an encroachment not only on
+liberty but also on property, for "Wit, my Lords, is a sort of property;
+it is the property of those that have it, and too often the only property
+that they have to depend on."
+
+As a manager of the intrepid little theatre in the Haymarket, as well as
+the author of the most successful of the offending plays, the Licensing
+Act fell with double weight on Fielding. "When I speak against the Bill,"
+cried Chesterfield, "I must think I plead the cause of Wit, I plead the
+cause of Humour, I plead the cause of the British Stage, and of every
+gentleman of taste in the Kingdom." Looking back over two centuries, we
+honour Chesterfield in that, unknown to himself, he also pleaded the cause
+of the greatest of English humourists. But appeals on behalf of genius and
+freedom were thrown away upon Walpole; the Act received the royal assent
+on June 21 1737; and, in the honourable company of Wit, Humour, and Taste,
+Fielding was forced to retire from the theatre, on the boards of which he
+had for two years so vigorously assailed Ministerial corruption and
+autocracy.
+
+[1] _Works of Henry Fielding_, Edited by Edmund Gosse. Introduction,
+p. xxi.
+
+[2] _Life of Garrick_. T. Davies. 1780, vol. i. p. 223.
+
+[3] _Notitia Dramatica_, MSS. Dept. British Museum, speaks of _Pasquin_ as
+performed for the fortieth time on April 21, 1736: and quotes an
+advertisement of the play for March 5. There seems to be no record of the
+actual first night.
+
+[4] Rich appears to have been the manager at Covent Garden from 1733 to
+1761.
+
+[5] _Autobiography of Mrs Delany._ 1861. Vol I. p. 554.
+
+[6] See Fielding's ironic reference to such "iniquitous surmises" in the
+Dedication to the _Historical Register_.
+
+[7] The earliest newspaper reference, so far available, is that of the
+_Daily Journal_ for April 6 1737, which speaks of April 11 as the ninth
+day of the _Register_.
+
+[8] In the succeeding Epilogue of _Eurydice Hiss'd_ it must be admitted
+that Sir Robert's love of the bottle is broadly satirised.
+
+[9] _Daily Advertiser_, April 29. 1737.
+
+[10] _Life of Garrick_, T. Davies, vol. ii. p. 206.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+HOMESPUN DRAMA
+
+    "Virtue distrest in humble state support."
+    Prologue to _Fatal Curiosity_.
+
+The Licensing Act of June 1737 thus brought Henry Fielding's career as
+political dramatist to a hasty conclusion; a conclusion quite unforeseen
+by the luckless author, as appears from his _Dedication_ to the
+_Historical Register_, published almost at the moment when the Act became
+law: "The very great indulgence you have shown my performances at the
+little theatre these two last years," he says, addressing his public,
+"have encouraged me to the proposal of a subscription for carrying on that
+theatre, for beautifying and enlarging it, and procuring a better company
+of actors."
+
+Before finally losing sight of the stage on which _Pasquin_ and the
+_Register_ had scored such signal success, we may notice some minor
+incidents of these two years of Fielding's administration. His company
+does not seem to have included either Macklin, Quin, or Kitty Clive; but
+that distinguished actress Mrs Pritchard, the central figure of Hogarth's
+charming group called "The Green Room, Drury Lane," is said to have made
+her first appearance on his boards, [1] and his players also included that
+man of many parts Tom Davies. Davies was a student of Edinburgh
+University; an actor at Drury Lane and elsewhere; a bookseller of whom the
+elder D'Israeli said 'all his publications were of the best kind'; the
+writer of various works including a _Life of Garrick_; and a particular
+friend of Dr Johnson. In the first year of Fielding's management in the
+Haymarket, Davies was cast for a principal part in George Lillo's tragedy
+_Fatal Curiosity_; and it is to his pen that we owe the only known
+contemporary reference to the active part taken by Fielding himself in the
+affairs of his theatre.
+
+Lillo, a jeweller of Moorfields, had captured the town, a few years
+previously, by his tragedy of common life, _George Barnwell_; and among
+the dramatists selected by Fielding for representation on his stage the
+most interesting is undoubtedly this pioneer of the coming revolution in
+English literature. For, incredible as it may seem, until that first
+performance of _Barnwell_, no writer, to quote Tom Davies' own words "had
+ventured to descend so low as to introduce the character of a merchant or
+his apprentice into a tragedy." Certain "witty and facetious persons who
+call themselves the town," continues Davies, brought to the first night
+copies of the old ballad on which the jeweller's play was based, meaning
+to mock the new tragedy with the old song; but so forcible and pathetic
+were Lillo's scenes that these merry gentlemen were obliged "to throw away
+their ballads, and take out their handkerchiefs." More tears, we learn,
+were shed over this 'homespun drama' than at all the imitations of ancient
+fables by learned moderns. To Fielding this revolution, from the buskin'd
+heroics of the Alexanders and Clelias to the living and natural pathos of
+the tragedy of a poor London apprentice, must have appealed with
+extraordinary force; for it is the especial glory of his own genius that,
+throwing aside all the traditions of his age, and 'adventuring on one of
+the most original expeditions that ever a writer undertook,' [2] he was to
+discover a new world for English fiction, the world of simple human
+nature. That expedition must have been already forming in his mind when,
+night after night, in the hottest part of the year, _George Barnwell_ was
+playing to crowded houses, and convincing the astonished audiences of 1731
+that even so low a creature as a London apprentice was possessed of
+passions extremely like their own. Some ten years later, when Fielding
+revealed the first true sign of his own surpassing genius in the _History
+of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews_, he chose for his hero a country
+footman. The worthy City jeweller was, in his own limited measure, the
+forerunner, on the stage, of that new era in English literature created by
+honest Andrews and Parson Adams, Partridge and Mrs Slipslop, Fanny and
+Sergeant Atkinson, Tow-wouse and Mrs Miller, to name but a few of
+Fielding's immortal portraits, drawn from the 'vast authentic book of
+Nature.'
+
+It is no wonder then, to return to Tom Davies, that a play by Lillo was
+announced on the bills of Fielding's theatre within a few months of the
+opening of his management. On May 27, 1736, the following advertisement
+appeared:
+
+    "Guilt its Own Punishment. Never Acted before. By Pasquin's
+    Company of Comedians. Being a True Story in Common Life and the
+    Incidents extremely affecting." By the Author of George Barnwell.
+
+Davies' part in the play was a chief one, that of young Wilmot, and the
+story of the performance may be given in his own words. "Mr Fielding, who
+had a just sense of our author's merit, and who had often in his humourous
+pieces laughed at those ridiculous and absurd criticks who could not
+possibly understand the merit of Barnwell, because the subject was low,
+treated Lillo with great politeness and friendship. He took upon himself
+the management of the play and the instruction of the actors. It was
+during the rehearsal of the _Fatal Curiosity_ that I had an opportunity to
+see and to converse with Mr Lillo. Plain and simple as he was in his
+address, his manner of conversing was modest affable and engaging. When
+invited to give his opinion how a particular sentiment should be uttered
+by the actor he expresst himself in the gentlest and most obliging terms,
+and conveyed instruction and conviction with good nature and good
+manners.... Fielding was not content merely to revise the 'Fatal
+Curiosity,' and to instruct the actors how to do justice to their parts.
+He warmly recommended the play to his friends and to the public. Besides
+all this he presented the author with a well written prologue."
+
+This _Prologue_, which has apparently hitherto escaped the collectors of
+Fielding's _Works_, seems worthy of a reprint here, if only for its
+characteristic sympathy with virtue and distress 'in humble state,' and
+for the opening tribute to 'Shakespeare's nature' and to 'Fletcher's
+ease.'
+
+PROLOGUE TO THE FATAL CURIOSITY
+
+  "The Tragic Muse has long forgot to please
+  With Shakespeare's nature or with Fletcher's ease:
+  No passion mov'd, thro' five long acts you sit,
+  Charm'd with the poet's language or his wit.
+  Fine things are said, no matter whence they fall;
+  Each single character must speak them all.
+
+  "But from this modern fashionable way
+  To-night our author begs your leave to stray.
+  No fustian hero rages here to-night,
+  No armies fall to fix a tyrant's right:
+  From lower life we draw our scenes' distress:
+  --Let not your equals move your pity less!
+  Virtue distrest in humble state support;
+  Nor think she never lives without the court.
+
+  "Tho' to our scenes no royal robes belong
+  And tho' our little stage as yet be young
+  Throw both your scorn and prejudice aside;
+  Let us with favour not contempt be try'd,
+  Thro' the first act a kind attention lend
+  The growing scene shall force you to attend:
+  Shall catch the eyes of every tender fair,
+  And make them charm their lovers with a tear.
+  The lover too by pity shall impart
+  His tender passion to his fair one's heart:
+  The breast which others' anguish cannot move
+  Was ne'er the seat of friendship or of love."
+
+
+Notwithstanding all the manager's friendly efforts, the play met at first
+with very little success, a failure in Davies' opinion "owing in all
+probability to its being brought on in the latter part of the season, when
+the public had been satiated with a long run of _Pasquin_," but, he adds,
+"it is with pleasure I observe that Fielding generously persisted to serve
+the man whom he had once espoused; he tacked the 'Fatal Curiosity' to his
+Historical Register which was played with great success in the ensuing
+winter." [3]  We owe no inconsiderable debt to Tom Davies in that he has
+preserved for us this picture of Fielding, actively engaged in the
+stage-management of his little theatre; a picture, moreover, that does
+equal honour to the brilliant wit, the successful political satirist, and
+to that modest, gentle Nonconformist poet, the man of whom it was said
+that he "had the spirit of an old Roman joined to the innocence of a
+Primitive Christian," George Lillo.
+
+A few weeks before the production of Lillo's tragedy, and while _Pasquin_
+was still in the full tide of political success, an event occurred of
+closer import to Fielding's affectionate nature than all the applause of
+the Opposition and the town. This was the birth, in April, 1736, of his
+daughter Charlotte. No English writer has left more charming pictures of
+mother and child than those we owe to the tenderness and simplicity of
+Fielding's pen. When we find Squire Western turning, in his latter days,
+to Sophia's nursery, and hear him declaring that the prattling of his
+granddaughter is "sweeter Music than the finest Cry of Dogs in _England_"
+when we see Captain Booth stretched at full length on the floor of his
+poor lodgings, with his "little innocents" jumping over him, we are almost
+inclined to forgive alike the brutalities of the old foxhunter, and the
+weaknesses of the young soldier. Fielding's affection for his children,
+his apprehensions for their ultimate provision, his anxiety in their
+sickness, his grief at the loss of a little daughter, are manifest in his
+pages. If anything could exceed the satisfaction which the brilliant
+success of _Pasquin_ must have given to his buoyant nature, it would be
+the birth of this, the first child apparently, of his marriage with the
+beautiful Charlotte Cradock. The entry in the registers of St Martin's in
+the Fields runs as follows: Baptized May 19th, 1736 Charlotte Fielding, of
+Henry and Charlotte, Born April 27th.
+
+The dates of _Pasquin_, of Lillo's tragedy, and of the _Historical
+Register_, cover a considerable portion of the years 1736, 1737, and their
+production in a theatre under Fielding's own management practically
+presupposes his presence in London at that time. This by no means fits in
+with Murphy's implication that Fielding retired to Stour on his marriage,
+and that, remaining there, he ran through his "little patrimony," in "less
+than three years." A complete country retirement cannot be assigned to
+those busy years in the Haymarket; and in 1736 the journey from London to
+Dorsetshire was no trifling undertaking. But it seems quite possible that
+Fielding and his wife went down to their small estate in Dorsetshire for
+part or all of the summer, autumn and winter of both 1736 and 1737. This
+would cover the hunting months, and "hounds and horses," according to
+Murphy, filled a large part in Fielding's country life at Stour; the time
+would be that of the comparatively dull season for the theatre in the
+Haymarket; and, with the year immediately preceding _Pasquin_, we should
+thus, perhaps, account sufficiently for Murphy's "three years". Certain
+passages in the _Miscellanies_, published long after the pleasant meadows
+and the modest house at Stour--no less than the turmoil of the green-room
+and the crowded political audiences in the Haymarket--were things of the
+past, have a personal ring, reminiscent perhaps of such months of "sweet
+Retirement" in Dorsetshire. Thus one of the characters in the _Journey
+from this World to the next_ recalls the change, from a life of "restless
+Anxieties," to a "little pleasant Country House, where there was nothing
+grand or superfluous, but everything neat and agreeable"; and how, after a
+little time, "I began to share the Tranquillity that visibly appeared in
+everything round me. I set myself to do Works of Fancy and to raise little
+Flower-Gardens, with many such innocent rural Amusements; which altho'
+they are not capable of affording any great Pleasure, yet they give that
+serene Turn of the Mind, which I think much preferable to anything else
+Human Nature is made susceptible of." To this pleasant picture of "rural
+Amusements," and tranquillity, it is surely not impertinent to add this
+further passage, as a possible echo of Charlotte Fielding's thought, well
+acquainted as she must have been both with the "sweetly winding banks of
+Stour" and with the clamorous successes of political drama: "in all these
+various Changes I never enjoyed any real Satisfaction, unless in the
+little time I lived retired in the Country free from all Noise and Hurry."
+
+In the summer or autumn of 1737 the curtain was finally rung down on all
+the 'noise and hurry,' the achievements and audacities of Fielding's
+"little stage"; a few months later, and the country retirement at Stour
+had also become but a memory of that short life into which he managed to
+compress "more variety of Scenes than many People who live to be very
+old."
+
+[1] _Life of Garrick_. T. Davies, vol. ii.
+
+[2] _Works of Henry Fielding_, edited by Edmund Gosse. Introduction, p.
+xxix.
+
+[3] _The Works of Mr George Lillo, with some Account of his Life_, T.
+Davies.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+BAR STUDENT. JOURNALIST
+
+    "the ... Covetous, the Prodigal, the Ambitious, the Voluptuous,
+    the Bully, the Vain, the Hypocrite, the Flatterer, the Slanderer,
+    call aloud   for the _Champion's_ Vengeance."
+    --The _Champion_, Dec. 22, 1739.
+
+There is no record of when or how Fielding disposed of his share in the
+management of the New Theatre in the Haymarket. But on June 21 1737,
+Walpole's Bill for regulating the stage received, as we have seen, the
+royal assent; and there can be no doubt that Sir Robert would at once
+apply his newly acquired powers to removing the dances of the fiddler, Mr
+Quiddam, and the drunken consolations of Mr Pillage, from the Haymarket
+boards, if indeed these gentlemen had not anticipated events by already
+removing themselves. We may safely assume that Henry Fielding's career as
+political dramatist came to an abrupt conclusion some time in the summer
+of 1737. [1]
+
+It remains a matter for speculation why, after seven years spent in
+producing a stream of not unsuccessful social comedies and farces, leading
+up to a final and brilliant success in the field of political satiric
+drama, Fielding should have thrown up the stage as a whole, when suddenly
+debarred from those party onslaughts which had occupied but a fraction of
+his dramatic energies. The cause was not any lack of popularity. "The
+farces written by Mr Fielding," wrote Murphy in 1762, "were almost all of
+them very successful, and many of them are still acted every winter, with
+a continuance of approbation." And it is obvious that the fashionable
+vices and follies of the time afforded ample inducement to a satiric
+dramatist to continue 'laying about him,' even when Ministerial offences
+had been rendered inviolate by Act of Parliament. Neither was Fielding's
+sanguine temperament likely to be daunted by the single failure of his
+farce _Eurydice_, which had been damned at Drury Lane on February 19 of
+this same year: "disagreeable impressions," Murphy tells us, "never
+continued long upon his mind." The most satisfactory solution of the
+matter seems to be that now, in the approaching maturity of his powers,
+the 'Father of the English Novel' was becoming conscious that the true
+field for his genius lay in a hitherto unattempted form of imaginative
+narration, and not within the five acts of comedy or farce. The entirely
+original conceptions of a _Joseph Andrews_ and a _Jonathan Wild_ may
+already have begun to captivate the vigorous energies of his mind. We have
+his own word for assigning "some years" to the writing of _Tom Jones_; it
+is therefore not unreasonable to suppose that the conception of the first
+English "Comic Epic Poem in Prose" may date as far back as the summer of
+1737.
+
+Leaving surmise for fact, it is certain that this year marks the dividing
+line in Fielding's life.
+
+Henceforth he ceases to be the witty, facile, popular dramatist; and he
+enters slowly on his birthright as the first in time, if not in genius, of
+English novelists. To this complete severance from the theatre belongs his
+own remark that "he left off writing for the stage when he ought to have
+begun." Arrived at a late maturity, and with accumulated stores of
+observation and insight,--"he saw the latent sources of human action,"
+says Murphy--his genius happily turned into a channel carved, with
+splendid originality, for itself alone. After nine years of servitude to
+the limitations of dramatic construction, limitations he was wont to
+relieve, as his friend James Harris tells us, by "pleasantly though
+perhaps rather freely" _damning the man who invented fifth acts_, Fielding
+was now soon to discover his freedom in the spacious, hitherto
+unadventured, regions of prose fiction. But genius, especially genius with
+wife and child to support, cannot maintain life on inspiration alone; and,
+accordingly, the ex-dramatist now flung himself, with characteristic
+impetuosity and courage, into a struggle for independence at the Bar,
+perhaps the most arduous profession, under all the circumstances, that he
+could have chosen. For a reputation as the writer of eighteen comedies,
+and as the reckless political dramatist whose boisterous energies had set
+the town ringing with _Pasquin_ and the _Register_, the fame in short of
+being the successful manager of _The Great Mogul's Company of Comedians_,
+was surely the last reputation in the world to bring a man briefs from
+cautious attorneys. And, with whatever hopes of political patronage, any
+temperament less buoyant might well have hesitated to embark on reading
+for the Bar at the age of thirty. But "by dificulties," says his earliest
+biographer, "his resolution was never subdued; on the contrary they only
+roused him to struggle through them with a peculiar spirit and
+magnanimity." So, within six months of the closing down of his little
+theatre under Walpole's irate hand, Fielding had formally entered himself
+as a student at the Middle Temple.
+
+The entry in the books of that society runs as follows:--
+
+    [574 G] 1 Nov'ris. 1737.
+
+    _Henricus Fielding, de East Stour in Com Dorset Ar, filius et
+    haeres apparens Brig: Gen'lis: Edmundi Fielding admissus est in
+    Societatem Medii Templi Lond specialiter at obligatur una cum &c.
+
+    Et dat pro fine_ 4. 0. 0.
+
+Of the ensuing two and a half years of student life in the Temple we know
+practically nothing, beyond one vivacious picture of Harry Fielding's
+attack upon the law. "His application while a student in the Temple,"
+writes Murphy, "was remarkably intense; and though it happened that the
+early taste he had taken of pleasure would occasionally return upon him,
+and conspire with his spirits and vivacity to carry him into the wild
+enjoyments of the town, yet it was particular in him that amidst all his
+dispositions nothing could suppress the thirst he had for knowledge, and
+the delight he felt in reading; and this prevailed in him to such a
+degree, that he has been frequently known by his intimates, to retire late
+at night from a tavern to his chambers, and there read and make extracts
+from the most abstruse authors, for several hours before he went to bed;
+so powerful were the vigour of his constitution and the activity of his
+mind."
+
+One of the few pages of Fielding's autograph that have come down to us is
+presumably a relic of these student days. In the catalogue of the
+_Morrison Manuscripts_ occurs this description of two undated pages in his
+hand: "List of offences against the King and his state immediately, which
+the Law terms High Treason. Offences against him in a general light as
+touching the Commonwealth at large, as Trade etc. Offences against him as
+supreme Magistrate etc." Were ever genius and wit more straitly or more
+honourably shackled than that of Henry Fielding, gallantly accepting such
+toil as this, toil moreover that must have weighed with double weight on a
+man who had spent nine years in the company of those charming if 'fickle
+jades' the Muses.
+
+All efforts have failed to trace where Fielding and his wife and child (or
+children--the date of the birth of his daughter Harriet is not known)
+lived during these laborious months; but that money was needed in the
+summer following his entry at the Middle Temple may be inferred from the
+sale of the property at Stour. According to the legal note of this
+transaction, [2] "Henry ffeilding and Charlotte his wife" conveyed, in the
+Trinity Term of 1738, to one Thomas Hayter, for the sum of £260, "two
+messuages, two dove-houses, three gardens, three orchards, fifty acres of
+Land, eighty acres of meadow, one hundred and forty acres of pasture, ten
+acres of wood and common and pasture for all manner of cattle with the
+appurtenances in East Stour." It does not need a very active imagination
+to realise the keen regret with which Fielding must have parted with his
+gardens and orchards, his pastures, woods and commons. Sixty years ago the
+barn and one of the "dove-houses" had been but recently pulled down; and
+to this day the estate is still known as "Fielding's Farm." [3]
+
+It has been stated, on what authority does not appear, that, after leaving
+Stour, Fielding went to Salisbury, and there bought a house, his solicitor
+being a Mr John Perm Tinney. Whatever be the fact as to the Salisbury
+residence, it is certain that a full year after the sale of the
+Dorsetshire property the Temple student was by no means at the end of his
+resources. For in the following letter [4] to Mr Nourse, the bookseller,
+dated July 1739, we find him requiring a London house at a rent of forty
+pounds and with a large "eating Parlour."
+
+
+"Mr Nourse,
+
+Disappointments have hitherto prevented my paying y'r Bill, which, I
+shall certainly do on my coming to Town which will be next Month. I
+desire the favour of y'u to look for a House for me near the Temple. I
+must have one large eating Parlour in it for the rest shall not be very
+nice.
+
+Rent not upwards of £40 p. an: and as much cheaper as may be. I will take
+a Lease for Seven years. Yr Answer to this within a fortnight will much
+oblige.
+
+Y'r Humble Serv't
+
+Henry Ffielding.
+
+I have got Cro: Eliz. [5]
+
+"July 9th 1739."
+
+This note, written a year before Fielding's call to the Bar, suggests
+that his early married life was by no means spent in the "wretched
+garrett" of Lady Louisa Stuart's celebrated reminiscence.
+
+In the September following the sale of his Dorsetshire estate Fielding had
+to regret the death of George Lillo, to whose success he had devoted so
+much personal care and energy, when staging Lillo's tragedy _Fatal
+Curiosity_ on the boards of the little theatre in the Haymarket. The close
+relationship in intellectual sympathy between Lillo's talent and the
+genius of Fielding has already been noticed. But apart from this
+intellectual sympathy, the personal worth and charm of the good tradesman
+is noteworthy, as affording striking proof of the quality of man chosen by
+the 'wild Harry Fielding' for regard and friendship. And it should be
+remembered that in those days to bridge the social gulf between the
+kinsman of the Earl of Denbigh and a working jeweller, required courage as
+well as insight. Some time after Lillo's death a generous memorial notice
+of him appeared in Fielding's paper the _Champion_. The writer detects in
+his work "an Heart capable of exquisitely Feeling and Painting human
+Distresses, but of causing none"; and declares that his title to be called
+the best tragic poet of his age, "was the least of his Praise, he had the
+gentlest and honestest Manners, and, at the same Time, the most friendly
+and obliging. He had a perfect Knowledge of Human Nature, though his
+Contempt of all base Means of Application, which are the necessary Steps
+to great Acquaintance, restrained his Conversation within very narrow
+Bounds: He had the Spirit of an old _Roman_, joined to the Innocence of a
+primitive Christian; he was content with his little State of Life, in
+which his excellent Temper of Mind gave him an Happiness, beyond the Power
+of Riches, and it was necessary for his Friends to have a sharp Insight
+into his Want of their Services, as well as good Inclinations or Abilities
+to serve him. In short he was one of the best of Men, and those who knew
+him best will most regret his Loss." [6] In the excellent company of Henry
+Fielding's friends George Lillo may surely take his stand beside the 'good
+Lord Lyttelton,' the munificent and pious Allen, and not far from 'Parson
+Adams' himself.
+
+No record has survived of Fielding's share in the political struggles of
+his party, during his first two years of "intense application" to the law.
+Walpole's power had been sensibly lessened by the death of the Queen, and
+he was losing the support of the country and even of the trading classes.
+The Prince of Wales, now openly hostile to the "great man," was the
+titular head of an Opposition numbering almost all the men of wit and
+genius in the kingdom. Lyttelton, Fielding's warmest friend, had become
+secretary to the Prince, and was recognised as a fluent leader of the
+Opposition in the House of Commons. Another friend, John Duke of Argyll,
+had joined the ranks of the Opposition in the Lords. On the whole the
+author of _Pasquin_, may well have hoped for a speedy fall of the
+"Colossos," with "its Brains of Lead, its Face of Brass, its Hands of
+Iron, its Heart of Adamant," and the accession to power of a party not
+without obligations to the fearless manager of the little theatre in the
+Haymarket. During these years the Opposition, even though supported by
+Pope and Chesterfield, Thomson and Bolingbroke, could scarcely fail to
+utilise the trenchant scorn, the whole-hearted vigour, the boisterous
+humour, of Fielding's genius; and Murphy, speaking vaguely of Fielding's
+legal years, says that a "large number of fugitive political tracts, which
+had their value when the incidents were actually passing on the great
+scene of business, came from his pen." It is not however till November
+1739, two years and a half after the pillorying of Walpole on the
+Haymarket boards, that Fielding is again clearly seen, 'laying about' him,
+in those clamourous eighteenth-century politics.
+
+His choice of a new weapon of attack is foreshadowed in the noble
+concluding words of the _Introduction_ to the _Historical Register_; words
+written on the very eve of the Ministerial Bill gagging that and all other
+political plays: "If nature hath given me any talents at ridiculing vice
+and imposture, I shall not be indolent, nor afraid of exerting them, while
+the liberty of the press and stage subsists, that is to say while we have
+any liberty left among us." A few weeks after these words were published
+the liberty of the stage was triumphantly stifled by Walpole's Licensing
+Bill. But even "old Bob" himself dared not lay his hand on the liberty of
+the British Press; and so we find Mr Pasquin reappearing under the guise,
+or in the company, of the _Champion and Censor of Great Britain_,
+otherwise one _Captain Hercules Vinegar_, a truculent avenger of wrong and
+exponent of virtue, in whose fictitious name a political, literary, and
+didactic newspaper entered the field of party politics on November 15,
+1739. The paper, under the title of the _Champion_, was issued three times
+a week, and consisted of one leading article, an anti-Ministerial summary
+of news, and literary notices of new books. The first number announced
+that the author and owner was the said Captain Hercules Vinegar, and that
+the Captain would be aided in various departments by members of his
+family. Thus the Captain's wife, Mrs Joan Vinegar, a matron of a very
+loquacious temper, was to undertake the ladies' column, and his son Jack
+was to have "an Eye over the gay Part of the Town." The criticism was to
+be conducted by Mr Nol Vinegar who was reported to have spent one whole
+year in examining the use of a single word in Horace. And the politics
+were to be dealt forth by the Captain's father, a gentleman intimately
+versed in kingdoms, potentates and Ministers, and of so close a
+disposition that he "seldom opens his Mouth, unless it be to take in his
+Food, or puff out the Smoke of his Tobacco."
+
+The paper bore no signed articles; but judging from an attack levelled
+against it in a pamphlet of the following year, [7] Fielding and his
+former not very worshipful partner in the Haymarket management, James
+Ralph, were the reputed "authors," Ralph being in a subordinate position.
+Thus, it is stated that Ralph, "is now say'd to be the 'Squire of the
+_British_ CHAMPION"; the writer identifies _Captain Vinegar_ and the
+author of _Pasquin_ as one and the same person; he describes Pasquin and
+Ralph as the "Authors of the Champion"; he asserts that the old Roman
+statues of Pasquin and Marfario, "are now dignified and distinguished (by
+The CHAMPION and his doughty Squire RALPH), under the Names [_sic_] of
+Captain Hercules Vinegar."; he prints an address to the "_Self-dubb'd
+Captain_ Hercules Vinegar," and his "Man _Ralph_"; and appends some
+doggerel verse entitled "Vinegar and his gang." But from all this nothing
+definite emerges as to the precise part taken by Fielding in the
+authorship of the _Champion_. The pamphleteer accredits a fragment of a
+paper signed C. to the _Captain_, and attributes two papers, [8] signed C.
+and L., to "Mr Pasquin"--_i.e._ Fielding; and as the reprint of the
+_Champion_, which appeared in 1741, announces that all papers so signed
+are the "Work of one Hand," there is so much external proof that all such
+pages in these volumes (numbering some sixty essays) are by Fielding. Dr
+Nathan Drake, writing in 1809, more than sixty years after the appearance
+of the paper, asserts, without stating his reasons, that the numbers
+marked "C." and "L." "were the work of Fielding." This view is further
+supported by the opinion of Mr Austin Dobson, that many of the papers
+signed _C._ "are unmistakably Fielding's."
+
+On the other hand Murphy, writing only twenty-two years after the
+appearance of the paper, but often with gross inaccuracy, states that the
+_Champion_ "owed its chief support to his [Fielding's] abilities," but
+that "his essays in that collection cannot now be so ascertained as to
+perpetuate them in this edition of his works." Boswell refers to Fielding
+as possessing a "share" in the paper. A manuscript copy of some of the
+Minutes of meetings of the _Champion_ partners, written out in an
+eighteenth-century handwriting, and now in the possession of the present
+writer, confirms Boswell's note, in as far as an entry therein records
+that "Henry Fielding Esq. did originally possess Two Sixteenth Shares of
+the Champion as a Writer in the said paper." One of the lists of the
+partners of the _Champion_ which occur in the same manuscript, is headed
+by the name of "Mr Fielding." Finally, a contemporary satirical print
+shows Fielding with his "length of nose and chin" and his tall figure,
+acting as standard-bearer of the _Champion_; the paper being represented
+in its political capacity of a leading Opposition organ. There is,
+moreover, the internal evidence of style and sentiment. Thus the matter
+rests; and although it is exceedingly tempting to use the _Champion_ for
+inferences as to the manner in which Fielding approached his new craft of
+journalism, and as to his attitude on the many subjects, theological,
+social, political and personal, handled in these essays, the evidence
+seems hardly sufficient to warrant such deductions. It does, however, seem
+clear, taking as evidence the shilling pamphlet already
+mentioned,[9] that Harry Fielding, the intrepid and audacious Mr Pasquin
+of 1736-7 reappeared, laying about him with his ever ready cudgel now
+raised to the dignity of a miraculous Hercules club, as the _Champion_ of
+1739-41. To all lovers of good cudgelling, whether laid on the shoulders
+of the incorrigible old cynic Sir Robert, or on those of the egregious
+Colley Cibber, or falling on the follies and abuses of the day, the
+"Pasquinades and Vinegarades" of _Captain Hercules Vinegar_, and his
+"doughty Squire Ralph," may be commended. And no fault can be found with
+the _Captain's_ declaration, when establishing a Court of Judicature for
+the trial and punishment of sundry offenders in his pages, that "whatever
+is wicked, hateful, absurd, or ridiculous, must be exposed and punished,
+before this Nation is brought to that Height of Purity and good Manners to
+which I wish to see it exalted." [10]
+
+One personal sketch of Fielding himself deserves quotation, whether drawn
+by his own hand or that of another. The _Champion_ for May 24, 1740,
+contains a vision of the Infernal Regions, where Charon, the ghostly
+boatman, is busy ferrying souls across the River Styx. The ferryman bids
+his attendant Mercury see that all his passengers embark carrying nothing
+with them; and the narrator describes how, after various Shades had
+qualified for their passage, "A tall Man came next, who stripp'd off an
+old Grey Coat with great Readiness, but as he was stepping into the Boat,
+_Mercury_ demanded half his Chin, which he utterly refused to comply with,
+insisting on it that it was all his own." Fielding's length of chin and
+nose was well known; and not less familiar, doubtless, was the 'old Grey
+Coat,' among the purlieus of the Temple.
+
+The beginning of the year 1740, when the lusty _Champion_ and his cudgel
+were well established, and _Captain Hercules'_ private legal studies were
+drawing to a close, was marked by a fresh outburst of the old feud with
+Colley Cibber. Cibber, already notorious as actor, dramatist, manager, the
+Poet Laureat of "preposterous Odes," and the 'poetical Tailor' who would
+even cut down Shakespeare himself, now appeared in the character of
+historian and biographer, publishing early in 1740 the famous _Apology for
+the Life of Mr Colley Cibber, Comedian, and late Patentee of the Theatre
+Royal. With an Historical View of the Stage during his Own Time._
+
+Cibber, soon to be scornfully chosen by Pope as dunce-hero of the
+_Dunciad_, had, for the past six years, been pilloried by Fielding; and,
+not unmindful of these onslaughts, he inserted in his new work a virulent
+attack on the late manager of the New Theatre in the Haymarket. The tenor
+of _Pasquin_ was here grossly misrepresented. Fielding was described as
+being, at the time of entering on his management, "a Broken Wit"; he was
+accused of using the basest dramatic means of profit, since "he was in
+haste to get money"; and the final insult was added by Cibber's stroke of
+referring to his enemy anonymously, as one whom "I do not chuse to name."
+
+Looking back across two centuries on to the supreme figures of Pope and
+Fielding, it is matter for some wonder that these giants of the intellect
+should have greatly troubled to annihilate a Colley Cibber. A finer
+villain, it seems to us, might have been chosen by Pope for the six
+hundred lines of his _Dunciad_ a worthier target might have drawn the
+arrows of Fielding's _Champion_. But Cibber possessed at least the art of
+arousing notable enmities; and the four slashing papers in which the
+_Champion_ [11] promptly parried the scurrilities of the _Apology_ still
+make pretty reading for those who are curious in the annals of literary
+warfare. It is noteworthy that these _Champion_ retorts are honourably
+free from the personalities of an age incredibly gross in the use of
+personal invective. Fielding's journal, even under the stinging
+provocation of the insults of the _Apology_, was still true to the
+standard set in the _Prologue_ of his first boyish play
+
+  'No private character these scenes expose.'
+
+It is Cibber's ignorance of grammar, his murder of the English tongue,
+his inflated literary conceit, rather than his 'private character' that
+are here exposed.
+
+Some time during the latter half of 1740 the whole feud between Cibber,
+Pope, Fielding and Ralph was reprinted in the shilling pamphlet, already
+referred to, entitled _The Tryal of Colley Cibber_. The collection
+concludes as follows:
+
+    "ADVERTISEMENT
+
+    "If the Ingenious _Henry Fielding_ Esq.; (Son of the Hon.
+    Lieut. General  _Fielding_, who upon his Return from his
+    Travels entered Himself of the  _Temple_ in order to study
+    the Law, and married one of the pretty Miss  _Cradocks_ of
+    _Salisbury_) will _own_ himself the AUTHOR of 18
+    strange Things  called Tragical _Comedies_ and Comical
+    _Tragedies_, lately advertised by _J. Watts_, of
+    _Wild-Court_, Printer, he shall be _mentioned_ in
+    Capitals in the _Third_ edition of Mr CIBBER'S _Life_,
+    and likewise be placed _among_ the _Poetae minores
+    Dramatici_ of the Present Age; then will both his _Name and
+    Writings be remembered on Record_ in the immortal _Poetical
+    Register_ written by Mr Giles Jacob."
+
+
+The whole production affords a lively example of the full-blooded
+pamphleteering of 1740; and throws valuable light on Fielding's repute as
+the _Champion_.
+
+As regards Ralph's collaboration with Fielding at this period (a
+collaboration further affirmed by Dr Nathan Drake's assertion, written in
+1809, that James Ralph was Fielding's chief coadjutor in that paper) it
+may be recalled that ten years previously this not very reputable American
+had provided a prologue for Fielding's early play, the _Temple Beau_; and
+that he appears again as Fielding's partner in the management of the
+Little Theatre in the Haymarket. Gradually relinquishing his theatrical
+ambitions, Ralph appears to have turned his talents to political
+journalism, and according to Tom Davies was becoming formidable as a party
+writer for the Opposition in these last years of Walpole's administration.
+Boswell tells us that Ralph ultimately succeeded Fielding in his share of
+the _Champion_; [12] but we have no definite knowledge of what precise
+part was taken by him in the earlier numbers. No continued trace occurs of
+his collaboration with Fielding; and indeed it is difficult to conceive
+any permanent alliance between Fielding's manly, independent, and generous
+nature, and the sordid and selfish character, and mediocre talents of
+James Ralph.
+
+[1] The fullest newspaper for theatrical notices at this date, preserved
+in the British Museum, the _London Daily Post_, is unfortunately missing
+for this year.
+
+[2] Now first printed, from documents at the Record Office.
+
+[3] A table inscribed by a former owner as having belonged to Henry
+Fielding, Esq., novelist, is now in the possession of the Somersetshire
+Archaeological Society. The inscription adds that Fielding "hunted from
+East Stour Farm in 1718." He would then be eleven years old!
+
+[4] From the hitherto unpublished original, in the library of Alfred Huth,
+Esq.
+
+[5] "Cro: Eliz." is the legal abbreviation for Justice Croke's law reports
+for the reign of Elizabeth.
+
+[6] _Champion_, February 26, 1740.
+
+[7] _The Tryal of Colley Cibber, Comedian etc._ 1740.
+
+[8] Those of April 22, and April 29, 1740.
+
+[9] And see _Daily Gazeteer_, Oct. 9, 1740.
+
+[10] _Champion_, December 22, 1739.
+
+[11] For April 22, April 29, May 6, and May 17.
+
+[12] Boswell's _Johnson_, edited by Birkbeck Hill. Vol. i. p. 169. n. 2:
+"Ralph ... as appears from the minutes of the partners of the _Champion_
+in the possession of Mr Reed of Staple Inn, succeeded Fielding in his
+share of the paper before the date of that eulogium [1744]."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+"COUNSELLOR FIELDING"
+
+    "Wit is generally observed to love to reside in empty pockets."
+    _Joseph Andrews_.
+
+The last retort on Colley Cibber had scarcely been launched from the
+columns of the _Champion_, when that intrepid 'Censor of Great Britain'
+and indefatigable law student, _Captain Hercules Vinegar_, attained the
+full dignities of a barrister of the Middle Temple. On June 20, 1740,
+Fielding was called to the Bar; and on the same day the Benchers of his
+Inn assigned to him chambers at No. 4 Pump Court, "up three pair of
+stairs." This assignment, according to the wording of the Temple records,
+was "for the term of his natural life." These chambers may still be seen,
+with their low ceilings and panelled walls, very much to all appearance as
+when tenanted by Harry Fielding. The windows of the sitting-room and
+bedroom look out on to the beautiful old buildings of Brick Court, and
+from the head of the staircase one looks across to the stately gilded
+sundial of Pump Court, old even in Fielding's day, with its warning motto:
+
+  "Shadows we are and like shadows depart."
+
+Here, in these lofty chambers, up their "three pair" of worn and narrow
+stairs, Fielding donned his barrister's gown, and waited for briefs; and,
+possessing as he did an imagination "fond of seizing every gay prospect,"
+and natural spirits that gave him, as his cousin Lady Mary tells us,
+cheerfulness in a garret, this summer of 1740 must have been full of
+sanguine hopes. He was now thirty-three, and his splendid physique had not
+yet become shattered by gout. He had gained, Murphy observes, no
+inconsiderable reputation by the _Champion_; his position as a brilliant
+political playwright had been long ago assured by _Pasquin_; the party to
+whose patriotic interests he had devoted so much energy and wit was now
+rapidly approaching power; and two years of eager application had equipped
+him with 'no incompetent share of learning' for a profession in which, we
+are told, he aspired to eminence. The swift disappointment of these brave
+hopes, the fast coming years of sickness, distress, and grief endow the
+old chambers with something of tragedy; but in June, 1740, the shadows
+were still but a sententious word on the dial.
+
+There is practically no surviving record of Fielding's activity as a
+barrister. From Murphy we learn that his pursuit of the law was hampered
+by want of means; and that, moreover, even his indomitable energies were
+soon often forced to yield to disabling attacks of illness. So long as his
+health permitted him he "attended with punctual assiduity" on the Western
+circuit, and in term time at Westminster Hall. But gout rapidly "began to
+make such assaults upon him as rendered it impossible for him to be as
+constant at the bar as the laboriousness of his profession required," and
+he could only follow the law in intervals of health. Under such
+"severities of pain and want" he yet made efforts for success; and the
+tribute rendered by his first biographer to the courage of those efforts
+deserves quotation in full: "It will serve to give us an idea of the great
+force of his mind, if we consider him pursuing so arduous a study under
+the exigencies of family distress, with a wife and children, whom he
+tenderly loved, looking up to him for subsistence, with a body lacerated
+by the acutest pains, and with a mind distracted by a thousand avocations
+and obliged for immediate supply to produce almost extempore a farce, a
+pamphlet, or a newspaper." Murphy's careless pen seems here to confuse the
+student years with those of assiduous effort at the Bar; and the extempore
+farces are, judging by the dates of Fielding's collected plays, no more
+than a rhetorical flourish: but there seems no reason to doubt the
+essential truth of this picture of the vigorous struggles of the sanguine,
+witty, and not unlearned barrister, ambitious of distinction, and always
+sensitively anxious as to the maintenance of his wife and children. We may
+see him attending the Western circuit in March and again in August, riding
+from Winchester to Salisbury, thence to Dorchester and Exeter, and on to
+Launceston, Taunton, Bodmin, Wells or Bristol as the case might be;
+constant in his appearance at Westminster; and supplementing his briefs by
+political pamphlets written in the service of an Opposition supported by
+the intellect and integrity of the day.
+
+It is inexplicable that no records, in the letters or diaries of his
+brother lawyers, should have come down to us of circuits, enlivened by the
+wit of Harry Fielding; that practically all traces of his professional
+work should be lost; and that concerning the many friendships which he is
+recorded to have made at the Bar we should know practically nothing beyond
+his own cordial acknowledgment of the lawyers' response, three years after
+his call, to the subscription for the _Miscellanies_. In the preface to
+those volumes he writes: "I cannot however forbear mentioning my sense of
+the Friendship shown me by a Profession of which I am a late and unworthy
+Member, and from whose Assistance I derive more than half the Names which
+appear to this subscription." All that we have to add to this, is the
+unconscious humour of Murphy's observation that the friendships Fielding
+met with "in the course of his studies, and indeed through the remainder
+of his life from the gentlemen of the legal profession in general, and
+particularly from some who have since risen to be the first ornaments of
+the law, will ever do honour to his memory." Had the names of these worthy
+'ornaments' been preserved, posterity could now give them due recognition
+as having been honoured by the friendship of Henry Fielding. [1]
+
+Fielding in his habit, as he lived, is for ever eluding us. His tall
+figure vanishes behind the prolific playwright, the exuberant politician,
+the truculent journalist, the indefatigable magistrate, the great creative
+genius. But at no point does the wittiest man of his day, and a lawyer of
+some repute--'Mr Fielding is allowed to have acquired a respectable share
+of jurisprudence'--escape us so completely as during these years of
+'punctual assiduity' at the Bar. His very domicile is unknown, after the
+surrender of those pleasant chambers in Pump Court, on November 28 1740.
+
+The political activities of "Counsellor Fielding" stand out far more
+clearly than do the legal labours of these years of struggle at the Bar.
+The year of his call, 1740, was one of constant embarrassment for Sir
+Robert Walpole, whose long enjoyment of single power was now at last
+drawing to a miserable close. The conduct of the Spanish War was
+arraigned, and suggestions were made that the Government were in secret
+alliance with the enemy. When the news came, in March, that Walpole's
+parliamentary opponent, the bluff Admiral Vernon, had captured Porto Bello
+from Spain, with six ships only, the public rejoicing and votes of
+congratulation were so many attacks on the peace-at-any-price Minister. A
+powerful fleet, designed against Spain, lay inactive in Torbay the greater
+part of the summer, through (alleged) contrary winds. And when Parliament
+met in November 1740, an onslaught by the Duke of Argyll in the Lords
+paved the way for the celebrated attack on Sir Robert in the Commons,
+known as "The Motion" of February 13, 1741. A fine political cartoon
+published in the following month, and here reproduced, in which Walpole
+appears as mocking at the death and burial of this same "Motion" of
+censure (which the House had rejected), places Fielding in the forefront
+of the Opposition procession. The dead "Motion" is being carried to the
+"Opposition" family vault, already occupied by Jack Cade and other
+"reformers"; and the bier is preceded by five standard-bearers, sadly
+carrying the insignia of the party's papers. Among these, and second only
+to the famous _Craftsman_, comes Fielding's tall figure, bearing aloft a
+standard inscribed _The Champion_, and emblazoned with that terrible club
+of _Captain Hercules Vinegar_, which, we may recall, was always ready to
+"fall on any knave in company." Behind the bier hobbles, clearly, the old
+Duchess of Marlborough; and Walpole's fat figure stands in the foreground,
+laughing uproariously at this "Funeral of Faction." In the doggerel verses
+beneath this cartoon, it is very plainly hinted that "old Sarah," and the
+Opposition, were in league with the Stewarts. In this historic debate, for
+which members secured seats at six o'clock in the morning, the vote of
+censure on "the _one person_" arraigned was defeated, Sir Robert once
+again securing a majority, and so "the Motion" as the cartoonist depicts,
+died "of a Disappointment." Another cartoon commemorating this ill-fated
+effort is instructive as showing, again in the foreground of the fight, a
+figure wearing a barrister's wig, gown, and bands, and inscribed with the
+words _Pasquin_ and _The Champion_. The Opposition Leader, Pulteney, leads
+both the _Pasquin_ figure, and another representing the paper _Common
+Sense_, literally by the nose with the one hand, while with the other he
+neatly catches, on his drawn sword, Walpole's organ the _Gazetteer_. In
+doggerel verses attached to the print Fielding is complimented with the
+following entire verse to himself:--
+
+  "Then the Champion of the Age,
+  Being Witty, wise, and Sage,
+  Comes with Libells on the Stage."
+
+This _Pasquin_ figure has none of the personal characteristics of
+Fielding, neither his "length of nose" nor his stately stature, so well
+suggested in the former print; but, lay figure though it be, it symbolises
+no less clearly the prominent part he played in these final political
+struggles of 1741. Also the lawyer's dress with which Fielding is here
+signified is noteworthy; and similar acknowledgment of his new dignities
+may be seen in the reference (in a copy of Walpole's _Gazetteer_ for 1740)
+to the attacks levelled on Sir Robert by "Captain Vinegar--_i.e._
+Counsellor F---d--g."
+
+These popular indications of Fielding's activity in the fighting ranks of
+the Opposition, during this last year of Walpole's domination, are
+supplemented by the evidence of his own pen. As early as January 1741, and
+while the grand Parliamentary attack of the 13th of February was but
+brewing, he published an eighteenpenny pamphlet, in verse, satirising Sir
+Robert's lukewarm conduct of the war with Spain. To the title of _The
+Vernoniad_, there was added a lengthy mock-title in Greek, the whole being
+presented as a lost fragment by Homer, describing, in epic style, the
+mission of one "Mammon" sent by Satan to baffle the fleets of a nation
+engaged in war with _Iberia_. "Mammon" is a perfectly obvious satirical
+sketch of Walpole himself, in the execution of which the hand that had
+drawn the corrupt fiddler "Mr Quidam" and the tipsy "Mr Pillage" for the
+Haymarket stage, has in no wise lost its cunning. "Mammon" (Walpole was
+reputed to have amassed much wealth) hides his palace walls by heaps of
+"ill-got Pictures." The pictures collected at Houghton, the Minister's
+pretentious Norfolk seat, were famous; and the notes to the "Text" are
+careful to depict, in illustration, "some rich Man without the least Taste
+having purchased a Picture at an immense Price, lifting up his eyes to it
+with Wonder and Astonishment, without being able to discover wherein its
+true Merit lies." "Mammon" declares virtue to be but a name, and his
+wonted eloquence is bribery. Sir Robert asserted that every man has his
+price. "Mammon" preserves dulness and ignorance, "while Wit and Learning
+starve." Walpole's illiterate tastes were notorious. At the close of the
+poem, "Mammon" accomplishes the behest of his master, Satan, by bribing
+contrary winds to drive back the English ships (a satire on Walpole's
+conduct of the war); and he finally returns to hell, and "in his Palace
+keeps a _three Weeks'_ Feast." Sir Robert it may be noted usually
+entertained for three weeks, in the spring, at Houghton. The whole is a
+slashing example of the robust eighteenth-century political warfare,
+polished by constant classical allusions and quotations; and doubtless it
+was read with delight in the coffee houses of the Town in that critical
+winter of 1740-1741. Two characteristic allusions must not be omitted.
+Even in the heat of party hard hitting Fielding finds time for a thrust at
+Colley Cibber, whose prose it seems was in several places by no means to
+be comprehended till "explained by the _Herculean_ Labours of Captain
+_Vinegar_" And there is a pleasant reference to "my friend Hogarth the
+exactest Copier of Nature."
+
+In this first month of 1741, Fielding published yet another poetical
+pamphlet for his party, but of a less truculent energy. _True Greatness_
+is a poem inscribed to a recruit in the Opposition ranks, the celebrated
+George Bubb Dodington; and when the eulogiums offered by the poet to his
+political leaders, Argyll, Carteret, Chesterfield, and Lyttelton, to all
+of whom are ascribed that "True Greatness" which "lives but in the Noble
+Mind," are completed by a description of Dodington as irradiating a blaze
+of virtues, this particular pamphlet becomes somewhat rueful reading. For
+Dodington was, if report speaks true, a pliant politician as well as an
+ineffable coxcomb, although it must be admitted that he won eulogies and
+compliments alike from the perfect integrity of Lyttelton, and the
+honourable pen of James Thomson. Even Fielding's glowing lines do not
+outstrip Thomson's panegyric in _The Seasons_.
+
+A more enduring interest however than the merits or demerits of a
+Dodington, lies in this shilling pamphlet. In it is clearly foreshadowed
+Fielding's great ironic outburst on false greatness, given to the world a
+few years later in the form of the history of that Napoleon in villany,
+the "great" Mr Jonathan Wild. In the medium of stiff couplets (verse being
+"a branch of Writing" which Fielding admits "I very little pretend to")
+the subject-matter of the magnificent irony of _Jonathan Wild_ is already
+sketched. Here the spurious "greatness" of inhuman conquerors, of droning
+pedants, of paltry beaus, of hermits proud of their humility, is
+mercilessly laid bare; and something is disclosed of the "piercing
+discernment" of that genius which, Murphy tell us, "saw the latent sources
+of human actions."
+
+We have seen indications in Murphy's careless pages that these few years
+of Fielding's assiduous efforts at the Bar were years burdened by
+"severities of want and pain." It is difficult not to admit a reference to
+some such personal experiences in a passage in this same poem. The lines
+in question describe the Poet going hungry and thirsty
+
+  "As down Cheapside he meditates the Song"....
+
+a "great tatter'd Bard," treading cautiously through the streets lest he
+meet a bailiff, oppressed with "want and with contempt," his very liberty
+to "wholesome Air" taken from him, yet possessing the greatness of mind
+that no circumstances can touch, and the power to bestow a fame that shall
+outlive the gifts of kings. This latter claim foreshadows the magnificent
+apostrophe in _Tom Jones_ on that unconquerable force of genius, able to
+confer immortality both on the poet, and the poet's theme. Was the 'great
+tatter'd Bard,' cautiously treading the streets, little esteemed, and yet
+the conscious possessor of true greatness (did not the author of _Tom
+Jones_ rely with confidence on receiving honour from generations yet
+unborn), none other than the tall figure of Fielding himself? At least we
+know that soon after this year he writes of having lately suffered
+accidents and waded through distresses, sufficient to move the pity of his
+readers, were he "fond enough of Tragedy" to make himself "the Hero of
+one."
+
+One of the rare fragments of Fielding's autograph, [2] refers both to this
+pamphlet, and to the _Vernoniad_:
+
+
+"Mr Nourse,
+
+"Please to deliver Mr Chappell 50 of [crossed out: my] [_sic_] True
+Greatness and 50 of the Vernoniad.
+
+Y'rs
+
+"Hen. Ffielding.
+
+"_April_ 20 1741."
+
+In June of this year occurred the death of General Edmund Fielding,
+briefly noticed in the _London Magazine_ as that of an officer who "had
+served in the late Wars against _France_ with much Bravery and
+Reputation." The General's own struggles to support his large family
+probably prevented his death affecting the circumstances of his eldest
+son. In the same month Fielding appears as attending a "Meeting of the
+Partners in the Champion," held at the Feathers Tavern, on June 29. The
+list of the partners present at the Feathers is given as follows:--[3]
+
+    Present
+
+    Mr Fielding
+    Mr Nourse
+    Mr Hodges
+    Mr Chappelle
+
+    Mr Cogan
+    Mr Gilliver
+    Mr Chandler
+
+The business recorded was the sale of the "Impressions of the Champion in
+two Vollumes, 12'o, No. 1000." The impression was put up to the Company by
+auction, and was knocked down to Mr Henry Chappelle for £110, to be paid
+to the partners. The majority of the partners are declared by the Minutes
+to have confirmed the bargain; the minority, as appears from the list of
+signatures, being strictly that of one, Henry Fielding. After this
+dissension Fielding's name ceases to appear at the _Champion_ meetings;
+and as he himself states that he left off writing for the paper from this
+very month the evidence certainly points to a withdrawal on his part in
+June 1741 from both the literary and the business management of the paper.
+The edition referred to in the Minutes is doubtless that advertised in the
+_London Daily Post_ a few days before the meeting of the partners, as a
+publication of the _Champion_ "in two neat Pocket Volumes." [4]
+
+Meanwhile the whole force of the Opposition was thrown into the battle of
+a General Election; and it is interesting to note that Pitt stood for the
+seat for Fielding's boyish home, and the home of his wife, that of Old
+Sarum. The elections went largely against Walpole, and by the end of June
+defeat was prophesied for a Minister who would only be supported by a
+majority of sixteen.
+
+It is somewhat inexplicable that at this, the very moment of the
+approaching victory of his party Fielding appears to have withdrawn from
+all journalistic work. "I take this Opportunity to declare in the most
+solemn Manner," he writes, in after years, "I have long since (as long as
+from _June_ 1741) desisted from writing one Syllable in the _Champion_, or
+any other public Paper." And yet more unexpected is the fact that six
+months later, during the last weeks of Walpole's failing power, a rumour
+should be abroad that Fielding was assisting his old enemy. In one of his
+rare references to his private life, that in the Preface to the
+_Miscellanies_, he seeks to clear himself from unjust censures "as well on
+account of what I have not writ, as for what I have"; and, as an instance
+of such baseless aspersions, he relates that, in this winter of 1741, "I
+received a letter from a Friend, desiring me to vindicate myself from two
+very opposite Reflections, which two opposite Parties thought fit to cast
+on me, _viz_. the one of writing in the _Champion_ (tho' I had not then
+writ in it for upwards of half a year) the other, of writing in the
+Gazetteer, in which I never had the honour of inserting a single Word."
+What can have occurred, in the bewildering turmoil of that
+eighteenth-century party strife, that the author of _Pasquin_, the
+possessor of "Captain Vinegar's" Herculean Club, should have to vindicate
+himself from a charge of writing in the columns of Walpole's _Gazetteer_.
+During these last months of Sir Robert's power his Cabinet was much
+divided, and two of his Ministers were in active revolt; possibly rumour
+assigned the services of the witty pen of Counsellor Fielding to these
+Opposition Ministerialists. But that some change did indeed take place in
+Fielding's political activities, in these last six months of 1741 is
+obvious from his withdrawal from writing in any "Public" paper; and from
+passages in the last political pamphlet known to have come from his pen.
+This pamphlet, entitled _The Opposition. A Vision_, was published in the
+winter of 1741, a winter of severe illness, and of "other circumstances"
+which, as he tells us, "served as very proper Decorations" to the sickbeds
+of himself, his wife, and child. It is a lively attack on the divided
+councils and leaders of the Opposition, thrown into the form of a dream,
+caused by the author's falling asleep over "a large quarto Book intituled
+'An apology for the Life of Mr Colley Gibber, Comedian.'" In his dream
+Fielding meets the Opposition, in the form of a waggon, drawn by very
+ill-matched asses, the several drivers of which have lost their way. The
+luggage includes the Motion for 1741, and a trunk containing the
+_Champion_ newspaper. One passenger protests that he has been hugely
+spattered by the "Dirt" of the "last Motion," and that he will get out,
+rather than drive through more dirt. A gentleman of "a meagre aspect" (is
+he the lean Lyttelton?) leaves the waggon; and another observes that the
+asses "appear to me to be the worst fed Asses I ever beheld ... that long
+sided Ass they call _Vinegar_, which the Drivers call upon so often to
+_gee up_, and _pull lustily_, I never saw an Ass with a worse Mane, or a
+more shagged Coat; and that grave Ass yoked to him, which they name
+_Ralph_, and who pulls and brays like the Devil, Sir, he does not seem to
+have eat since the hard Frost. [5] Surely, considering the wretched Work
+they are employed in, they deserve better Meat."
+
+The longsided ass, Vinegar, with the worst of manes and the most shagged
+coat, short even of provender, recalls the picture, drawn twelve months
+previously, of the great hungry tatter'd Bard; and the inference seems
+fair enough that for Fielding politics were no lucrative trade. A more
+creditable inference, in those days of universal corruption, it may be
+added, would be hard to find. The honour of a successful party writer who
+yet remained poor in the year 1741, must have been kept scrupulously
+clean. The _Vision_ proceeds to show the waggon, with two new sets of
+asses from Cornwall and Scotland (the elections had gone heavily against
+Walpole in both these districts), suddenly turning aside from the "Great
+Country Road" (the Opposition was known as the Country Party); and the
+protesting passengers are told that the end of their journey is "St
+James." Some of the asses, flinching, are "well whipt"; but the waggon
+leaves the dreamer and many of its followers far behind. Suddenly a Fat
+Gentleman's coach stops the way. The drivers threaten to drive over the
+coach, when one of the asses protests that the waggon is leaving the
+service of the country, and going aside on its own ends, and that "the
+Honesty of even an Ass would start" at being used for some purposes. The
+waggon is all in revolt and confusion, when the Fat Gentleman, who
+appeared to have "one of the pleasantest and best natured Countenances I
+ever beheld," at last had the asses unharness'd, and turned into a
+delicious meadow, where they fell to feeding, as after "long Abstinence."
+Finally, the pleasant-faced fat gentleman's coach proceeds on the way from
+which the waggon had deviated, carrying with it some of the former drivers
+of the same; the mob burn the derelict obstructing vehicle; and their
+noise, and the stink and smoke of the conflagration wake the dreamer.
+
+In this last word of Fielding's active political career (for his later
+anti-Jacobite papers are concerned rather with Constitutional and
+Protestant, than with party strife), a retirement from political
+collar-work is certainly signified. His reasons for such a step escape us
+in the mist of those confused and heated conflicts. His detestation of
+Walpole's characteristic methods may very well have roused his ever ready
+fighting instincts, whereas, once Walpole's fall was practically assured
+the weak forces of the Opposition (William Pitt being yet many years from
+power) could have availed but little to enlist his penetrating intellect.
+And he may by now have found that politics afforded, in those days, but
+scanty support to an honourable pen.
+
+But supposition, in lack of further evidence, is fruitless; all that we
+can clearly perceive is that this winter of sickness and distress marks a
+final severance from party politics. The hungry 'hackney writer' of the
+lean sides and shagged coat, if not, indeed, turned to graze in the fat
+meadow of his dream, was at last freed from an occupation that could but
+shackle the genius now ready to break forth in the publication of _Joseph
+Andrews_.
+
+[1] A tantalising reference to one such acquaintance occurs in Lord
+Campbell's _Lives of the Chancellors_. Vol. v. p. 357. In notes made by
+Lord Camden's nephew, George Hardinge, for a proposed Life of the Lord
+Chancellor there is this entry: "formed an acquaintance ... with Henry
+Fielding ... called to the Bar."
+
+[2] Now in the possession of W. K. Bixby, Esq., of St Louis, U.S.A.
+
+[3] In a manuscript copy of the Minutes, in the possession of the present
+writer.
+
+[4] _London Daily Post_, June 18-26, 1741.
+
+[5] The hard frost would be the terrible preceding winter of 1739-40, a
+winter long remembered for the severity of the cold, the cost of
+provisions, and the suffering of the poor.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+JOSEPH ANDREWS
+
+    "This kind of writing I do not remember to have seen hitherto
+    attempted in our language."
+    Preface to _Joseph Andrews_.
+
+On the 2nd of February 1742 Sir Robert Walpole, the 'Colossos' of popular
+broadsides, under whose feet England had lain for exactly thirty years,
+received his final defeat; and the intrepid wit, who for the past eight
+years had heartily lashed the tyrannies and corruptions of that 'Great
+Man,' enjoyed at last the satisfaction of witnessing the downfall of the
+_Mr Quiddam_ and _Mr Pillage_ of his plays, of the _Plunderer_ and
+_Mammon_ of his pamphlets, of the _Brass_ on whom many a stinging blow had
+fallen in the columns of his _Champion_.
+
+With the retirement of Walpole, Fielding's vigorous figure vanishes from
+active political service. No more caustic Greek epics, translated from the
+original "by Homer," no more boisterous interludes with three-bottle Prime
+Ministers appearing in the part of principal boy, come from his pen. But
+scarcely is the ink dry on the page of his last known political pamphlet,
+when Fielding reappears, in this Spring of 1742, not as the ephemeral
+politician, but as the triumphant discoverer of a new continent for
+English literature; as the leader of a revolution in imaginative writing
+which has outlived the Ministries and parties, the reforms, the broils,
+and warfares of two centuries. For, to-day, the fierce old contests of
+Whig and Tory, the far-off horrors of eighteenth-century gibbets, jails,
+and streets, the succession of this and that Minister, the French Wars and
+Pragmatic Sanctions of 1740 are all dead as Queen Anne. But the novel
+based on character, on human life, in a word on 'the vast authentic Book
+of Nature' is a living power; and it was by the publication, in February
+1742, of _The Adventures of Mr Joseph Andrews and his Friend Mr Abraham
+Adams_, that Fielding reveals himself as the father of the English novel.
+Henceforth we can almost forget the hard-hitting political _Champion_; we
+may quite forget the facile 'hackney writer' of popular farces, and the
+impetuous studies of the would-be barrister. With the appearance of these
+two small volumes Henry Fielding reaches the full stature of his genius as
+the first, and perhaps the greatest, of English novelists.
+
+It is difficult, at the present day, to realise the greatness of his
+achievement. Fielding found, posturing as heroines of romance, the
+_Clelias, Cleopatras, Astraeas_; he left the living women, Fanny Andrews,
+Sophia Western, Amelia Booth. "Amelia," writes his great follower
+Thackeray, "... the most charming character in English fiction,--Fiction!
+Why fiction? Why not history? I know Amelia just as well as Lady Mary
+Wortley Montagu." Again, Fielding found a world of polite letters, turning
+a stiff back on all "low" naturalness of life. He taught that world (as
+his friend Lillo had already essayed to do in his tragedy of a _London
+Merchant_) that the life of a humble footman, of a poor parson in a torn
+cassock, of the poverty-hunted wife of an impoverished army-captain, of a
+country lad without known parentage, interest or fortune, may make finer
+reading than all the Court romances ever written; and, moreover, that "the
+highest life is much the dullest, and affords very little humour or
+entertainment." And, having rediscovered this world of natural and simple
+human nature, his genius proceeded to the creation of nothing less than an
+entirely new form of English literary expression, the medium of the novel.
+
+The preface to _Joseph Andrews_ shows that Fielding was perfectly
+conscious of the greatness of his adventure. Such a species of writing, he
+says, "I do not remember to have seen hitherto attempted in our language."
+We can but wonder at, and admire, the superb energy and confidence which
+could thus embark on the conscious production of this new thing, amid
+want, pain, and distress. And wonder and admiration increase tenfold on
+the further discovery that this fresh creation in literature, fashioned in
+circumstances so depressing, is overflowing with an exuberance of healthy
+life and enjoyment. Having entered on his fair inheritance of this new
+world of human nature, Fielding pourtrays it from the standpoint of his
+own maxim, that life "everywhere furnishes an accurate observer with the
+ridiculous." So, into this, his newly-cut channel for imaginative
+expression (to use Mr Gosse's happy phrase) he poured the strength of a
+genius naturally inclined to that "exquisite mirth and laughter," which as
+he declared in his preface to these volumes, "are probably more wholesome
+physic for the mind and conduce better to purge away spleen, melancholy,
+and ill affections than is generally imagined." No book ever more
+thoroughly carried out this wholesome doctrine. The laughter in _Joseph
+Andrews_ is as whole-hearted, if not as noisy, the practical jokes are as
+broad, as those of a healthy school-boy; and the pages ring with a spirit
+and gusto recalling Lady Mary's phrase concerning her cousin "that no man
+enjoyed life more than he did." To quote again from Mr Gosse: "A good deal
+in this book may offend the fine, and not merely the superfine. But the
+vitality and elastic vigour of the whole carry us over every difficulty...
+and we pause at the close of the novel to reflect on the amazing freshness
+of the talent which could thus make a set of West country scenes, in that
+despised thing, a novel, blaze with light like a comedy of Shakespeare."
+
+So original in creation, so humane, so full of a brave delight in life,
+was the power that, mastering every gloomy obstacle of circumstance, broke
+into the stilted literary world of 1742; and Murphy's Irish rhetoric is
+not too warm when he talks of this sunrise of Fielding's greatness "when
+his genius broke forth at once, with an effulgence superior to all the
+rays of light it had before emitted, like the sun in his morning glory."
+
+Any detailed comment on the literary qualities of the genius which thus
+disclosed itself would exceed the limits of this memoir; and indeed such
+comment is, now, a thrice-told tale. To Sir Walter Scott, Fielding is the
+"father of the English novel"; to Byron, "the prose Homer of human
+nature." The magnificent tribute of Gibbon still remains a towering
+monument, whatever experts may tell us concerning the Hapsburg genealogy.
+"Our immortal Fielding," he wrote, "was of the younger branch of the Earls
+of Denbigh, who drew their origin from the Counts of Hapsburg. The
+successors of Charles V. may disdain their brethren of England; but the
+romance of _Tom Jones_, that exquisite picture of human manners, will
+outlive the palace of the Escurial and the Imperial Eagle of Austria."
+Smollett affirmed that his predecessor painted the characters, and
+ridiculed the follies, of life with equal strength, humour and propriety.
+The supreme autocrat of the eighteenth century, Dr Johnson himself, though
+always somewhat hostile to Fielding, read _Amelia_ through without
+stopping, and pronounced her to be 'the most pleasing heroine of all the
+romances.' "What a poet is here," cries Thackeray, "watching, meditating,
+brooding, creating! What multitudes of truths has that man left behind
+him: what generations he has taught to laugh wisely and fairly." Finally
+we may turn neither to novelist nor historian, but to the metaphysical
+philosopher, "How charming! How wholesome is Fielding!" says Coleridge,
+"to take him up after Richardson is like emerging from a sick-room, heated
+by stoves, into an open lawn on a breezy day in May." Such are some
+estimates of the quality of Fielding's genius, given by men not
+incompetent to appraise him. To analyse that genius is, as has been said,
+beyond the scope of these pages. But Fielding's first novel is not only a
+revelation of genius. It frankly reveals much of the man behind the pen;
+and in its pages, and in those of the still greater novels yet to come, we
+may learn more of the true Fielding than from all the fatuities and
+surmises of his early biographers.
+
+Thus in _Joseph Andrews_ for the first time we come really close to the
+splendid and healthy energy, the detachment, the relentless scorn, the
+warmth of feeling, that characterised Henry Fielding under all
+circumstances and at all times of his life. This book, as we have seen,
+was written under every outward disadvantage, and yet its pages ring with
+vigour and laughter. Here is the same militant energy that had nerved
+Fielding to fight the domination of a corrupt (and generally corrupting)
+Minister for eight lean years; and which in later life flung itself into a
+chivalrous conflict with current social crime and misery. Here is a
+detachment hardly less than that which fills the pages of the last
+_Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon_ with a courage, a gaiety, a serenity that
+no suffering and hardship, and not even the near approach of death itself,
+could disturb. Here, again, Fielding consciously avows a moral purpose in
+his art; the merciless scorn of his insight in depicting a vicious man or
+woman is actuated, he expressly declares, by a motive other than that of
+'art for art's sake.' And as this motive is scarce perceptible in the
+lifelike reality of the figures whom we see breathing in actual flesh and
+blood in his pages, and yet is of the first importance for understanding
+the character of their creator, the great novelist's confession of this
+portion of his literary faith may be quoted in full. The passage occurs in
+the preface to Book iii. of _Joseph Andrews_. Fielding is afraid, he
+explains, that his figures may be taken for particular portraits, whereas
+it is the type and not the individual that concerns him. "I declare here,"
+he solemnly affirms, "once for all, I describe not Men, but Manners; not
+an Individual, but a Species." And he proceeds to make example of the
+lawyer in the stage coach as not indeed confined "to one Profession, one
+Religion, or one Country; but when the first mean selfish Creature
+appeared on the human Stage, who made Self the Centre of the whole
+Creation; would give himself no Pain, incur no Damage, advance no Money to
+assist, or preserve his Fellow-Creatures; then was our Lawyer born; and
+while such a Person as I have described, exists on Earth, so long shall he
+remain upon it." Not therefore "to mimick some little obscure Fellow" does
+this lawyer appear on Fielding's pages, but "for much more general and
+noble Purposes; not to expose one pitiful Wretch, to the small and
+contemptible Circle of his Acquaintance; but to hold the Glass to
+thousands in their Closets that they may contemplate their Deformity, and
+endeavour to reduce it."
+
+Yet another characteristic of Fielding's personality appears in the
+conscious control exercised over all the humorous and satiric zest of
+_Joseph Andrews_. Here is no unseemly riot of ridicule. The ridiculous he
+declares in his philosophic preface is the subject-matter of his pages;
+but he will suffer no imputation of ridiculing vice or calamity. "Surely,"
+he cries, "he hath a very ill-framed Mind, who can look on Ugliness,
+Infirmity, or Poverty, as ridiculous in themselves"; and he formally
+declares that such vices as appear in this work "are never set forth as
+the objects of Ridicule but Detestation." What then were the limits which
+Fielding imposed on himself in treating this, his declared subject matter
+of the ridiculous? Hypocrisy and vanity, he says, appearing in the form of
+affectation; "Great Vices are the proper Object of our Detestation,
+smaller Faults of our Pity: but Affectation appears to me the only true
+Source of the Ridiculous." Such is Fielding's sensitive claim for the
+decent limits of ridicule; and such the consciously avowed subject of his
+work. But the force of his genius, the depth of his insight, the warmth of
+his detestations and affections, soon carried him far beyond any mere
+study in the ridicule of vain and hypocritical affectation. The immortal
+figure of Parson Adams, striding through these pages, tells us infinitely
+much of the character of his creator, but nothing at all of the nature of
+affectation. The "rural innocence of a Joseph Andrews," to quote Miss
+Fielding's happy phrase [1] and of his charming Fanny, are as natural and
+fresh as Fielding's own Dorsetshire meadows, but instruct us not at all in
+vanity or hypocrisy.
+
+To turn to the individual figures of _Joseph Andrews_; what do they tell
+us of the man who called them into being. First and foremost, it is Parson
+Adams who unquestionably dominates the book. However much the licentious
+grossness of Lady Booby, the shameless self-seeking of her waiting-woman,
+Mrs Slipslop, the swinish avarice of Parson Trulliber, the calculating
+cruelty of Mrs Tow-wouse, to name but some of the vices here exposed,
+blazon forth that 'enthusiasm for righteousness' which constantly moved
+Fielding to exhibit the devilish in human nature in all its 'native
+Deformity,' it is still Adams who remains the central figure of the great
+comic epic. Concerning the good parson, appreciation has stumbled for
+adequate words, from the tribute of Sir Walter Scott to that of Mr Austin
+Dobson. "The worthy parson's learning," wrote Sir Walter, "his simplicity,
+his evangelical purity of heart, and benevolence of disposition, are so
+admirably mingled with pedantry, absence of mind, and with the habit of
+athletic and gymnastic exercise, ... that he may be safely termed one of
+the richest productions of the Muse of Fiction." And to Mr Austin Dobson,
+this poor curate, compact as he is of the oddest contradictions, the most
+diverting eccentricities, is "assuredly a noble example of primitive
+goodness, and practical Christianity." We love Adams, as Fielding intended
+that we should, for his single-hearted goodness, his impulsiveness, his
+boundless generosity, his muscular courage; we are never allowed to forget
+the dignity of his office however ragged be the cassock that displays it;
+we admire his learning; we delight in his oddities. But above all he
+reflects honour on his creator by the inflexible integrity of his
+goodness. A hundred tricks are played on him by shallow knaves, and the
+result is but to convince us of the folly of knavery. His ill-clad and
+uncouth figure moves among the vicious and prosperous, and we perceive the
+ugliness of vice, and the poverty of wealth. With his nightcap drawn over
+his wig, a short grey coat half covering a torn cassock, the crabstick so
+formidable to ruffians in his hand, and his beloved AEschylus in his
+pocket, Adams smoking his pipe by the inn fire, or surrounded by his
+"children" as he called his parishioners vying "with each other in
+demonstrations of duty and love," fully justifies John Forster's comment
+on Fielding's manly habit of "discerning what was good and beautiful in
+the homeliest aspects of humanity." Before the true dignity of Abraham
+Adams, whether he be publicly rebuking the Squire and Pamela for laughing
+in church, or emerging unstained from adventures with hogs-wash and worse,
+the accident of his social position as a poor curate, contentedly drinking
+ale in the squire's kitchen, falls into its true insignificance.
+
+Rumour assigned to Fielding's friend and neighbour at East Stour, the Rev.
+William Young, the honour of being the original of Parson Adams; and it is
+a pleasant coincidence that the legal assignment for _Joseph Andrews_,
+here reproduced in facsimile, should bear the signature, as witness, of
+the very man whose "innate goodness" is there immortalised. If there be
+any detractors of Fielding's personal character still to be found, they
+may be advised to remember the truism that a man is known by his friends,
+and to apply themselves to a study of William Young in the figure of
+Parson Adams.
+
+Of the charming picture of rustic beauty and innocence presented in the
+blushing and warmhearted Fanny less need be said; for Fielding's ideal in
+womanhood was soon to be more fully revealed in the lovely creations of
+Sophia and Amelia. And honest Joseph himself, his courage and fidelity,
+his constancy, his tenderness and chivalrous passion for Fanny, his
+affection for Mr Adams, his voice "too musical to halloo to the dogs," his
+fine figure and handsome face, concerns us here chiefly as demonstrating
+that Fielding, when he chose, could display both virtue and manliness as
+united in the person of a perfectly robust English country lad.
+
+These then, are some of the figures that Fielding loved to create,
+breathing into their simple virtues a vigorous human life, fresh as
+Coleridge said, as the life of a Spring morning. In these joyous creations
+of his heart and of his genius, the great novelist assuredly gives us a
+perfectly unconscious revelation of his own character. And among the
+changing scenes of this human comedy one incident must not be forgotten.
+In the famous episode of the stage coach, all Fielding's characteristic
+and relentless hatred of respectable hypocrisy, all his love of innate if
+ragged virtue is betrayed in the compass of a few pages: in those pages in
+which we see the robbed, half-murdered, and wholly naked Joseph lifted in
+from the wayside ditch amid the protests and merriment of the respectable
+passengers; and his shivering body at last wrapped in the coat of the
+postilion,--"a Lad who hath since been transported for robbing a
+Hen-roost,"--who voluntarily stripped off a greatcoat, his only garment,
+"at the same time swearing a great Oath (for which he was rebuked by the
+Passengers) 'that he would rather ride in his Shirt all his Life, than
+suffer a Fellow-Creature to lie in so miserable a Condition.'"
+
+Much has been written concerning the notorious feud between Fielding and
+Richardson, a feud ostensibly based upon the fact that _Joseph Andrews_
+was, to some extent, frankly a parody of Richardson's famous production
+_Pamela_. In 1740, two years before the appearance of _Joseph Andrews_
+that middle-aged London printer had published _Pamela, or Virtue
+Rewarded_, achieving thereby an enormous vogue. That amazing mixture of
+sententious moralities, of prurience, and of mawkish sentiment, became the
+rage of the Town. Admirers ranked it next to the Bible; the great Mr Pope
+declared that it would "do more good than many volumes of Sermons"; and it
+was even translated into French and Italian, becoming, according to Lady
+Mary Wortley Montagu, who did not love Richardson, "the joy of the
+chambermaids of all nations." That all this should have been highly
+agreeable to the good Richardson, a 'vegetarian and water-drinker, a
+worthy, domesticated, fussy, and highly nervous little man,' ensconced in
+a ring of feminine flatterers whom he called 'my ladies,' is obvious; and
+proportionate was his wrath with Fielding's _Joseph Andrews_, of which the
+early chapters, at least, are a perfectly frank, and to Richardson
+audacious, satire on _Pamela_. The caricature was indeed frank. Joseph is
+introduced as Pamela's brother; he writes letters to that virtuous
+maid-servant; and the Mr B. of Richardson becomes the Squire Booby of
+Fielding. But there can be hardly two opinions as to such ridicule being
+an entirely justified and wholesome antidote to the pompous and nauseous
+original. To Fielding's robust and masculine genius, says Mr Austin
+Dobson, "the strange conjunction of purity and precaution in Richardson's
+heroine was a thing unnatural and a theme for inextinguishable Homeric
+laughter." To Thackeray's sympathetic imagination the feud was the
+inevitable outcome of the difference between the two men. Fielding, he
+says "couldn't do otherwise than laugh at the puny cockney bookseller,
+pouring out endless volumes of sentimental twaddle, and hold him up to
+scorn as a moll-coddle and a milksop. His genius had been nursed on sack
+posset, and not on dishes of tea. His muse had sung the loudest in tavern
+choruses, and had seen the daylight streaming in over thousands of empty
+bowls, and reeled home to chambers on the shoulders of the watchman.
+Richardson's goddess was attended by old maids and dowagers, and fed on
+muffins and bohea. 'Milksop!' roars Harry Fielding, clattering at the
+timid shop-shutters. 'Wretch! Monster! Mohock!' shrieks the sentimental
+author of _Pamela_; and all the ladies of his court cackle out an
+affrighted chorus."
+
+Looking back on the incident it seems matter for yet more Homeric laughter
+that Richardson should have called the resplendent genius of Fielding
+"low." But the feud, it may be surmised, led to much of the odium that
+seems to have attached to Fielding's name amongst some of his
+contemporaries. Feeling ran high and was vividly expressed in those days;
+and when cousinly admiration for Fielding was coupled by an excellent
+comment on Richardson's book as the delight of the maidservants of all
+nations, personal retorts in favour of the popular sentimentalist were but
+too likely to ensue. Apart from this aspect of the matter the ancient
+quarrel does not seem a very essential incident in Fielding's life.
+
+The lack of means indicated by Fielding himself, in his reminiscence of
+this winter of 1741-2 as darkened by the illness of himself, his wife and
+of a favourite child, attended "with other Circumstances, which served as
+very proper Decorations to such a Scene," received but little alleviation
+from the publication of _Joseph Andrews_. The price paid for the book by
+Andrew Millar was but £183, 11s.; and there is no record that Millar
+supplemented the original sum, as he did in the case of _Tom Jones_, when
+the sale was assured. The first edition appears to have consisted of 1,500
+copies. A second edition, of 2,000 copies was issued in the same
+summer,[2] and a third edition followed in 1743.
+
+Fielding's formal declaration that he described "not men but manners"; his
+solemn protest, in the preface to this very book, that "I have no
+Intention to vilify or asperse anyone: for tho' everything is copied from
+the Book of Nature, and scarce a Character or Action produced which I have
+not taken from my own Observations and Experience, yet I have used the
+utmost Care to obscure the Persons by such different Circumstances,
+Degrees, and Colours, that it will be impossible to guess at them with any
+degree of Certainty"--represent rather his intention than the result. The
+portraits of "manners" by the "prose Homer of human nature" were too
+lifelike to escape frequent identification. Thus not only was the
+prototype of Parson Adams discovered, but that of his antithesis, the
+pig-breeding Mr Trulliber, was thought to exist in the person of the Rev.
+Mr Oliver, the Dorsetshire curate under whose tutelage Fielding had been
+placed when a boy. Tradition also connects Mr Peter Pounce with the
+Dorsetshire usurer Peter Walter. [3]
+
+Two echoes have come down to us of the early appreciation of this novel. A
+translation of _Joseph Andrews_, "par une Dame Angloise," and bound for
+Marie Antoinette by Derome le Jeune, was placed on the shelves of her
+library in the Petit Trianon. [4] And, seven years after the appearance of
+_Joseph Andrews_, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, when sixty years old, writes
+from her Italian exile: "I have at length received the box with the books
+enclosed, for which I give you many thanks as they amuse me very much. I
+gave a very ridiculous proof of it, fitter indeed for my granddaughter
+than myself. I returned from a party on horseback; and after having rode
+20 miles, part of it by moonshine, it was ten at night when I found the
+box arrived. I could not deny myself the pleasure of opening it; and
+falling upon Fielding's works was fool enough to sit up all night reading.
+I think Joseph Andrews better than his Foundling." [5]
+
+[1] _Cleopatra and Octavia_. Sarah Fielding. Introduction.
+
+[2] See the ledgers of Woodfall, the printer, quoted in _Notes and
+Queries_, Series vi. p. 186.
+
+[3] It is interesting to note that Samuel Rogers was heard to speak with
+great admiration of chapter xiii. of Book iii., entitled "A curious
+Dialogue which passed between Mr Abraham Adams and Mr Peter Pounce." (MS.
+note by Dyce, in a copy of _Joseph Andrews_, now in the South Kensington
+Museum.)
+
+[4] This copy, published in Amsterdam in 1775, is now in the possession of
+Mr Pierpont Morgan.
+
+[5] Letters and Works of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Vol. ii. p. 194.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+THE _Miscellanies_ AND _Jonathan Wild_
+
+    "Is there on earth a greater object of contempt than the poor
+    scholar to a splendid beau; unless perhaps the splendid beau to
+    the poor scholar."
+    _Covent Garden Journal_, No. 61.
+
+If the 'sunrise' of Fielding's genius did indeed shine forth on the
+publication of _Joseph Andrews_, it was a sunrise attended by dark clouds.
+For, with the appearance of these two little volumes, we enter on the most
+obscure period of the great novelist's life, and on that in which he
+appears to have suffered the severest 'invasions of Fortune.'
+
+As regards the winter immediately preceding the appearance of that joyous
+epic of the highway, he himself has told us that he was 'laid up in the
+gout, with a favourite Child dying in one Bed, and my Wife in a Condition
+very little better, on another, attended with other Circumstances, which
+served as very proper Decorations to such a Scene.' In the following
+February, an entry in the registers of St Martin's in the Fields records
+the burial of a child "Charlott Fielding." So it is probable that the very
+month of the appearance of his first novel brought a private grief to
+Fielding the poignancy of which may be measured by his frequent betrayals
+of an anxious affection for his children.
+
+To such distresses of sickness and anxiety, there was now, doubtless,
+added the further misery of scanty means. For a few months later an
+advertisement (hitherto overlooked) appears in the _Daily Post_, showing
+that Fielding was already eagerly pushing forward the publication of the
+_Miscellanies_, that incoherent collection which is itself proof enough
+that necessity alone had called it into being. "The publication of these
+Volumes," he says, "hath been hitherto retarded by the Author's
+indisposition last Winter, and a train of melancholy Accidents, scarce to
+be parallel'd; but he takes this opportunity to assure his Subscribers
+that he will most certainly deliver them within the time mentioned in his
+last receipts, viz. by the 25th December next." [1]
+
+We may take it, then, that the first six months of 1742 were attended by
+no easy circumstances; and, accordingly, during these months Fielding's
+hard-worked pen produced no less than three very different attempts to win
+subsistence from those humoursome jades the nine Muses. To take these
+efforts in order of date, first comes, in March, his sole invocation of
+the historic Muse, the _Full Vindication of the Dutchess Dowager of
+Marlborough_, published almost before Joseph Andrews was clear of the
+printers, and sold at the modest price of one shilling. We learn from the
+title page that the _Vindication_ was called forth by a "late _scurrilous_
+Pamphlet," containing "_base_ and _malicious_ Invectives" against Her
+Grace. Together with Fielding's natural love for fighting, a family tie
+may have given him a further incitement to draw his pen on behalf of the
+aged Duchess. For his first cousin, Mary Gould, the only child of his
+uncle James Gould, M.P. for Dorchester, had married General Charles
+Churchill, brother to the great Duke. Whether this cousinship by marriage
+led to any personal acquaintance between 'old Sarah' and Harry Fielding we
+do not know; and the muniment room at Blenheim affords no trace of any
+correspondence between the Duchess and her champion. But certainly the
+_Vindication_ lacks nothing of personal warmth. Fielding tells us that he
+has never contemplated the character of that 'Glorious Woman' but with
+admiration; and he defends her against the attacks of her opponents
+through forty strenuous pages, in which the curious may still hear the
+echoes of the controversies that raged round the Duke and his Duchess,
+their mistress Queen Anne, and other actors of the Revolution. The
+_Vindication_ appeared in March; and a second edition was called for
+during the year. As far as Millar's payment goes Fielding, as appears from
+the assignment in _Joseph Andrews_, received only £5; and it is to be
+feared that the Duchess (who is said to have paid the historian Hooke
+£5000 for his assistance in the production of her own celebrated pamphlet)
+placed but little substantial acknowledgment in Fielding's lean purse. Her
+champion at any rate had, within three years, modified the views expressed
+in this _Vindication_, concerning the munificence of Her Grace's private
+generosity; for in his journal the _True Patriot_, there occurs the
+following obituary notice, "A Man supposed to be a Pensioner of the late
+Duchess of Marlborough.... He is supposed to have been Poor."
+
+This same month of March marked Fielding's final severance with the
+_Champion_. The partners of that paper, meeting on March the 1st, ordered
+"that Whereas Henry Fielding Esq., did Originally possess Two Sixteenth
+Shares of the Champion as a Writer in the said paper and having withdrawn
+himself from that Service for above Twelve Months past and refused his
+Assistance in that Capacity since which time Mr Ralph has solely
+Transacted the said Business. It is hereby Declared that the said Writing
+Shares shall devolve on and be vested in Mr James Ralph." [2] It is
+curious that Fielding did not add to his impoverished exchequer by selling
+his _Champion_ shares.
+
+Having sought assistance from the Muse of history in March, Fielding
+returns to his old charmer the dramatic Muse in May; assisting in that
+month to produce a farce, at Drury Lane, entitled _Miss Lucy in Town_. In
+this piece, he tells us, he had a very small share. He also received for
+it a very small remuneration; £10, 10s. being recorded as the price paid
+by Andrew Millar.
+
+In the following month Fielding's inexhaustible energies were off on a new
+tack, producing, in startling contrast to _Miss Lucy_, a classical work,
+executed in collaboration with his friend the Rev. William Young,
+otherwise Parson Adams. The two friends contemplated a series of
+translations of all the eleven comedies of Aristophanes; adorned by notes
+containing "besides a full Explanation of the Author, a compleat History
+of the Manners and Customs of the Ancient Greeks particularly of the
+Athenians"; and in June they inaugurated their scheme with the work in
+question, a translation of the Plutus.[3] William Young, says Hutchins,
+"had much learning which was the cement of Mr Fielding's connexion with
+him"; and Fielding's own scholarship, irradiated by his wit, would
+assuredly have made him an ideal translator of Greek comedy. But the
+public of 1742 appears to have afforded very little encouragement to this
+scheme, preferring that "pretty, dapper, brisk, smart, pert, Dialogue" of
+their own comedies, to which allusion is made in the authors' preface.
+
+The rest of the year shows nothing from a pen somewhat exhausted perhaps
+with the production of _Joseph Andrews_ of the historical _Vindication_,
+and of parts of a Drury Lane farce and of the _Plutus_, all within five
+months. And the winter following, in which the promised _Miscellanies_
+should have appeared, brought, in the renewed illness of his wife, an
+anxiety that paralysed even Fielding's buoyant vigour. This we learn from
+his own touching apology for the further delay of those volumes; a delay
+due, their author tells us, to "the dangerous Illness of one from whom I
+draw all the solid Comfort of my Life, during the greatest Part of this
+Winter. This, as it is most sacredly true, so will it, I doubt not,
+sufficiently excuse the Delay to all who know me." [4] Early in the
+following year, after this second winter of crushing anxiety, and under an
+urgent pressure for means, Fielding tried again his familiar _rôle_ of
+popular dramatist, giving his public the husks they preferred, in the
+comedy of the _Wedding Day_. This comedy was produced at Drury Lane on the
+17th of February 1743.
+
+If Fielding had failed to descend to the taste of the Town in offering
+them Aristophanes, he flung them in the _Wedding Day_ something too
+imperfect for acceptance, even by the 'critic jury of the pit,' And the
+bitter humour in which he was now shackling his genius to the honourable
+task of immediate bread-winning, or in his own words to the part of
+"hackney writer," comes out clearly enough in the well-known anecdote of
+the first night of this comedy. In Murphy's words, Garrick, then a new
+player, just taking the Town by storm, "told Mr Fielding he was
+apprehensive that the audience would make free in a particular passage;
+adding that a repulse might so flurry his spirits as to disconcert him for
+the rest of the night, and therefore begged that it might be omitted. 'No,
+d--mn 'em,' replied the bard, 'if the scene is not a good one, let them
+find _that_ out.' Accordingly the play was brought on without alteration,
+and, just as had been foreseen, the disapprobation of the house was
+provoked at the passage before objected to; and the performer alarmed and
+uneasy at the hisses he had met with, retired into the green-room, where
+the author was indulging his genius, and solacing himself with a bottle of
+champaign." Fielding, continues Murphy, had by this time drank pretty
+plentifully, and "'_What's the matter, Garrick?_' says he, '_what are they
+hissing now?_' Why the scene that I begged you to retrench; I knew it
+would not do; and they have so frightened me that I shall not be able to
+collect myself again the whole night. _Oh! d--mn 'em_, replies the author,
+_they HAVE found it out, have they!_" That Fielding should be scornfully
+indifferent to the judgment of the pit on work forced from him by
+overwhelming necessities, and which his own judgment condemned, is a
+foregone conclusion; but that he suffered keenly in having to produce
+imperfect work, and was jealously anxious to clear his reputation, as a
+writer, in the matter of this particular comedy, is no less apparent from
+the very unusual personal explanation he offered for it, soon after the
+brief run of the play was over. For no man was more shy of
+autobiographical revelations. His biographers are continually reduced to
+gleaning stray hints, here and there, concerning his private life.
+[5] And therefore we can measure by this emergence from a habitual
+personal reticence the soreness with which he now published work unworthy
+of his genius. "Mr Garrick," Fielding tells us, speaking of this
+distressed winter of 1742-3 "... asked me one Evening, if I had any play
+by me; telling me he was desirous of appearing in a new Part [and] ... as
+I was full as desirous of putting Words into his Mouth, as he could appear
+to be of speaking them, I mentioned [a] Play the very next morning to Mr
+_Fleetwood_ who embraced my Proposal so heartily, that an Appointment was
+immediately made to read it to the Actors who were principally to be
+concerned in it." On consideration, however, this play appeared to
+Fielding to need more time for perfecting, and also to afford very little
+opportunity to Garrick. So, recollecting that he still had by him a play
+which, although 'the third Dramatic Performance' he ever attempted,
+contained a character that would keep the audience's "so justly favourite
+Actor almost eternally before their Eyes," he decided, with characteristic
+impetuosity, to a change at the last moment. "I accordingly," he writes,
+"sat down with a Resolution to work Night and Day, owing to the short Time
+allowed me, which was about a Week, in altering and correcting this
+Production of my more Juvenile Years; when unfortunately the extreme
+Danger of Life into which a Person, very dear to me, was reduced, rendered
+me incapable of executing my Task. To this Accident alone I have the
+vanity to apprehend, the Play owes most of the glaring Faults with which
+it appeared.... Perhaps, it may be asked me why then did I suffer a Piece
+which I myself knew was imperfect, to appear? I answer honestly and
+freely, that Reputation was not my Inducement; and that I hoped, faulty as
+it was, it might answer a much more solid, and in my unhappy situation, a
+much more urgent Motive." This hope was, alas, frustrated; not even the
+brilliancy of a cast which included Garrick, Mrs Pritchard, Macklin, and
+Peg Woffington, could carry the _Wedding Day_ over its sixth night; and
+the harassed author received 'not £50 from the House for it.' The comedy
+is a coarsely moral attack on libertinism, a fact which probably, in no
+wise added to the popularity of the play in the pit and boxes of 1743.
+
+A doggerel prologue, both written and spoken by Macklin, gives an
+excellent picture of the playhouse humours, and of the wild pit, of those
+exuberant days; and contains moreover the following sound advice,
+addressed to Fielding
+
+  "Ah! thou foolish follower of the ragged Nine
+  You'd better stuck to honest Abram Adams, by half;
+  He, in spite of critics can make your Readers laugh."
+
+The next publication of these lean years was the _Miscellanies_, a
+collection of mingled prose, verse, and drama, of which the only
+connecting link seems to be the urgent need of money which forced so
+heterogenous a medley from so great an artist. These long delayed volumes
+appeared, probably, in April, and were, says Fielding, composed with a
+frequent "Degree of Heartache." They include the lover's verses of his
+early youth; philosophical, satiric, and didactic essays; a reprint of the
+political effusion dedicated to Dodington; a few plays; the fragment
+entitled _A Journey from this World to the Next_; and the splendid ironic
+outburst on villany, _Jonathan Wild_.
+
+The _Preface_, largely occupied as it is with those private circumstances
+which forced the hasty production of the _Wedding Day_, has other matter
+of even greater interest for the biographer. Thus Fielding's sensitive
+care of his reputation in essential matters appears in the fiery denial
+here given to allegations of publishing anonymous scandals: "I never was,
+nor will be the Author of anonymous Scandal on the private History or
+Family of any Person whatever. Indeed there is no Man who speaks or thinks
+with more detestation of the modern custom of Libelling. I look on the
+practice of stabbing a Man's Character in the Dark, to be as base and as
+barbarous as that of stabbing him with a Poignard in the same manner; nor
+have I ever been once in my Life guilty of it." Here too, he marks his
+abhorrence of that 'detestable Vice' hypocrisy, which vice he was, before
+long, to expose utterly in the person of Blifil in _Tom Jones_. His happy
+social temperament is betrayed in the characteristic definition of good
+breeding as consisting in "contributing with our utmost Power to the
+Satisfaction and Happiness of all about us." And in these pages we have
+Fielding's philosophy of _goodness_ and _greatness_, delivered in words
+that already display an unrivalled perfection of style. Speaking of his
+third volume, that poignant indictment of devilry the _Life of Mr Jonathan
+Wild the Great_, it is thus that Fielding exposes the iniquity of villains
+in "great" places:--"But without considering _Newgate_ as no other than
+Human Nature with its mask off, which some very shameless Writers have
+done, a Thought which no Price should purchase me to entertain, I think we
+may be excused for suspecting, that the splendid Palaces of the Great, are
+often no other than _Newgate_ with the Mask on. Nor do I know anything
+which can raise an honest Man's Indignation higher than that the same
+Morals should be in one Place attended with all imaginable Misery and
+Infamy and in the other with the highest Luxory and Honour. Let any
+impartial Man in his Senses be asked, for which of these two Places a
+Composition of Cruelty, Lust, Avarice, Rapine, Insolence, Hypocrisy, Fraud
+and Treachery, was best fitted, surely his Answer must be certain and
+immediate; and yet I am afraid all these Ingredients glossed over with
+Wealth and a Title, have been treated with the highest Respect and
+Veneration in the one, while one or two of them have been condemned to the
+Gallows in the other."
+
+Here is the converse of that insight which could discern goodness under a
+ragged cassock, or in a swearing postilion. And, having discerned the true
+nature of such Great Men, Fielding proceeds to point out that "However the
+Glare of Riches and Awe of Title may terrify the Vulgar; nay however
+Hypocrisy may deceive the more Discerning, there is still a Judge in every
+Man's Breast, which none can cheat or corrupt, tho' perhaps it is the only
+uncorrupt thing about him"; that nothing is so preposterous as that men
+should laboriously seek to be villains; and that this Judge, inflexible
+and honest "however polluted the Bench on which he sits," always bestows
+on the spurious Great the penalty of fear, an evil which "never can in any
+manner molest the Happiness" of the "Enjoyments of Innocence and Virtue."
+
+The subsequent philosophic dissertation on the qualities of goodness and
+greatness is interesting for such passages as the definition of a good man
+as one possessing "Benevolence, Honour, Honesty, and Charity"; and the
+fine declaration that of the passion of Love "goodness hath always
+appeared to me the only true and proper Object." And the very springs of
+action underlying half at least of each of the three great novels, and
+almost every page of _Jonathan Wild_, are revealed in the final
+declaration of the writer's intention to expose in these pages vice
+stripped of its false colours; to show it "in its native Deformity." As
+the native and stripped deformity of vice is perhaps not often fully
+apprehended and certainly is very seldom exposed in our own age, Fielding,
+by the very sincerity and fire of his morality, doubtless loses many a
+modern reader.
+
+It is in the third volume of the _Miscellanies_, a volume completely
+occupied by _Jonathan Wild_, that Fielding first fully reveals himself as
+public moralist. And in this Rogue's progress to the gallows he displays
+so concentrated a zeal, that nothing short of his genius and his humour
+could have saved these pages from the dullness of the professional
+reformer. For the little volume consists of a relentless exposure of the
+deformity and folly of vice. Here the foul souls of Wild and his
+associates, stripped of all the glamour of picturesque crime, stand
+displayed in their essential qualities, with the result that even the
+pestilential air of thieves' slums, of 'night cellars,' and of Newgate
+purlieus, an air which hangs so heavy over every page, falls back into
+insignificance before the loathsomeness of the central figure. A few years
+later, in the preface to _Tom Jones_, Fielding formally asserted his
+belief that the beauty of goodness needed but to be seen 'to attract the
+admiration of mankind'; in _Jonathan Wild_ he appears to be already at
+work on the converse doctrine, that if the deformity of vice be but
+stripped naked, abhorrence must ensue. Such a naked criminal is Wild; and
+in the contemplation of his vices, as in the case of the arch hypocrite
+Blifil, in _Tom Jones_, and of the shameless sensualist "My Lord," in
+_Amelia_, Fielding's characteristic compassion for the faults of hard
+pressed humanity is, for the time, scorched up in the fierceness of his
+anger and scorn at deliberate cruelty, avarice and lust. Under the spell
+of Fielding's power of painting the devil in his native blackness, we feel
+that for such as Wild hanging is too handsome a fate. It is easy for his
+Newgate chaplain to assert that "nothing is so sinful as sin"; it takes a
+great genius and a great moralist to convince us, as in this picture, that
+nothing is so deformed or so contemptible. The dark places of _Jonathan
+Wild_ receive some light in the character of the good jeweller, in the
+tender scenes between that honest ruined tradesman and his wife and
+children, and in the devoted affection of his apprentice. But the true
+illumination of the book, and its personal value for the biographer, lie
+in the white heat of anger, the "sustained and sleepless irony" to adopt
+Mr Austin Dobson's happy phrase, with which Fielding, with a force
+unwavering from the first page to the last, here assails his subject. An
+underlying attack on the Ministerial iniquity of "Great Men" in high
+places seems to be often suggested; if this be a true inference, it does
+but give us further proof of Fielding's energies as a political, no less
+than as a moral, reformer. Certainly, through all the squalid scenes of
+the book, the contention is insisted on that criminals of Wild's
+tyrannical stamp may as easily be found in courts, and at the head of
+armies, as among the poor leaders of Newgate gangs. To the wise moralist
+it is the same rogue, whether picking a pocket or swindling his country.
+
+And not to forget the wit in the moral reformer, we may leave Mr Jonathan
+Wild listening to one of the reasons given by the Newgate chaplain for his
+Reverence's preference for punch over wine: "Let me tell you, Mr Wild
+there is nothing so deceitful as the spirits given us by wine. If you must
+drink let us have a bowl of punch; a liquor I the rather prefer as it is
+nowhere spoken against in Scripture."
+
+After _Jonathan Wild_ the most interesting fragment of the _Miscellanies_
+is the _Journey from this World to the Next_. In this essay Fielding
+reveals his philosophy, his sternness, his affections, and his humour, as
+a man might do in intimate conversation. His warm humanity breathes in the
+conception that "the only Business" of those who had won admission to
+Elysium 'that happy Place,' was to "contribute to the Happiness of each
+other"; and again in the stern declaration of Heaven's doorkeeper, the
+Judge Minos, that "no Man enters that Gate without Charity." And indeed
+the whole chapter devoted to the judgments administered by Minos on the
+spirits that come, confident or trembling, before him, and are either
+admitted to Heaven, sent back to earth, or despatched to the "little Back
+Gate" opening immediately into the bottomless pit, is full of personal
+revelation. We feel the glee with which Fielding consigns the "little
+sneaking soul" of a miser to diabolically ingenious torments; the
+satisfaction with which he watches Minos apply a kick to the retreating
+figure of a duke, possessed of nothing but "a very solemn Air and great
+Dignity"; and the pleasure it gave him to observe the rejection accorded
+to "a grave Lady," the Judge declaring that "there was not a single Prude
+in Elysium." Again, nothing could be more true to Fielding's nature than
+the account of the poet who is admitted, not for the moral value he
+himself places on his Dramatic Works (which he endeavours to read aloud to
+Minos), but because "he had once lent the whole profits of a Benefit Night
+to a Friend, and by that Means had saved him and his Family from
+Destruction"; unless it were the account of the poverty driven wretch,
+hanged for a robbery of eighteen-pence, who yet could plead that he had
+supported an aged Parent with his labour, that he had been a very tender
+Husband, and a Kind Father, and that he had ruined himself for being Bail
+for a Friend. "At these words," adds the historian, "the gate opened, and
+_Minos_ bid him enter, giving him a slap on the Back as he passed by him."
+
+When the author's own turn came, he very little expects, he tells us, "to
+pass this fiery Trial. I confess'd I had indulged myself very freely with
+Wine and Women in my Youth, but had never done an Injury to any Man
+living, nor avoided an opportunity of doing good; but I pretended to very
+little Virtue more than general Philanthropy and Private Friendship." Here
+Minos cut the speaker short, bidding him enter the gate, and not indulge
+himself trumpeting forth his virtues. Whether or no we may here read the
+reflections of Fielding's maturity, looking honestly back over his own
+forty years and forward with humble fear into the future, we may certainly
+see reflected in both confession and judgment much of the doctrine and the
+practice of his life.
+
+After the failure, early in 1743, of the _Wedding Day_, and the subsequent
+publication of the _Miscellanies_, Fielding seems to have thrown his
+energies for twelve months into an exclusive pursuit of the law. This
+appears from his statement, made a year later, in May 1744, that he could
+not possibly be the author of his sister's novel _David Simple_, which had
+been attributed to him, because he had applied himself to his profession
+"with so arduous and intent a diligence that I have had no leisure, if I
+had inclination, to compose anything of this kind." Clearly, in the period
+that covers the publication of _Joseph Andrews_ an historical pamphlet,
+parts of a farce and of _Plutus_, and of the _Miscellanies_, Fielding
+found both leisure and inclination for writing; so this sudden immersion
+in law must relate to the twelve months or so intervening between these
+works and the publication of his statement. Murphy corroborates this bout
+of hard legal effort. After the _Wedding Day_ says that biographer "the
+law from this time had its hot and cold fits with him." The cold fits were
+fits of gout; and inconveniences felt by Fielding from these interruptions
+were, adds Murphy "the more severe upon him, as voluntary and wilful
+neglect could not be charged upon him. The repeated shocks of illness
+disabled him from being as assiduous an attendant at the bar, as his own
+inclination and patience of the most laborious application, would
+otherwise have made him."
+
+Mr Counsellor Fielding follows his retrospect of this strenuous attack on
+the law with a declaration that, henceforth, he intends to forsake the
+pursuit of that 'foolscap' literary fame, and the company of the
+'infamous' nine Muses; a decision based partly on the insubstantial nature
+of the rewards achieved, and partly it would seem due to the fact that at
+Fielding's innocent door had been laid, he declares, half the anonymous
+scurrility, indecency, treason, and blasphemy that the few last years had
+produced. [6] In especial he protests against the ascription to his pen of
+that 'infamous paltry libel' on lawyers, the _Causidicade_, an ascription
+which, as he truly says, accused him "not only of being a bad writer and a
+bad man, but with downright idiotism in flying in the face of the greatest
+men of my profession." He also declares that no anonymous work had issued
+from his pen since his promise to that effect; and that these false
+accusations had injured him cruelly in ease, reputation and interest. This
+solemn declaration that the now detested Muses shall no longer beguile
+Fielding's pen affords excellent reading in view of the fact that this
+absorbed barrister must, within a year or two, have been at work on _Tom
+Jones_. The whole emphatic outburst was probably partly an effort to
+assert himself as now wholly devoted to the law, and partly an example of
+one of those "occasional fits of peevishness" into which, Murphy tells us,
+distress and disappointment would betray him.
+
+The preface to his sister's novel _David Simple_, in which Fielding took
+occasion to announce these protests and assertions, is his only extant
+publication for this year of 1744; and apart from its biographical value
+is not of any great moment. Ample proof may be found in it of brotherly
+pride and admiration for the work of a sister "so nearly and dearly allied
+to me in the highest friendship as well as relation." There is the
+noteworthy declaration that the "greatest, noblest, and rarest of all the
+talents which constitute a genius" is the gift of "a deep and profound
+discernment of all the mazes, windings, and labyrinths which perplex the
+heart of man." The utterance concerning style, by so great a master of
+English, is memorable--"a good style as well as a good hand in writing is
+chiefly learned by practice." And a delightful reference should not be
+forgotten to the carping ignorant critic, who has indeed, "had a little
+Latin inoculated into his tail," but who would have been much the gainer
+had "the same great quantity of birch been employed in scourging away his
+ill-nature."
+
+Disabled by gout and harassed by want of money, a yet greater distress was
+now fast closing on Fielding in the prolonged illness of his wife. "To see
+her daily languishing and wearing away before his eyes," says Murphy, "was
+too much for a man of his strong sensations; the fortitude with which he
+met all other calamities of life [now] deserted him." In the autumn of
+1744 Mrs Fielding was at Bath, doubtless in the hope of benefit from the
+Bath waters. And here, in November, she died. Her body was brought to
+London for burial in the church of St. Martin's in the Fields; receiving
+on the 14th of November, 1744, honourable interment in the chancel vault,
+to the tolling of the great tenor bell, and with the fullest ceremonial of
+the time. Indeed it is evident, from the charges still preserved in the
+sexton's book, that Fielding rendered to his wife such stately honours as
+were occasionally accorded to the members of the few great families
+interred in the old church.
+
+The death of this beloved wife, Murphy tells us, brought on Fielding "such
+a vehemence of grief that his friends began to think him in danger of
+losing his reason." When we remember that he himself has explicitly stated
+that lovely picture of the 'fair soul in the fair body,' the Sophia of
+_Tom Jones_, to have been but a portrait of Charlotte Fielding, we can in
+some measure realise his overwhelming grief at her death. And that the
+exquisite memorial raised to his wife by Fielding's affection and genius
+was not more beautiful in mind or face than the original, is acknowledged
+by Lady Bute, a kinswoman of the great novelist. Lady Bute was no
+stranger, "to that beloved first wife whose picture he drew in his Amelia,
+where, as she said, even the glowing language he knew how to employ did
+not do more than justice to the amiable qualities of the original, or to
+her beauty. He loved her passionately, and she returned his affection; yet
+had no happy life for they were almost always miserably poor, and seldom
+in a state of quiet and safety. His elastic gaiety of spirit carried him
+through it all; but meanwhile, care and anxiety were preying upon her more
+delicate mind, and undermining her constitution. She gradually declined,
+caught a fever and died in his arms." That Fielding's married life was
+unhappy, whatever were its outward conditions, is obviously a very shallow
+misstatement; but, for the rest, the picture accords well enough with our
+knowledge of his nature. The passionate tenderness of which that nature
+was capable appears in a passage from those very _Miscellanies_, which, he
+tells us, were written with so frequent a "Degree of Heartache." In the
+_Journey from this World to the Next_, Fielding describes how, on his
+entrance into Elysium, that "happy region whose beauty no Painting of the
+Imagination can describe" and where "Spirits know one another by
+Intuition" he presently met "a little Daughter whom I had lost several
+years before. Good Gods! What Words can describe the Raptures, the melting
+passionate Tenderness, with which we kiss'd each other, continuing in our
+Embrace, with the most extatic Joy, a Space, which if Time had been
+measured here as on Earth, could not have been less than half a Year."
+
+The fittest final comment on Henry Fielding's marriage with Charlotte
+Cradock is, perhaps, that saying of a member of his own craft of the
+drama, "Now to love anything sincerely is an act of grace, but to love the
+best sincerely is a state of grace."
+
+[1] _Daily Post_, June 5, 1742.
+
+[2] MS. copy of the Minutes of the Meetings of the Partners in the
+_Champion_, in the possession of the present writer.
+
+[3] See _Daily Post_. May 29, 1742.
+
+[4] Preface to the _Miscellanies_.
+
+[5] Such as the inscription on some verses, published in the
+_Miscellanies_, as "Written _Extempore_ in the Pump-room" at Bath, in
+1742.
+
+[6] Preface to _David Simple_.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+PATRIOTIC JOURNALISM
+
+    "he only is the _true Patriot_ who always does what is in
+    his Power for his Country's Service without any selfish Views or
+    Regard to private Interests."--The _True Patriot_.
+
+Fielding's active pen seems to have been laid aside for twelve months
+after the death of his wife; and it is perfectly in accord with all that
+we know of his passionate devotion to Charlotte Cradock that her loss
+should have shattered his energies for the whole of the ensuing year.
+Murphy, as we have seen, speaks of the first vehemence of his grief as
+being so acute that fears were entertained for his reason. According to
+Fielding's kinswomen, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Lady Bute, the first
+agonies of his grief approached to frenzy; but "when the first emotions of
+his sorrow were abated" his fine balance reasserted itself, and to quote
+again from Murphy, "philosophy administered her aid; his resolution
+returned, and he began again to struggle with his fortune."
+
+As we hear no more of exclusive devotion to the law, it may be assumed
+that the attempt of the previous year to live by that arduous calling
+alone was now abandoned; and to a man of Fielding's strong Protestant and
+Hanoverian convictions the year of the '45, when a Stewart Prince and an
+invading Highland army had captured Edinburgh and were actually across the
+border, could not fail to bring occupation. Fielding believed ardently
+that Protestant beliefs, civil liberty, and national independence of
+foreign powers were best safeguarded by a German succession to the English
+throne; so by the time Prince Charles and 6,000 men had set foot on
+English soil, the former 'Champion of Great Britain' was again up in arms,
+discharging his sturdy blows in a new weekly newspaper entitled the _True
+Patriot_.
+
+The _True Patriot_ is chiefly notable as affording the first sign that
+Fielding was now leaving party politics for the wider, and much duller,
+field of Constitutional liberty. A man might die for the British
+Constitution; but to be witty about it would tax the resources of a
+Lucian. And, accordingly, in place of that gay young spark Mr Pasquin, who
+laid his cudgel with so hearty a good will on the shoulders of the
+offending 'Great Man,' there now steps out a very philosophic, mature, and
+soberly constitutional _Patriot_; a patriot who explicitly asserts in his
+first number, "I am of no party; a word I hope by these my labours to
+eradicate out of our constitution: this being indeed the true source of
+all those evils which we have reason to complain of." And again, in No.
+14, "I am engaged to no Party, nor in the Support of any, unless of such
+as are truly and sincerely attached to the true interest of their Country,
+and are resolved to hazard all Things in its Preservation." Here is a
+considerable change from the personal zest that placed Mr Quiddam and Mr
+Pillage before delighted audiences in the Little Theatre in the Haymarket.
+
+The available copies of the _True Patriot_, now in the British Museum,
+[1] include only thirty-two numbers, starting from No. 1, which appeared
+on the 5th of November, 1745, and ending on June 3, 1746. The first number
+contains a characteristic tribute to Dean Swift, whose death had occurred
+'a few days since.' Doctor Jonathan Swift, says the _Patriot_, was "A
+genius who deserves to be rank'd among the first whom the World ever saw.
+He possessed the Talents of a Lucian a Rabelais and a Cervantes and in his
+Works exceeded them all. He employed his Wit to the noblest Purposes in
+ridiculing as well Superstition in Religion as Infidelity and the several
+Errors and Immoralities which sprung up from time to time in his Age; and
+lastly in defence of his Country.... Nor was he only a Genius and a
+Patriot; he was in Private Life a good and charitable Man and frequently
+lent Sums of Money, without interest, to the Poor and Industrious; by
+which means many Families were preserved from Destruction." In No. 2, the
+_Patriot_ reiterates his "sincere Intention to calm and heal, not to blow
+up and inflame, any Party-Divisions"; but even the task of defending the
+British Constitution could not stifle Fielding's wit, and he escapes, for
+breathing space as it were, into a column devoted to the news items of the
+week, gathered from various papers, and adorned by comments of his own,
+printed in italics. And in this running commentary on the daily occurences
+of the time we get nearer, perhaps, to the table-talk of Henry Fielding
+than by any other means. Thus he faithfully repeats the inflated obituary
+lists that were then in fashion, but with such a variation as the
+following, "Thomas Tonkin, ... universally lamented by his Acquaintance.
+Upwards of 40 Cows belonging to one at Tottenham Court, _universally
+lamented by all their Acquaintance_." On a notice of an anniversary
+meeting of the Society for propagating the Gospel in Foreign Parts there
+is the pertinent comment "_It is a Pity some Method--was not invented for
+the Propagation of the Gospel in Great Britain_." After the deaths of a
+wealthy banker and factor, comes the obituary of "One Nowns a Labourer,
+_most probably immensely poor, and yet as rich now as either of the two
+Preceeding_"; beside which may be placed the very characteristic assertion
+in No. 6 that "Spleen and Vapours inhabit Palaces and are attired with
+Pomp and Splendor, while they shun Rags and Prisons."
+
+There is scarcely a personal allusion in all the thirty-two numbers of the
+_Patriot_, save the charming picture of that gentleman sitting in his
+study "meditating for the good and entertainment of the public, with my
+two little children (as is my usual course to suffer them) playing near
+me." And the ending of his horrid nightmare, in which a Jacobite
+executioner was placing a rope round his neck, "when my little girl
+entered my bedchamber and put an end to my dream by pulling open my eyes,
+and telling me that the taylor had brought home my cloaths for his
+Majesty's Birthday." The number for January 28 must not be overlooked,
+containing as it does, a scathing and humourous exposure of the profligate
+young sparks of the Town, from no less a pen than that of the Rev. Mr.
+Abraham Adams; and Parson Adams' letter concludes with a paragraph in
+which may be heard the voice of the future zealous magistrate: "No man can
+doubt but that the education of youth ought to be the principal care of
+every legislation; by the neglect of which great mischief accrues to the
+civil polity in every city." When himself but a lad of twenty, and in the
+prologue of his first comedy, Fielding had entered his protest against
+certain popular vices of the time, and had made merry over its follies.
+The desire to make the world he knew too well a better place than he found
+it is just as keen in the wit and humourist of thirty-nine; a desire,
+moreover, undulled by twenty years of vivacious living. Surely not the
+least amazing feature of Fielding's genius is this dual capacity for
+exuberant enjoyment, and incisive judgement. "His wit," said Thackeray,
+"is wonderfully wise and detective; it flashes upon a rogue and brightens
+up a rascal like a policeman's lantern."
+
+To this time of national ferment belongs a publication of which we know
+nothing but the title, a _Serious Address_; and also one of our rare
+glimpses of the novelist's home life. Joseph Warton writes to his brother
+Tom, on October 29, 1746:--"I wish you had been with me last week when I
+spent two evenings with Fielding and his sister, who wrote David Simple,
+and you may guess I was very well entertained. The lady indeed retir'd
+pretty soon, but Russell and I sat up with the Poet till one or two in the
+morning, and were inexpressibly diverted. I find he values, as he justly
+may, Joseph Andrews above all his writings: he was extremely civil to me,
+I fancy, on my Father's account." Joseph Warton's father was Vicar of
+Basingstoke, Professor of Poetry at Oxford, and moreover, something of a
+Jacobite; whereby, we may surmise, that the _True Patriot_ did not allow
+his staunch Hanoverian sentiments too great an invasion into his private
+society. Alas, that it did not occur to Warton to preserve, for the
+entertainment of later ages, some fuller record of those two _noctes
+ambrosianae_.
+
+This sister, Sally Fielding as her cousin Lady Mary Wortley Montagu called
+her, made some figure in the literary world of the day. Richardson
+extolled her "knowledge of the human heart"; Murphy writes of her "lively
+and penetrating genius"; and her classical scholarship is attested by a
+translation of Xenophon's _Memorabilia_. That she also shared some of the
+engaging qualities of her brother may be assumed from the lines written to
+the memory of the "esteemed and loved ... Mrs. Sarah Fielding," by her
+friend Dr. John Hoadley.
+
+  "Her unaffected Manners, candid Mind,
+  Her Heart benevolent, and Soul resign'd;
+  Were more her Praise than all she knew or thought
+  Though Athens Wisdom to her Sex she taught."
+
+Sarah Fielding's name occurs again as living with her brother in that
+house in Beaufort Buildings with which is associated perhaps the happiest
+instance of Fielding's warm-hearted generosity. The story may be given as
+nearly as possible in the words of the narrator, one G. S., writing from
+Harley Street in 1786. After speaking of the conspicuous good nature of
+"the late Harry Fielding," G. S. says: "His receipts were never large, and
+his pocket was an open bank for distress and friendship at all times to
+draw on. Marked by such a liberality of mind it is not to be wondered at
+if he was frequently under pecuniary embarrassments.... Some parochial
+taxes for his house in Beaufort Buildings being unpaid, and for which he
+had been demanded again and again [we may remember how Mr. Luckless' door
+was "almost beat down with duns"]...he was at last given to understand by
+the collector who had an esteem for him, that he could procrastinate the
+payment no longer." To a bookseller, therefore he addressed himself, and
+mortgaged the coming sheets of some work then in hand. He received the
+cash, some ten or twelve guineas, and was returning home, full freighted
+with this sum, when, in the Strand, within a few yards of his own house,
+he met an old college chum whom he had not seen for many years. "Harry
+felt the enthusiasm of friendship; an hundred interrogatives were put to
+him in a moment as where had he been? where was he going? how did he do?
+&c. &c. His friend told him in reply he had long been buffeting the waves
+of adverse fortunes, but never could surmount them." Fielding took him off
+to dine at a neighbouring tavern, and as they talked, becoming acquainted
+with the state of his friend's pocket, emptied his own into it; and a
+little before dawn, he turned homewards "greater and happier than a
+monarch." Arrived at Beaufort Buildings his sister, who had anxiously
+awaited him, reported that the collector had called for the taxes twice
+that day. "Friendship," answered Harry Fielding "has called for the money
+and had it;--let the collector call again." Well might his cousin Lady
+Mary say of the man of whom such a story could be told, "I am persuaded he
+has known more happy moments than any prince upon earth."
+
+During the summer following Warton's visit to the brother and sister,
+Fielding published a _Dialogue between an Alderman and a Courtier_. And in
+the following November his second marriage took place, at the little City
+church of St Bene't's, Paul's Wharf. The story of this marriage cannot be
+better told than in the words of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's
+granddaughter, Lady Louisa Stuart, quoting from the personal knowledge of
+her mother and grandmother:
+
+"His biographers seem to have been shy of disclosing that after the death
+of this charming woman [his first wife] he married her maid. And yet the
+act was not so discreditable to his character as it may sound. The maid
+had few personal charms, but was an excellent creature, devotedly attached
+to her mistress, and almost broken-hearted for her loss. In the first
+agonies of his own grief, which approached to frenzy, he found no relief
+but from weeping with her; nor solace, when a degree calmer, but in
+talking to her of the angel they mutually regretted. This made her his
+habitual confidential associate, and in process of time he began to think
+he could not give his children a tenderer mother, or secure for himself a
+more faithful housekeeper and nurse. At least this was what he told his
+friends; and it is certain that her conduct as his wife confirmed it, and
+fully justified his good opinion." From a supposed allusion by Smollett,
+in the first edition of _Peregrine Pickle_, (an allusion afterwards
+suppressed) it would appear that Fielding's old schoolfellow and lifelong
+friend 'the good Lord Lyttelton' so far approved the marriage as himself
+to give Mary Daniel away; and, as the dates in the Twickenham Register of
+births show that the marriage was one of justice as well as expediency,
+this well accords with Lyttelton's upright and honourable character. Of
+Fielding's affectionate and grateful loyalty to his second wife ample
+evidence appears in the pages of his last book, the _Journal of a Voyage
+to Lisbon_. Throughout this touching record of the journey of a dying man,
+there are references to her tenderness, ability and devotion. At the sad
+parting from children and friends, on the morning of their departure for
+Lisbon, he writes of her behaviour as "more like a heroine and
+philosopher, though at the same time the tenderest mother in the world."
+When, during the voyage down the Thames, an unmannerly custom house
+officer burst into the cabin where Fielding and his wife were sitting, the
+man was soundly rated for breaking "into the presence of a lady without an
+apology or even moving his hat"; by which we may see his sensitive care
+that due respect was accorded her. He tells us how he persuaded her with
+difficulty to take a walk on shore when their vessel was wind bound in
+Torbay, it being "no easy matter for me to force [her] from my side." With
+anxious forboding he thinks of his "dear wife and child" facing the world
+alone after his death, for "in truth I have often thought they are both
+too good and too gentle to be trusted to the power of any man I know, to
+whom they could possibly be so trusted." And in a more formal tribute he
+acknowledges the abilities that accompanied her worth, when he says that
+"besides discharging excellently well her own and all tender offices
+becoming the female character; ... besides being a faithful friend, an
+amiable companion, and a tender nurse, [she] could likewise supply the
+wants of a decrepit husband and occasionally perform his part." That
+Fielding suffered socially by the fact of his second marriage is probable.
+But the fact is proof, if proof were needed, of his courage in reparation,
+and of the unworldly spirit in which he ultimately followed the dictates
+of that incorruptible judge which he himself asserted to be in every man's
+breast.
+
+It was in December 1747, just a month after his second marriage, that
+Fielding again flung himself into the arena of contentious journalism,
+'brandishing' his pen as truculently as ever on behalf of the Protestant
+and Hanoverian succession, and in despite of the Jacobite cause. He called
+his new paper "_The Jacobite's Journal_, by John Trott Plaid Esq're.," and
+the ironic title was accompanied by a woodcut traditionally associated
+with Hogarth. The ironic mask, Fielding explains, was assumed "in order if
+possible to laugh Men out of their follies and to make men ashamed of
+owning or acting by" Jacobite principles.
+
+The _Jacobite's Journal_ appeared at a moment when public opinion, and
+public gossip also, seem to have been immersed in the question whether a
+notorious pamphlet purporting to have been found among the papers of a
+late Minister, Mr. Thomas Winnington, were genuine or a libel. Into this
+fray Fielding promptly plunged, publishing, in December 1747, [2] a
+shilling pamphlet entitled _A Proper Answer to a Late Scurrilous
+Libel,... By the Author of the Jacobites Journal._ This little pamphlet,
+copies of which may be seen in the British Museum, is merely a further
+vigorous declamation for civil liberty and the Protestant religion, as
+under King George, and contains hardly any reference either to Winnington
+or to the author. It was retorted on in two further pamphlets. In one of
+these a Lady Fanny and her friend, enjoying a 'Chit chat,' discuss the
+news that Lady Fanny is she "whom F---g represents in a _Plaid Jocket_ in
+the front of his _Jacobite_ Journal." "The Whirling Coxcomb," cries Lady
+Fanny enraged, "what had he to do with ridiculing any Party, who had
+travell'd round the whole Circle of Parties and Ministers, ever since he
+could brandish a Pen." [3] Her Ladyship adds some further sneers on
+writers pensioned to amuse people with their nonsense. The other counter
+pamphlet consists of conversations overheard, all over the town, on the
+subject of Winnington and his _Apology_. Here a mercer and a bookseller
+abuse Fielding for boxing the political compass, and for selling his pen.
+Another bookseller insinuates that Fielding's own attack on the _Apology_
+is but a half-hearted affair--"Ah Sir, you know not what F---g could do if
+he were willing ... you would have seen him mince and hash it so as to
+make half the Town weep and the other laugh. Don't you think the Pen that
+writ _Pasquin, Joseph Andrews_, and the _Champion_ could have answered the
+Apology if he had had the Will?" "But I can't see why the Author of the
+Jacobite Journal should want that will," protests a Bencher. "Alas Sir!"
+cries the bookseller, "You forget the Power of _Necessity_. If a Man that
+wants Bread can establish a Paper by the P--t Off--e [Post Office?] taking
+off two thousand every week is he not more excusable...." To which the
+Bencher replies that possibly it is Fielding's 'Wavering Principles' that
+have "brought him to the Necessity of writing for Bread." [4] From all
+which we may assume that Fielding's superiority to what he calls the
+"absurd and irrational Distinction of Parties [which] hath principally
+contributed to poison our Constitution" [5] was very little understood by
+the heated party factions of 1747.
+
+To call one's political opponent a 'Whirling Coxcomb,' or a 'pensioned
+scribbler,' was a very mild amenity in eighteenth century party warfare;
+and the abuse of such small fry as these anonymous pamphleteers might be
+wholly disregarded did it not show Fielding's prominence, during these
+anxious times, as a strenuous Hanoverian, and also the fact that he had
+now not only largely abjured party politics, but that what party tenets he
+still held were changed. Indeed as much may surely be deduced from the
+following philosophic passage in his _True Patriot_. "I have formerly
+shown in this Paper, that the bare objecting to a Man a _Change_ in his
+_Political Notions_, ought by no means to affect any Person's _Character_;
+because in a Country like this it is simply impossible that a Man of sound
+Sense, and strict Honour, should always adhere to the same _Political
+Creed_." [6] It is very little material to our knowledge of Fielding as an
+honest man and a great genius to discover, were it possible, precisely
+what changes his political views underwent. When Sir Robert Walpole
+essayed to corrupt the nation Fielding fought strenuously in the cause of
+political honour; when a Stewart invasion threatened (as he thought) both
+civil liberty and Protestant beliefs he flung himself as zealously into
+the defence of the Church of England and of the Hanoverian Government. It
+is clear that the latter exertions stirred up much cheap obliquy; and it
+must be admitted that such references to his antagonists as "last weeks
+Dunghill of Papers" were likely to entail unsavory retort.
+
+This abuse seems to have broken out with an excess of virulence not long
+after the appearance of the _Jacobite's Journal_; a fate, as Fielding
+observes, little to be expected by the editor of a loyal paper. His
+dignified protest in the matter is worth recalling. In a leading article
+he declares that "before my paper hath reached the 20th. number a heavier
+load of Scandal hath been cast upon me than I believe ever fell to the
+Share of a Single Man. The Author of the Journal was soon guessed at;
+Either from some Singularity in Style, or from little care which being
+free from any wicked Purpose, I have ever taken to conceal my Name. Of
+this several Writers were no sooner possessed than they attempted to
+blacken it with every kind of Reproach; pursued me into private Life,
+_even to my boyish Years_; where they have given me almost every Vice in
+Human Nature. Again they have followed me with uncommon Inveteracy into a
+Profession in which they have very roundly asserted that I have neither
+Business nor Knowledge: And lastly, as an Author they have affected to
+treat me with more Contempt than Mr. Pope, who hath great Merit and no
+less Pride in the Character of a Writer hath thought proper to bestow on
+the lowest Scribbler of his Time. All this moreover they have poured forth
+in a vein of Scurrility which hath disgraced the Press with every abusive
+Term in our Language." Although, as Fielding adds, those who knew him
+would not take their opinion from those who knew him not, it is to be
+feared that the scurrilous libellers of the day succeeded in creating a
+prejudice that is hardly yet dispersed. For such petty clamours would be
+trifling enough round the figure of the creator of the English novel, were
+it not that in the abuse of the gutter press of his day we may probably
+find the reason for much of the vague cloud which has so strangely
+overhung Fielding's name. In his own spirited protest he tells us of the
+'ordure' that was thrown at him; and it is an old saying that if enough
+mud be thrown some will stick.
+
+In the February following the appearance of his new paper Fielding must
+have been at Twickenham; for the baptism of his son William appears in the
+Parish Register for that month. A writer of thirty years ago says that the
+house celebrated as that in which Fielding lived was then still standing,
+a quaint old fashioned wooden dwelling, in Back Lane; and adds the
+information that Fielding had two rooms, the house being then let in
+lodgings. [7] Lysons, however, in his _Environs of London_, published in
+1795, says that Fielding "rented a house at this time in the Back-Lane at
+Twickenham," adding that he received his information from the Earl of
+Orford. The site is now occupied by a row of cottages. In his _Parish
+Register for Twickenham_ Horace Walpole commemorates the great novelist's
+residence in that quiet village, so full of eighteenth century memories.
+Here, he says,
+
+  "... Fielding met his bunter Muse,
+  And, as they quaff'd the fiery juice,
+  Droll Nature stamp'd each lucky hit
+  With unimaginable wit."
+
+Bunter was a cant word for a woman who picks up rags about the street; and
+it may seem to later generations that the epithet fitted far more nicely
+the _bunter muse_ of that "facile retailer of _ana_ and incorrigible
+society-gossip," that rag-picker of anecdotes, Mr. Horace Walpole himself.
+
+When the _Journal_ had been running some six months, Fielding formally
+relinquished his ironic character of a Jacobite, partly because, as he
+says, the evils of Jacobitism were too serious for jesting and required
+more open denunciation; partly because the age required more highly
+seasoned writing, the general taste in reading very much resembling "that
+of some particular Man in eating who would never willingly devour what
+doth not stink"; and partly from the ineptitude of the public to
+appreciate the ironic method. This latter passage is of interest as coming
+from the author of that great masterpiece in irony, _Jonathan Wild_.
+Fielding has observed, he tells us that "though Irony is capable of
+furnishing the most exquisite Ridicule; yet as there is no kind of humour
+so liable to be mistaken it is of all others the most dangerous to the
+Writer. An infinite Number of Readers have not the least taste or relish
+for it, I believe I may say do not understand it; and all are apt to be
+tired when it is carried to any degree of Length."
+
+The _Jacobite's Journal_ is of course mainly occupied with maintaining the
+Protestant British Constitution; but here, as in the _True Patriot_,
+Fielding allows himself a pleasant running commentary on the daily news.
+He also erects a _Court of Criticism_ in which, by virtue of his "high
+Censorial Office," he administers justice in "all matters in the Republic
+of Literature." By thus adopting the title of "Censor of Great Britain"
+the editor of the _Jacobites Journal_ preserves his identity with that
+censorial _Champion_ who nine years before had essayed to keep rogues in
+fear of his Hercules' club. Two judgments delivered by the _Court_ are of
+interest. In one, due castigation is given to that incorrigible mimic and
+wit Foote, who was once threatened by no less a cudgel than that of Dr.
+Johnson himself. Foote was evading all law and order by his inimitable
+mimicries at the Little Theatre in the Haymarket; and for these
+performances at his "scandal-shop" is very properly brought up before Mr.
+Censor's _Court_. Whereupon Foote begins to mimic the _Court_ "pulling a
+Chew of Tobacco from his Mouth, in Imitation of his Honour who is greatly
+fond of that weed." The culprit suffers conviction for crime against law
+and good manners. Having thus seen to the public welfare, Fielding also
+happily settles a little score of his own on one of his anonymous
+libellers. "One Porcupine Pillage," he records, "came into the court and
+threw a great shovelful of dirt at his honour, _but luckily none of it hit
+him_." His comments on weekly news items are no less characteristic than
+those hidden in the columns of the _Patriot_. Thus, on a trotting match,
+he observes, "Trotting is a Sport truly adapted to the English Genius."
+And on a man found dead in Jewin Street "formerly an eminent Dealer in
+Buckrams, but [who] being greatly reduced is supposed to have died for
+Want," he notes, "_either of Common Sense in himself or Common Humanity in
+his Aquaintance_." His own humanity is shown in the wise appeals, repeated
+on more than one page of the _Journal_, for some effective provision for
+the distressed widows and children of the poor clergy. And his unbiassed
+judgment appears in the _amende honorable_ to Richardson, in the form of
+generous and unstinted praise of _Clarissa_.
+
+The first number of the _Jacobite's Journal_ was dated Dec. 5, 1747, and
+'Mr. Trott Plaid' formally takes leave of his subject exactly eleven
+months later, on November 5, 1748, declaring that Jacobites were, by then,
+little to be feared. [8] Ten days before this last 'brandish' of
+Fielding's Constitutional pen, on October 26, 1748, his oaths had been
+received as a Justice of the Peace for Westminster.
+
+[1] These are in the Burney Collection, and are inscribed "These papers
+are by the celebrated Henry Fielding Esqre."
+
+[2] See the _Gentleman's Magazine_. Dec. 1747.
+
+[3] _A Free Comment on the Late Mr. W-G-N's Apology ... By a
+Lady ..._ 1748.
+
+[4] _The Patriot Analized_. 1748.
+
+[5] _True Patriot No. 14_.
+
+[6] _True Patriot_. No. 29. May 20, 1746.
+
+[7] R. Cobbett. _Memorials of Twickenham_, 1872.
+
+[8] The _Journal's_ epitaph was promptly written by a scurrilous opponent
+in lines showing that the prominences of Fielding's profile were
+well-known:
+
+  Beneath this stone
+  Lies _Trott Plaid John_
+  His length of chin and nose.
+
+See the _Gentleman's Magazine_, November 1748.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+TOM JONES
+
+    "In God's Name let us speak out honestly and set the good against
+    the bad."
+    No. 48 of the _Jacobite's Journal_.
+
+The two years of Fielding's life preceding his appointment as a Bow Street
+magistrate (an appointment comparable only to the choice of Robert Burns
+as an exciseman) were marked, as we have seen, by lively passages in the
+political arena, and a steady output of political journalism. Indeed, by
+this time, the public must have associated swingeing denunciations of
+Jacobites, and glowing eulogies of the British Constitution, with Harry
+Fielding's name; just as seven years previously he had been in their eyes
+the 'Champion' journalist of a brilliant Opposition; and, for ten years
+before that, the witty writer of a stream of popular farces and comedies.
+For there is no evidence that his audacious innovation, his splendid
+adventure in literature, _Joseph Andrews_, really revealed the existence
+of a new genius in their midst to the Whigs and Tories of those factious
+days, to the gay frequenters of the play-house, to the barristers at
+Westminster Hall and on the Western Circuit. In 1748 Fielding must have
+been, to his many audiences, a witty and well-born man of letters who, at
+forty-one, had as yet achieved no towering success; a facile dramatist;
+and a master of slashing political invective, growing perplexingly
+impartial, alike in his praise and his condemnation. While, as regards
+outward circumstances, the struggling barrister, baffled in his
+professional hopes by persistent attacks of gout, was now so far enlisted,
+to use his own fine image, under the black banner of poverty, that even
+the small post and hard duties of a Bow Street magistrate were worth his
+acceptance. [1]
+
+Such was Harry Fielding as the world of 1748 knew him, in the Coffee
+houses, the Mall, the Green-room and the Law-courts. What that world did
+not know was that all this dramatic, journalistic, and political action,
+was little more than the surface movement of a vitality far too exuberant
+to be contained in any one groove of hackney writing,--of an impetuous
+'enthusiasm for righteousness' far too ardent to pass by any flagrant
+social, moral, or political abuse without inflicting some form of
+chastisement; and that beneath this ever active surface movement
+Fielding's genius was slowly maturing in that new continent of literature
+the borders of which he had already crossed seven years before. In the
+pages of _Joseph Andrews_, he had, as we know, tentatively explored that
+continent feeling his way along the unknown paths of this long neglected
+world of human nature; bringing back with him one immortal figure, that
+living embodiment of simple piety and scholarship, of charity and honest
+strength, Parson Adams; disclosing hints of discoveries, not yet
+perfected, among the humours and villanies, the virtues and charms, of a
+dozen other inhabitants of his _terra incognita_. But there is no sign
+that the greatness of his discovery, the splendour of his addition to the
+empire of English literature, was in the least apprehended during the
+seven years following the appearance of _Joseph Andrews_. Only Fielding
+himself was conscious that he had created a kind of writing "hitherto
+unattempted in our language."
+
+And, having crossed the borders of this new continent, he seems, after his
+first survey, to have deliberately immersed himself in one portion, and
+that the blackest, of his re-discovered world. For _Jonathan Wild_, with
+its disclosure of the active spirit of 'diabolism,' of naked vice, is
+little else than the exploration of those darkest recesses of human nature
+which can be safely entered only by the sanest and healthiest of
+intellects. Fielding's strength was equal to his exploit; and from this,
+his second adventure, he brought back a picture of the deformity and folly
+of vice, drawn with a just and penetrating scorn unequalled, perhaps, by
+any English moralist. But neither of these two essays in the new field of
+writing had covered more than isolated or outlying portions, the first in
+sunlight, the second in shadow, of that vast territory. And it was not
+till the perfect maturity of his powers and of his experience, not till he
+had seen both the 'manners of many men,' and the workings of many hearts,
+not in a word till he had made himself master of great tracts of that
+human nature which had so long lain neglected, that Fielding in _Tom
+Jones_ disclosed himself as the creator of the English novel.
+
+Little is known as to when the conception of _Tom Jones_ first shaped
+itself in his mind, of where he lived during the writing of the great
+Comic Epic, or of the time occupied in its completion. Appropriately for a
+book expressly designed "to recommend goodness and innocence" the plan of
+the novel was suggested, many years before its appearance, by the 'good
+Lord Lyttelton'; and we know, further, that the writing occupied 'some
+thousands of hours'; but _Tom Jones_ does not emerge into definite
+existence till the summer of 1748.
+
+Legend it is true, attesting to the greatness of the achievement contained
+in the six little volumes, endows many localities with the fame of their
+origin. A well-credited contemporary writer, the Rev. Richard Graves,
+declared that the novelist "while he was writing his novel of Tom Jones"
+lived at Tiverton (Twerton), one and a half miles from Bath, and dined
+daily at Prior Park the seat of his munificent and pious friend Ralph
+Allen. Mr Graves says that Fielding then lived in "the first house on the
+right hand with a spread eagle over the door." [2] Salisbury is insistent
+that part at least of the great novel was written at Milford House, near
+to that city. An anonymous old engraver asserts the same honour for
+Fielding's Farm at East Stour, an assertion certainly not confirmed by the
+newly found documents concerning Fielding's sale of property at Stour in
+1738. Twickenham claims that the book was wholly composed in the house in
+Back Lane. And to an ancient building at Tintern Parva in the Wye Valley,
+said to have once been the lodging of the Abbot of Tintern, was also
+assigned the reputation of being the birthplace of the English novel. If
+the latter tradition were true, the fact that it was in the Harlequin
+chamber of the Abbots of Glastonbury that Henry Fielding was born, becomes
+strangely matched by the birth, some forty years later, of his
+masterpiece, in the lodging of the Abbot of Tintern. The one point of real
+interest in all these traditions is the fact that the fame of _Tom Jones_
+has been sufficient to create a widespread popular legend. The truth
+probably is that the book was written in the many shifting scenes of
+Fielding's life during these years; now at Bath whither his gout and the
+generous hospitality of Ralph Allen would take him; now in Salisbury, the
+home of his boyhood, and the scene of his courtship with the lovely
+original of Sophia Western; possibly in his own county of Somerset; and
+most probably both at Twickenham, and in London.
+
+From these various legends it is pleasant to be able to disentangle one
+clear picture of the making of _Tom Jones_. Before the manuscript was
+placed in the printers' hands Fielding submitted it to the opinion both of
+the elder Pitt, and of the estimable and pious Lyttelton; and the account
+of this memorable meeting cannot be better given than in the words of a
+descendant of the hostess on that occasion, the Rev. George Miller,
+great-grandson of that Sanderson Miller of Radway, Warwickshire, who
+numbered many men of note among his acquaintance, and with whom Fielding
+was on terms of intimate friendship. [3] Writing to the present writer, in
+1907, Mr. Miller says: "Lord Chatham and Lord Lyttleton came to Radway to
+visit my ancestor, when Lord Chatham planted three trees to commemorate
+the visit, and a stone urn was placed between them. Fielding was also of
+the party and read 'Tom Jones' in manuscript after dinner for the opinion
+of his hearers before publishing it. My father told me this often and he
+had the account from his Grandmother who survived her husband several
+years and who was the hostess on the occasion." Unhappily no record exists
+of the comments of one of the greatest of English statesmen when listening
+to this reading, in manuscript, of indubitably one of the greatest of
+English novels.
+
+The vagueness which hangs over the places in which _Tom Jones_ was
+written, the certainty that in all of them poverty was constantly present,
+is in perfect accord with the power of detachment manifested in this book
+from circumstances that would surely have tinged, if not over-whelmed, a
+weaker genius. Sickness and poverty are stern sponsors; but neither were
+suffered to leave more than two traces on the pages destined to outlive so
+greatly the harsh circumstances in which they had birth. There is the
+frank acknowledgement of the writer's dependence on Lyttelton's noble
+generosity, without which the book had never, Fielding says, been
+completed, since "I partly owe to you my Existence during great Part of
+the Time which I have employed in composing it." And a touching betrayal
+occurs of his anxiety for the future provision of the "prattling babes,
+whose innocent play hath often been interrupted by my labours." Fielding
+was sensitively anxious for his wife and children; but, for himself,
+living as he did with visions such as that of the _Invocation_ introducing
+Book xiii of _Tom Jones_, the precise situation of his "little Parlour,"
+or the poorness of its furniture, cannot have appeared very material.
+"Come bright Love of Fame," he cries "... fill my ravished Fancy with the
+Hopes of charming Ages yet to come... Do thou teach me not only to
+foresee, but to enjoy, nay, even to feed on future Praise. Comfort me by a
+solemn Assurance, that when the little Parlour in which I sit at this
+Instant, shall be reduced to a worse furnished Box, I shall be read, with
+Honour, by those who never knew nor saw me, and whom I shall neither know
+nor see."
+
+This capacity of Fielding for relegating circumstance to its true level,
+the detached idealism that moulded his genius, are, indeed, shown once for
+all in the fact that the exquisite picture of virtue, the whole-hearted
+attack on vice, the genial humour, the sunny portraits of humanity, the
+splendid cheerfulness of _Tom Jones_, that 'Epic of Youth,' came from a
+man in middle age, immersed in disheartening struggles, and fighting
+recurrent ill health. Superficial critics have called Fielding a realist
+because his figures are so full-blooded and alive that we feel we have met
+them but yesterday in the street; to eyes so shortsighted life itself must
+seem merely realistic. As none but an idealist could have conceived Parson
+Adams, so the creator of Sophia again announced himself an idealist in the
+Dedication of _Tom Jones_. Here, in language of pure symbolism, he
+contends that the ideal virtues such as goodness and innocence, may most
+effectively be presented to men in a figure, for "an Example is a Kind of
+Picture, in which Virtue becomes as it were an Object of Sight, and
+strikes us with an Idea of that Loveliness, which _Plato_ asserts there is
+in her naked Charms." [4] To the man who could write thus, and, who, in
+later pages of his great 'Epic,' could humbly desire of Genius "do thou
+kindly take me by the Hand, and lead me through all the Mazes, the winding
+Labyrinth of Nature. Initiate me into all those Mysteries which profane
+Eyes never beheld,"--to this man the material surroundings of life must
+have seemed of little greater import than the fittings of that narrow box
+to the occupation of which he looked forward with so calm a foresight.
+Indeed he himself acknowledges a carelessness of outward comfort on his
+own behalf. "Come," he cries, to the spirit of mercenary success, "Thou
+jolly Substance, with thy shining Face, ... hold forth thy tempting
+Rewards; thy shining chinking Heap; thy quickly-convertible Bank-bill, big
+with unseen Riches; thy often-varying Stock; the warm, the comfortable
+House; ... Come thou, and if I am too tasteless of thy valuable Treasures,
+warm my Heart with the transporting Thought of conveying them to others."
+His happy constitution, wrote his cousin Lady Mary, "made him forget
+everything when he was before a venison pasty or a flask of champagne";
+but behind those healthy exhilarations was, assuredly, a serenity based on
+a clear perception of the values of life. To a man of Fielding's happy
+social temperament, and who was yet also initiated into mysteries and
+occupied in converting ideal loveliness into 'an object of sight,' such
+matters as duns and pawnbrokers would seem precisely fit for oblivion in
+venison and champagne. In the creator of Tom Jones and of Sophia the most
+indestructible delight in living, and the keenest discernment of the
+unsubstantial qualities of that delight, appear to have been admirably
+interwoven.
+
+By June 11, 1748, the book was far enough advanced for the publisher,
+Andrew Millar, to pay £600 for it, as appears from a receipt now in the
+possession of Mr. Alfred Huth. [5] And it is eminently characteristic of
+the finances of a man who, as Lady Mary said, would have wanted money had
+his estates been as extensive as his imagination, that the receipt for
+this £600 is dated more than six months before the publication of the
+book. For it was not till February 28, 1749, that the _General Advertiser_
+announced
+
+    This day is published, in six vols., 12 mo
+    THE HISTORY OF TOM JONES,
+    A FOUNDLING
+    _Mores hominum multorum vidit_.
+    _By_ HENRY FIELDING, _Esqre_
+
+Henceforth Fielding ceases to be the boisterous politician, the witty
+dramatist; his poverty and his struggles for subsistence fall back, at his
+own bidding, among the accidents of life; and he stands revealed as the
+supreme genius, the creator of the English novel, the inheritor of that
+lasting fame which he had dared so confidently to invoke.
+
+The immediate success of the book, in that eighteenth-century world into
+which it was launched, is attested by the notice in the _London Magazine_
+of the very month of its publication. Under the heading of a "Plan of a
+late celebrated NOVEL," the _Magazine_ devotes its five opening pages to a
+summary of a book "which has given great Amusement and we hope Instruction
+to the polite Part of the Town." The summary is preceded by a description
+of _Tom Jones_ as a novel "calculated to recommend religion and virtue, to
+shew the bad consequences of indiscretion, and to set several kinds of
+vice in their most deformed and shocking light." The reviewer declares
+that "after one has begun to read it, it is difficult to leave off before
+having read the whole." And he concludes, "Thus ends this pretty novel,
+with a most just distribution of rewards and punishments, according to the
+merits of all the persons who had any considerable share in it." [6] Three
+months later Horace Walpole wrote, "Millar the bookseller has done very
+generously by him [Fielding]: finding Tom Jones, for which he had given
+him £600, sell so greatly, he has since given him another hundred." An
+admirer breaks out into rhyme, in the _Gentleman's Magazine_ for August
+1749,--
+
+  "let Fielding take the pen!
+  Life dropt her mask, and all mankind were men."
+
+thereby anticipating Thackeray's famous complaint that in his day no one
+dared "to depict to his utmost power a Man." Lady Bradshaigh, writing by a
+happy irony of fate to Richardson, says "as to Tom Jones I am fatigued
+with the name, having lately fallen into the company of several young
+ladies, who had each a 'Tom Jones' in some part of the world, for so they
+call their favourites." The gentlemen also had their Sophias, one indeed
+having bestowed that all-popular name on his 'Dutch mastiff puppy.' That
+eccentric eighteenth century philosopher, and enthusiastic Greek scholar,
+Lord Monboddo declared that _Tom Jones_ had more of character in it than
+any other work, ancient or modern, known to him, adding, "in short, I
+never saw anything that was so animated, and as I may say, _all alive_
+with characters and manners as _the History of Tom Jones_"; a criticism
+that recalls Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's remark that no man enjoyed life
+more than did Fielding. Doubtless it was his own magnificent capacity for
+living that endowed the very creatures of his pen with so abundant a
+vitality. In her own copy Lady Mary wrote _Ne plus Ultra_.
+
+To turn from the popular voices of the day to the comments of those
+capable of appraising genius, "What a master of composition Fielding was!"
+exclaimed Coleridge, "Upon my word I think 'Oedipus Tyrannus,' the
+'Alchemist,' and 'Tom Jones' the three most perfect plots ever planned."
+To Sir Walter Scott _Tom Jones_ was "truth and human nature itself."
+Gibbon described the book as "the first of ancient or modern romances";
+and, as we have seen, declared that its pages would outlive the Imperial
+Eagle of those Hapsburgs from whom Fielding was said to be descended.
+"There can be no gainsaying the sentence of this great judge," wrote
+Thackeray. "To have your name mentioned by Gibbon is like having it
+written on the dome of St Peter's. Pilgrims from all the world admire and
+behold it." Pilgrims from all the world have likewise admired _Tom Jones_.
+Translations have appeared in French, German, [7] Spanish, Swedish,
+Russian, Polish and Dutch; and as for the English editions, they range
+from the three editions issued within the year of publication to the
+several noble volumes newly edited in our own day, and the sixpenny copies
+on our railway bookstalls. So fully has time justified the invocation to
+future fame sent forth from the little ill-furnished parlour of the
+struggling barrister.
+
+To analyse the grounds for a chorus of praise ranging from the 'young
+ladies' of the eighteenth century to the utterances of distinguished
+critics, and popular authors of our own day, would be to confound literary
+criticism with biography. But there are some points appertaining to
+Fielding's great novel which cannot be here disregarded, in that they
+closely affect his personal character. Such are the light in which he
+himself regarded his masterpiece, the intention with which he wrote it,
+and the means which he selected to carry that intention into effect.
+
+All these he himself very plainly sets forth in his _Dedication_ to
+Lyttelton and in other passages of _Tom Jones_. As to his intention. "I
+declare," he says, in the _Dedication_, "that to recommend Goodness and
+Innocence hath been my sincere Endeavour in this History." And the means
+selected for this end, and for the companion object of persuading men from
+guilt, are as clearly stated. First as we have seen, Fielding plays the
+part of pure idealist, purposing to create a picture "in which virtue
+becomes as it were an object of sight." For such pictures we have but to
+think of Sophia Western, and of that final page of _Tom Jones_, than which
+no more charming representation of mutual affection, esteem, and well
+doing can be imagined. But besides this means of reaching his audience
+Fielding adopted, he tells us, a second method. He argues that no
+acquisitions of guilt can compensate a man for the loss of inward peace,
+for the attendant horror, anxiety, and danger, to which he subjects
+himself; thus endeavouring to enlist man's self-interest no less than his
+admiration, on the side of virtue. Again, he explains yet another method
+by which he essays to foil the progress of evil, viz. to show that virtue
+and innocence are chiefly betrayed "into the snares that deceit and
+villainy spread for them" by indiscretion; a moral which he has "the more
+industriously laboured ... since I believe it is much easier to make good
+Men, wise than to make bad Men good." For this purpose, he concludes,
+namely to show, as in a figure, the beauty of virtue, to persuade men that
+in following innocence and virtue they follow their own obvious interests,
+to arm them from the snares of villainy and deceit, "I have employed all
+the Wit and Humour of which I am Master in the following History; wherein
+I have endeavoured to laugh Mankind out of their favourite Follies and
+Vices."
+
+And, conscious that wit and humour require a rein quite unneeded by the
+methods of the professional moralist, Fielding further asserts that in
+these pages his laughter is worthy of the aim which he sets before him.
+Here, he carefully insists, are wit and humour wholly void of offence. He
+assures his reader that in the whole course of the work, he will find
+"nothing prejudicial to the Cause of Religion and Virtue; nothing
+inconsistent with the strictest Rules of Decency, nor which can offend
+even the chastest Eye in the Perusal." As the almost incredible change
+from the manners of 1749 to those of the following century, and of our own
+day, has injuriously affected the reputation of Fielding among readers
+ignorant of past conditions, this protest, in striking accord with the
+prologue for his first play acted when he was but a lad of twenty, cannot
+be too emphatically recorded. And no further justification of Fielding's
+words need be entered than that verdict of the eighteenth century scholar
+and bishop of the English Church, Doctor Warburton, when he declared that
+"Mr. Fielding [stands] the foremost among those who have given a faithful
+and chaste copy of life and manners."
+
+Such were the noble purposes to which Fielding consciously dedicated his
+genius in _Tom Jones_, and such was the careful restraint with which he
+exercised his chosen methods of wit and humour. That these purposes,
+executed by a supreme genius in the language and scenes of his own day,
+should ever have laid their author open to a charge of immorality is
+perhaps one of the most amazing pieces of irony in the whole history of
+English literature. But as this charge of moral laxity has been seriously
+brought against the pages of _Tom Jones_, and is perhaps not yet quite
+exploded, it cannot be wholly disregarded. The imputation amounts,
+briefly, to a too easy forgiveness for the youthful sins of Jones, and the
+involving that engaging youth in too deep a degradation. The answers to
+these charges are, firstly, that Fielding held strongly, and here
+exhibits, the humane and wise doctrine that a man should be judged, not by
+what he sometimes does, but by what he _is_. And, secondly, that as Sir
+Walter Scott pointed out, when dealing with this very matter, "the vices
+into which Jones suffers himself to fall are made the direct cause of
+placing him in the distressful situation which he occupies during the
+greater part of the narrative; while his generosity, his charity, and his
+amiable qualities become the means of saving him from the consequences of
+his folly." Fielding was not wholly concerned with the acts of a man; to
+him the admission of the Penitent Thief into Paradise, at the eleventh
+hour, could have been no stumbling block. And, further, Tom Jones not only
+suffers for his ill doing, but wins no heaven until he wholly purges
+himself from the sin which did so easily beset him.
+
+The distinction between doing and being is very fully enunciated by
+Fielding himself, in the _Introduction_ to Book vii. "A single bad Act,"
+he says, "no more constitutes a Villain in Life, than a single bad Part on
+the Stage". And again, "Now we, who are admitted behind the Scenes of this
+great Theatre of Nature, (and no Author ought to write any Thing besides
+Dictionaries and Spelling-Books who hath not this Privilege) can censure
+the Action, without conceiving any actual Detestation of the Person, whom
+perhaps Nature may not have designed to act an ill Part in all her Dramas:
+For in this Instance, Life most exactly represents the Stage, since it is
+often the same Person who represents the Villain and the Heroe". Coleridge
+has expressed the same truth in words written in a copy of _Tom Jones_,
+"If I want a servant or mechanic I wish to know what he _does_--but of a
+Friend I must know what he _is_. And in no writer is this momentous
+distinction so finely brought forward as by Fielding. We do not care what
+Blifil does ... but Blifil _is_ a villain and we feel him to be so." [8]
+
+It is true that, as Scott regrets the depth of degradation into which Tom
+Jones is suffered to fall, so Coleridge expresses a wish, "relatively to
+Fielding himself" that the great novelist had emphasised somewhat more the
+repentance of his hero: but this may be balanced by that other noble
+tribute to his morality, "I dare believe who consulted his heart and
+conscience only without adverting to _what the world_ would say could rise
+from the perusal of Fielding's _Tom Jones_, _Joseph Andrews_ and _Amelia_
+without feeling himself the better man--at least without an intense
+conviction that he could not be guilty of a base act." [9] To be forced to
+watch the temporary degradation of a noble nature, and the miseries
+ensuing, is surely one of the most effective means of rousing a hatred of
+vice. That such an exhibition should ever have been construed into moral
+laxity on the part of the author, especially when the restoration of the
+hero's character is drawn as entirely due to his ingrained worship of
+innocence and virtue, is almost incredible.
+
+In exact accordance with Fielding's character as moralist in intent,
+although supreme artist in execution, is the fact of the dedication of
+_Tom Jones_ to his life-long friend Lyttelton. George Lyttelton,
+statesman, scholar, and orator, was a friend of whom any man might be
+proud. It was said of him that he "showed the judgment of a minister, the
+force and wit of an orator, and the spirit of a gentleman." As theologian
+he wrote a treatise on _The Conversion of St. Paul_ which, a hundred years
+later, was described as being "still regarded as one of the subsidiary
+bulwarks of Christianity." As poet he won the praise of Gray for his
+tender and elegiac verse. Thomson sang of his "sense refined," and adds
+
+  Serene yet warm, humane yet firm his mind
+  As little touch'd as any man's with bad;
+
+And Pope drew his character as
+
+  "Still true to virtue and as warm as true."
+
+It was to this devout scholar, this refined gentleman, this warm-hearted
+follower of virtue, that _Tom Jones_ was dedicated, nay more, to him it
+owed both origin and completion. "To you, Sir," Fielding writes in his
+_Dedication_, "it is owing that this History was ever begun. It was by
+your Desire that I first thought of such a Composition.... Again, Sir,
+without your Assistance this History had never been completed.... I partly
+owe to you my Existence during great Part of the Time in which I have
+employed in composing it." And that Lyttelton cordially approved the book
+which owed so much to his own insight and generosity is evident from the
+references, in the _Dedication_, to his favourable judgment.
+
+With the appearance of _Tom Jones_ Fielding steps into his own place among
+the immortals. But lofty as his genius was, his feet were firmly planted
+in the world which he relished so keenly. To no man could be applied more
+happily the motto chosen by him for his title page, _mores hominum
+multorum vidit_--he saw the manners of many men. This characteristic
+emerges in a personal reminiscence of the novelist, at the very moment
+when the sheets of _Tom Jones_ were passing through the press. The
+great-nephew of his intimate friend Mrs Hussey relates; "Henry Fielding
+was fond of colouring his pictures of life with the glowing and variegated
+tints of Nature, by conversing with persons of every situation and
+calling, as I have frequently been informed by one of my great aunts, the
+late Mrs Hussey, who knew him intimately. I have heard her say, that Mr
+Fielding never suffered his talent for sprightly conversation to mildew
+for a moment; and that his manners were so gentlemanly, that even with the
+lower classes, with which he frequently condescended particularly to chat
+such as Sir Roger de Coverley's old friends, the Vauxhall water-men, they
+seldom outstepped the limits of propriety. My aunt ... [was] a fashionable
+sacque and mantua-maker, and lived in the Strand, ... One day Mr Fielding
+observed to Mrs Hussey, that he was then engaged in writing a novel, which
+he thought would be his best production; and that he intended to introduce
+into it the characters of all his friends. Mrs Hussey, with a smile,
+ventured to remark, that he must have many niches, and that surely they
+must already be filled. 'I assure you, my dear madam,' replied he, 'there
+shall be a bracket for a bust of you.' Some time after this, he informed
+Mrs Hussey that the work was in the press; but, immediately recollecting
+that he had forgotten his promise to her, went to the printer, and was
+time enough to insert, in vol. iii. p. 17, where he speaks of the shape of
+Sophia Western--'Such charms are there in affability, and so sure is it to
+attract the praises of all kinds of people.... It may indeed be compared
+to the celebrated Mrs Hussey.' To which observation he has given the
+following note: 'A celebrated mantua-maker in the Strand, famous for
+setting off the shapes of women.'" [10]
+
+Here is yet further proof, that Fielding loved not only to see the manners
+of many men, but also to render them whatever service lay within his
+power. Never were the warmest heart and the loftiest genius more happily
+united than in the creator of the English novel.
+
+Lyttelton not only suggested and approved the great Comic Epic, and
+enabled distressed genius to live while composing it; his own worth and
+benevolence, together with those of the generous Allen, afforded Fielding,
+as he tells us, the materials for the picture here presented of Allworthy.
+"The World," he says, speaking of this picture, "will not, I believe, make
+me the Compliment of thinking I took it from myself. I care not: This they
+shall own, that the two Persons from whom I have taken it, that is to say,
+two of the best and worthiest Men in the World, are strongly and zealously
+my Friends." And a point of still closer personal interest is the fact,
+already noticed, that in the lovely character and person of Sophia
+Western, Fielding raised an enduring memorial to that beloved wife whose
+death had occurred a few years before the publication of _Tom Jones_. The
+authenticity of the portrait is explicitly stated in the _Invocation_
+prefixed to Book xiii. Apostrophizing that 'gentle Maid,' bright 'Love of
+Fame,' Fielding bids her, in the eighteenth century phrase that falls so
+strangely on a modern ear, "Foretell me that some tender Maid, whose
+Grandmother is yet unborn, hereafter, when under the fictitious Name of
+_Sophia_ she reads the real worth which once existed in my _Charlotte_,
+shall, from her sympathetic Breast, send forth the _Heaving Sigh_." Then
+follows, immediately, his own desire that he too may live in the knowledge
+and honour of far distant readers. Fielding lies buried under southern
+skies, far from his wife's English grave; but in the immortal pages of his
+masterpiece they are not divided.
+
+[1] The Fiat appointing Fielding as Magistrate for the City and Borough of
+Westminster, now in the House of Lords, is dated July 30, 1748.
+
+[2] On the house identified with Mr Graves' description, and now known as
+"Fielding's Lodge," a tablet has recently been placed, through the energy
+of Mr R. G. Naish of Twerton.
+
+[3] See _Life of the Earl of Hardwicke_. G. Harris. 1847. Vol. II. pp.
+456-7.
+
+[4] _Tom Jones_. Dedication.
+
+[5] See Appendix for this, hitherto unpublished, receipt.
+
+[6] _London Magazine_. Feb. 1749.
+
+[7] In Germany an edition of 1771 was followed by a second in 1780, and a
+third in 1786. In 1765 a lyrical comedy founded on the famous novel was
+acted in Paris; and the same year it was transformed into a German comedy
+by J.H. Steffens.
+
+[8] S. T. Coleridge. Manuscript notes in a copy of _Tom Jones_, now in the
+British Museum.
+
+[9] Ibid.
+
+[10] J. T. Smith. _Nollekens and his Times_. Vol. i. pp. 124-5.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+MR JUSTICE FIELDING
+
+  "The principal Duty which every Man owes is to his Country."
+  _Enquiry into the ... Increase of Robbers_.
+
+To have created the English novel were, it might seem, achievement enough
+to tire for a while the most vigorous of intellects; but to the author of
+_Tom Jones_ the apathy of repose was unknown. At no period of Fielding's
+short life can he be discerned as doing nothing; and, indeed, to an
+insight so penetrating, to an ardour so irrepressible, the England of
+George the Second can have afforded but very little inducement to
+inaction.
+
+Thus, in the one month of October 1748, the pages of _Tom Jones_ must have
+been nearing completion, if indeed the sheets were not already passing
+through the press. The Hanoverian philippics of "Mr Trott-Plaid" were
+still resounding in the _Jacobite's Journal_. While, on the 26th. of the
+month, Fielding's oaths were received for an entirely new rôle, that of a
+Justice of the Peace for Westminster. [1] Ten days later the _Jacobite's
+Journal_ had ceased to exist; and that a rumour was abroad connecting this
+demise of the _Journal_ with the bestowal of a new and arduous post on its
+editor appears from a paragraph in the _London Evening Post_. On Nov. 8,
+that organ prepares its readers for the fact that the now defunct "Mr
+Trott-Plaid" may possibly "rise awful in the Form of a Justice." Within
+four weeks of this announcement 'Justice Fielding's' name appears for the
+first time in the Police-news of the day, in a committal dated December
+10th [2]. And two days later he is sending three thieves to the Gatehouse,
+and admitting a suspected thief to bail, "after an Examination which
+lasted several hours." And it is interesting to notice that throughout
+this first month of his magisterial work the now 'awful form' of Justice
+Henry Fielding was kept constantly tempered in the public mind by the fact
+of his still undiminished popularity as a dramatist. In this December his
+comedies, with the inimitable 'romp' Kitty Clive as _Miss Lucy_, or the
+_Intrigueing Chambermaid_ or _Chloe_, as the case might be, were played no
+fewer than nine times on the Drury Lane boards.
+
+Scarcely had Fielding bent his genius to these new responsibilities of
+examining Westminster suspects and sending the rogues of that city to
+prison, than he appears preparing for an extension of those duties over
+the county of Middlesex. To be a county magistrate in 1750, however,
+necessitated the holding of landed estate worth £100 per annum; and
+Fielding's estate, for many years, seems to have been his pen. In this
+difficulty he turned to the Duke of Bedford, whose public virtues, and
+private generosity, were so soon to be acknowledged in the Dedication of
+_Tom Jones_. It was but three weeks after his appointment that the
+Westminster magistrate wrote as follows to the giver of those "princely
+Benefactions":
+
+
+"Bow Street. Decr. 13. 1748.
+
+"My Lord,
+
+"Such is my Dependence on the Goodness of your Grace, that before my Gout
+will permit me to pay my Duty to you personally, and to acknowledge your
+last kind Favour to me, I have the Presumption to solicite your Grace
+again. The Business of a Justice of Peace for Westminster is very
+inconsiderable without the Addition of that for the County of Middlesex.
+And without this Addition I cannot completely serve the Government in that
+office. But this unfortunately requires a Qualification which I want. Now
+there is a House belonging to your Grace, which stands in Bedford St., of
+70l. a year value. This hath been long untenanted, and will I am informed,
+require about 300l. to put in Repair. If your Grace would have the
+Goodness to let me have a Lease of this House, with some other Tenement
+worth 30l. a year, for 21 years, it would be a complete Qualification. I
+will give the full Worth for this lease, according to the valuation which
+any Person your Grace shall be pleased to appoint sets upon it. The only
+favour I beg of your Grace is, that I be permitted to pay the Money in two
+years, at four equal half-yearly Payments. As I shall repair the House as
+soon as possible, it will be in Reality an Improvement of that small Part
+of your Grace's estate, and will be certain to make my Fortune.
+
+"Mr Butcher will acquaint your Grace more fully than perhaps I have been
+able to do; and if Your Grace thinks proper to refer it to him, I and mine
+will be eternally bound to pray for your Grace tho I sincerely hope you
+will not lose a Farthing by doing so vast a service to,
+
+"My Lord your Grace's
+"Most obliged most obed' humble servant
+"H. Ffielding." [3]
+
+It seems probable that the Duke found better means of helping wit and
+genius, than by the leasing of the dilapidated tenement in Bedford Street.
+At any rate a month later, on January 11, we find Fielding duly swearing
+to an estate as consisting of "several Leasehold Messuages or Tenements
+Lying or being in the several parishes of St Paul Covent Garden, St Martin
+in the ffields, St Giles in the ffields, and St Georges Bloomsbury ... now
+in the possession or occupation of [my] Tennants or Undertennants, for and
+during the Term of Twenty one years of the clear yearly value of £100...."
+This statement, which is preserved in the Middlesex Records, is followed
+by Fielding's signature, appended to an oath that his qualification to
+serve as a Justice of the Peace for the county is as above described. [4]
+
+On the day following this sworn statement, January 12, 1749, his oaths
+were received as a Justice of the Peace for Middlesex. [5] But even this
+did not satisfy all the requirements of those days of doctrinal
+inquisitions and Jacobite risings. The certificate may still be seen among
+the Middlesex Records, duly certified by Charles Tough, Minister of the
+Parish and Church of St Pauls, Covent Garden, and 'Sworn in Court,' that
+"Henry Fielding Esq. on Sunday the 26th day of March, 1749, did receive
+the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper in ye Parish Church aforesaid,
+immediately after Divine Service and Sermon, according to the usage of the
+Church of England." [6] And among the same archives the dusty _Oath Roll_
+is preserved, bearing, under date of April 5, 1749, the signature of
+_Henry ffielding_ to a declaration of disbelief in the doctrine of
+Transubstantiation; a comprehensive oath of faithful service to King
+George and abjuration of King James; an oath directed against the power of
+the Holy See; and an oath of true allegiance to King George. All which
+oaths and declarations, it appears from the endorsement of the _Roll_,
+were taken immediately after the administration of Holy Communion, as
+attested by two credible witnesses.[7]
+
+It is with this second Commission in the Peace that we enter on the last
+five years of Fielding's crowded life, years full of that valiant struggle
+with eighteenth century crime to which the health of the great novelist
+was ultimately sacrificed. For no magistrate ever fulfilled more
+faithfully, or at greater personal cost, the first obligation of his Oath,
+"Ye shall swear that as Justice of Peace ... ye shall do equall right to
+the Poor and to the Rich, after your Cunning Witt and Power and after the
+Laws and Customes of the Realm...." And Fielding brought to his new post
+something more than a zealous discharge of the daily and nightly duties of
+an eighteenth century police magistrate. His genius and his patriotism
+found opportunity in the squalid Bow Street Court-room for advocating
+reforms as yet untouched by the slow hand of the professional
+philanthropist. The names of those reformers, of the men and women who
+swept away the pestilential horrors of eighteenth century prisons, of the
+statesmen who abolished laws that hung a man for stealing a handkerchief,
+and destroyed the public gallows that gave the mob their _Tyburn holiday_,
+of the creators of our temperance legislation, of our poor-law system, of
+our model dwellings,--all these are held high in honour. Because Henry
+Fielding was above all things a great creative genius his wise and
+strenuous efforts to raise social conditions, and to eradicate social
+sores, have been unduly forgotten.
+
+"Whatever he desired, he desired ardently," says Murphy. We soon have
+evidence of Justice Henry Fielding's ardent desire to cleanse London from
+some of the crying evils of his time. Of these evils none pressed more
+cruelly on the honest citizens than the prevalence and brutality of street
+robberies. To the well-protected Englishman of to-day the London of 1750
+would seem a nightmare of lawlessness. Thieves, as Fielding tells us,
+attacked their victims with loaded pistols, beat them with bludgeons and
+hacked them with cutlasses; and as to the murderers of the period, he has
+recorded how he himself was engaged on _five_ different murders, all
+committed by different gangs of street robbers within the space of one
+week. The exploit of one such gang may be quoted, from a newspaper
+paragraph of the first month of Fielding's administration at Bow Street.
+"On Friday evening," says the _General Advertiser_ for January 23, 1749,
+"about twenty fellows arm'd with Pistols, Cutlasses, Hangers, &c. went to
+the Gatehouse and one of them knocking at the Door, it was no sooner
+open'd than they all rush'd in, and struck and desperately wounded the
+Turnkey, and all that oppos'd them, and in Triumph carried off the Fellow
+who pick'd General Sinclaire's pocket of his watch as he was going into
+Leicester House." Surely, cries the indignant newspaper, "this instance of
+Daring Impudence must rouse every Person of Property to assemble and
+consult means for their own Security at least; for if Goals can be forc'd
+in this manner, private Houses can make but little resistance against such
+Gangs of Villains as at present infest this Great Metropolis." It was
+admitted that the numbers and arms of street robbers rendered it
+ordinarily impossible to arrest them in the act; and Fielding tells us how
+"Officers of Justice have owned to me that they have passed by [men] with
+Warrants in their Pockets against them without daring to apprehend them;
+and indeed they could not be blamed for not exposing themselves to sure
+Destruction: For it is a melancholy Truth, that at this very Day a Rogue
+no sooner gives the Alarm within certain Purlieus, than twenty or thirty
+armed Villains are found ready to come to his Assistance." And the new
+Justice found no effectual means at his disposal for coping with what he
+very aptly calls the enslaved condition of Londoners, assaulted, pillaged,
+and plundered; unable to sleep in their own houses, or to walk the
+streets, or to travel in safety. There were the Watch, who, we learn from
+_Amelia_ were "chosen out of those poor old decrepid People, who are from
+their Want of bodily Strength rendered incapable of getting a Livelihood
+by Work. These Men, armed only with a Pole, which some of them are scarce
+able to lift, are to secure the Persons and Houses of his Majesty's
+Subjects from the Attacks of Gangs of young, bold, stout, desperate and
+well-armed Villains.... If the poor old Fellows should run away from such
+Enemies, no one I think can wonder, unless he should wonder that they are
+able even to make their Escape." [8] These lineal descendants of Dogberry
+were supplemented by constables who it appears had to apply to the
+military when called upon to cope with the mere suppression of a
+gaming-house; and by "Thief-catchers," individuals so popularly odious
+that "the Thief-catcher is in Danger of worse Treatment from the Populace
+than the Thief." While the law was thus handicapped, the thief, on his
+side, had the advantage of the irregular buildings and the immense number
+of lanes, alleys, courts, and bye-places of London and Westminster, which,
+says Fielding, "had they been intended for the very purpose of
+concealment, they could scarce have been better contrived. Upon such a
+view the whole appears as a vast Wood or Forest, in which a Thief may
+harbour with as great Security as Wild Beasts do in the Desarts of Africa
+or Arabia." Also the thief's organisation was excellent: "there are at
+this Time," Fielding observes, "a great Gang of Rogues whose Number falls
+little short of a Hundred, who are incorporated in one Body, have Officers
+and a Treasury; and have reduced Theft and Robbery into a regular System."
+Further, he could generally bribe or deter the prosecutor. And in a last
+resource "rotten Members of the Law" forged his defence, and abundant
+false witnesses supported it. An illuminating example of the methods
+employed by our Georgian ancestors towards "deterring" prosecution occurs
+in a smuggling case of 1748, perpetrated shortly before Fielding first
+took office. A party of smugglers caught a custom-house officer and a
+shoemaker on their way to give evidence. The officer had 'every joint of
+him' broken; and after other torture, the description of which is more
+suitable for eighteenth century pages than our own, was dispatched. The
+less fortunate shoemaker was hung by the middle over a dry well, and left
+there. Several days afterwards the smugglers, returning and hearing him
+groan, cut the rope, let him drop to the bottom, and threw in logs and
+stones to cover him. And it was not only from the common thief that the
+Londoner of 1750 suffered. That fine flower of eighteenth century
+lawlessness, the gentleman of the road, carried his audacities into the
+heart of the Town itself. "I was sitting in my own dining-room on Sunday
+night," writes Horace Walpole, to a friend, "the clock had not struck
+eleven, when I heard a loud cry of 'stop thief!' A highwayman had attacked
+a postchaise in Piccadilly: the fellow was pursued, rode over the
+watchman, almost killed him, and escaped."
+
+It was into a conflict with this epidemic of crime that Fielding, at
+forty-three, and with already broken health, flung his energies, to such
+purpose that in these last five years of his life it is but too easy to
+forget the creator of _Joseph Andrews_, of _Tom Jones_, and of _Amelia_,
+in his last 'ardent desire,' as ardently pursued, to purify the sorely
+diseased body politic. His method of attack was twofold. He dealt
+vigorously with the individual criminal; and he sought to remove some of
+the causes by which those criminals were engendered. The individual attack
+is, for the most part, but sordid reading. Thus from a fragment of the
+Westminster _Committment Books_, preserved with the Middlesex Records, we
+may see how in January and February of this year 1749 'Henry Fielding
+Esq.' committed to the New Prison such cases as:
+
+Thomas Thrupp                for riot
+Thomas Trinder               for burglary
+T. Chamberlain and Terence
+Fitz Patrick                 for assault
+C. O'Neal                    for assaulting two Watchmen
+Mary Hughes and Caterine
+Edmonds                      for assault and beating
+John Smithson                for exercising the art of pattenmaker
+                             without having been brought up thereto
+                             for seven years
+Cornelius York               for filing guineas
+Christo Kelsey               for ill fame
+Bryan Park                   for assault
+
+
+This sorry list, interspersed with cases of murder, of robbery with
+violence, and of smuggling, may doubtless be extended over the entire five
+years of Fielding's work on the Bench; and to reiterate the details of
+such work would be as tedious now as the monotonous discharge of these
+duties must once have been to the author of _Tom Jones_. [9] Of much more
+enduring interest is the great novelist's second line of attack on the
+problem confronting him.
+
+For Henry Fielding's insight was far too profound for him to fail to
+strike at the root of individual crime, in those conditions which bred the
+criminal as surely as, to use his own favourite simile, unclean
+surroundings breed disease. And he had not been six months on the Bench
+before finding his first opportunity in a _Charge_ delivered, as their
+Chairman, to the Westminster Grand Jury, on June 29, 1749. [10] This "very
+loyal, learned, ingenious, excellent and useful" Charge was published "By
+Order of the Court, and at the unanimous Request of the Gentlemen of the
+Grand Jury"; and it is, Mr Austin Dobson tells us, "still regarded by
+lawyers as a model exposition." It is also a stirring appeal to the worthy
+jurors to discharge their duties as befitted men called upon to exercise
+one of the most ancient and honourable of English liberties: "Grand
+Juries, Gentlemen," declared their new Chairman, "are in Reality the only
+Censors of this Nation. As such, the Manners of the People are in your
+Hands, and in yours only. You, therefore, are the only Correctors of
+them.... To execute this Duty with Vigilance, you are obliged by the Duty
+you owe both to God and to your Country." Here is the same zeal, now
+directed to stimulating the conscience of the Westminster Jurors, which
+moved _Captain Vinegar_ to lay about him so lustily on all the abuses
+within reach of his newspaper, and which inspired the 'father of the
+English Novel' with the admitted motive,--"I declare, that to recommend
+Goodness and Innocence hath been my sincere Endeavour in this History"--if
+not with the consummate art of his pages.
+
+Fielding specially directs the energies of his jurors to the repression of
+open profligacy, the more as, through the 'egregious folly' of their
+parents, the _Town_ had then become the 'seminaries of education' for
+youths of birth and station. And he bids them attend to those 'temples of
+iniquity' the masquerade rooms of the time, with a side glance at Foote's
+scandalous performances; to the gaming houses; to the prevalent vice of
+profane swearing, that "detestable Crime, so injurious to the Honour of
+God, so directly repugnant to His positive Commands, so highly offensive
+to the Ears of all good Men, and so very scandalous to the Nation in the
+Ears of Foreigners"; and to the libeller, a species of 'Vermin' whom "men
+ought to crush wherever they find him, without staying till he bite them."
+It is noteworthy also, that to the genius of Fielding, 'watching,
+brooding, creating,' the characteristic feature of his age seemed to be a
+"fury after licentious and luxurious pleasures." "Gentlemen," he cries,
+"our News-Papers, from the Top of the Page to the Bottom, the Corners of
+our Streets up to the very Eves of our Houses, present us with nothing but
+a View of Masquerades, Balls, and Assemblies of various Kinds, Fairs,
+Wells, Gardens, &c. tending to promote Idleness, Extravagance and
+Immorality, among all Sorts of People." Many of the public, he declares,
+make diversion "no longer the Recreation or Amusement, but the whole
+Business of their Lives"; and not content with three theatres they must
+have a fourth. What would he have said to a London in which not four but a
+hundred and twenty theatres draw nightly, and sometimes twice a day, their
+crowded audiences.
+
+Two days after the delivery of this _Charge_ (which the _General
+Advertiser_ praises as "excellent and learned") a three days street riot
+broke out, which it fell to Fielding to subdue. On Saturday July 1 a mob
+had gathered in the Strand, about a disorderly house where a sailor was
+said to have been robbed. Beadle Nathaniel Munns, arriving on the scene,
+found the mob crying out "Pull down the house, pull down the house!"; and
+sent for the constables. Meanwhile the mob broke open the house and
+demolished and stripped the same; and throwing the goods out of the
+windows, set fire to them, causing such danger of a general conflagration
+that 'the parish engines' were sent for. A constable, _not being able to
+find any magistrate in Town_, went to Somerset House to procure assistance
+from the military, and on his returning with a corporal and twelve men, a
+force that later that night was increased to an officer and forty men, the
+mob was at last dispersed. On the next day, however, Sunday, they
+reassembled, and proceeded to demolish a second house, and to burn the
+goods thereof with an even larger fire than that of the preceding night.
+Mr Saunders Welch, High Constable for Holborn and, Fielding tells us, "one
+of the best Officers who was ever concerned in the Execution of Justice,
+and to whose Care, Integrity and Bravery the Public hath, to my Knowledge,
+the highest Obligations," passing through Fleet Street at the time, saw
+this second fire, and was told by the owner of another house that the mob
+threatened to come to him next. Upon which Mr Welch "well knowing the
+Impossibility of procuring any Magistrate at that Time who would act,"
+went to the Tilt Yard and procured an officer and some forty men; and
+returning, found the third house in great part wrecked, the danger of fire
+here being aggravated by the extreme narrowness of the street on both
+sides and the fact that the premises of a bank were adjacent. This same
+Sunday night, also, the mob broke open the night-prison under Beadle
+Munns' house, rescuing two prisoners; and forced the Watch-house of the
+Liberty with stones and brick bats, to the imminent danger of the Beadle's
+life, as "sworn before me, Henry Fielding." Till three in the morning Mr
+Welch and the soldiers remained on duty, by which time the rioters had
+again dispersed. All this time Fielding, Mr Welch records, was out of
+town; but, by noon on Monday, the Justice was back in Bow Street: and, on
+being acquainted with the riot, immediately dispatched an order for a
+party of the Guards to bring the prisoners to his house, the streets being
+then full of a riotous crowd threatening danger of rescue. Fielding
+proceeded to examine the prisoners, a "vast mob" meanwhile being assembled
+in Bow Steet, and the streets adjacent. On information of the threatening
+aspect of the people he applied to the Secretary at War for a
+reinforcement of the Guards; and from his window, spoke to the mob,
+informing them of their danger, and exhorting them to disperse, but in
+vain. Rumours, moreover, came that four thousand sailors were assembling
+to march to the Strand that Monday night. In view of these rumours and of
+the riotous state of the streets, Fielding, the officer of the guard, and
+Mr Welch "sat up the whole night, while a large party of soldiers were
+kept ready under arms who with the peace officers patrolled the streets."
+And thanks to this vigorous action on the part of their new magistrate the
+citizens found peace restored within twelve hours of his return to town.
+
+The same day as that on which Fielding was addressing the riotous mob from
+his Bow Street windows, and sitting up all night with the officer of a
+military guard, he found time to write to the Duke of Bedford on his own
+behalf and on that of his family, concerning the provision for which he
+betrays so constant an anxiety.
+
+
+"Bow Street. July 3. 1749.
+
+"My Lord,
+
+"The Protection which I have been honoured with receiving at the Hands of
+your Grace, and the goodness which you were pleased to express some time
+toward me, embolden me to mention to your Grace that the Place of
+Solicitor to the Excise is now vacant by the Death of Mr Selwyn. I hope
+no Person is better qualified for it, and I assure you, my Lord, none
+shall execute it with more Fidelity. I am at this Moment busied in
+endeavouring to suppress a dangerous Riot, or I w'd have personally
+waited on your Grace to solicite a Favour which will make me and my
+Family completely happy.
+
+"I am, &c.,
+
+"H. Ffielding." [11]
+
+The vacant post was secured, alas, by another candidate.
+
+A few weeks after the riotous scenes which had enabled Fielding to show
+himself a man of prompt action in times of popular ferment, the
+publication is advertised of his _Charge_, published "by order of the
+Court and at the request of the Gentleman of the Grand Jury." And on the
+same day he submits to the Lord Chancellor a copy both of this pamphlet,
+and of a draft of a _Bill for the better preventing Street Robberies &c_,
+the design of which it appears Lord Hardwick had already encouraged.
+
+
+"Bow Street, July 21. 1749.
+
+"My Lord,
+
+"I beg your Lordship's acceptance of a Charge given by me to the Grand
+Jury of Westminster though I am but too sensible how unworthy it is of
+your notice.
+
+"I have likewise presumed to send my Draught of a Bill for the better
+preventing street Robberies &c. which your Lordship was so very kind to
+say you would peruse; I hope the general Plan at least may be happy in
+your Approbation.
+
+"Your Lordship will have the goodness to pardon my repeating a desire
+that the name of Joshua Brogden, may be inserted in the next commission
+of the Peace for Middlesex and Westminster for whose [integrity] and
+Ability in the Execution of his office. I will engage my credit with your
+Lordship, an Engagement which appears to me of the most sacred Nature.
+
+"I am,
+"My Lord, with the utmost Respect and Devotion,
+"Your Lordship's most Obed't
+"Most humble Servant
+"H. Ffielding. [12]
+
+"To the Right Hon'ble.
+"The Lord High Chancellor of G. Britain."
+
+All trace of the text of this draft Bill seems to have been lost; but the
+fact of the Lord Chancellor's consent to consider its provisions shows
+clearly enough how rapidly Fielding was adding to his now achieved fame as
+the author of _Tom Jones_ the very different reputation of an authority on
+criminal legislation.
+
+The application on behalf of Joshua Brogden, later if not at this time the
+Justice's Clerk, recalls the further pleasant tribute paid to the
+soundness of Mr Brogden's morals in the _Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon_.
+If all Fielding's modest magisterial income of £300 a year had gone, as he
+declares it should have done, to his clerk, that functionary would, he
+tells us, have been "but ill paid for sitting almost sixteen hours in the
+twenty four, in the most unwholesome, as well as nauseous air in the
+universe, and which hath in his case corrupted a good constitution without
+contaminating his morals." It was Joshua Brogden who had witnessed, a few
+months earlier, the agreement with Andrew Millar for _Tom Jones_. Could
+the good clerk but have played the part of a Boswell to his illustrious
+master we should have something more than our present scanty materials for
+the personal life of Henry Fielding.
+
+Yet another of Fielding's rare letters belongs to this year; a letter
+conveying his formal congratulations to Lyttelton, on that model
+statesman's second marriage, and in which his warm heart again makes
+application, not on behalf of his own scanty means, but for a friend.
+
+
+"Bow Street, Aug't 29, 1749.
+
+"Sir,
+
+"Permit me to bring up the Rear of your Friends in paying my Compliments
+of Congratulation on your late Nuptials. There may perhaps be seasons when
+the Rear may be as honourable a Post in Friendship as in War, and if so
+such certainly must be every time of Joy and Felicity. Your present
+situation must be full of these; and so will be, I am confident, your
+future Life from the same Fountain. Nothing can equal the excellent
+character your Lady bears among those of her own Sex, and I never yet knew
+them speak well of a woman who did not deserve their good words. How
+admirable is your Fortune in the Matrimonial Lottery! I will venture to
+say there is no man alive who exults more in this, or in any other
+Happiness that can attend you than myself; and you ought to believe me
+from the same Reason that fully persuades me of the satisfaction you
+receive from any Happiness of mine; this Reason is that you must be
+sensible how much of it I owe to your goodness; and there is a great
+Pleasure in Gratitude though it is second I believe to that of
+Benevolence; for of all the Delights upon Earth none can equal the
+Raptures which a good mind feels on conferring Happiness on those whom we
+think worthy of it. This is the sweetest ingredient in Power, and I
+solemnly protest I never wished for Power, more than a few days ago for
+the sake of a Man whom I love, and that more perhaps from the esteem I
+know he bears towards you than from any other Reason. This Man is in Love
+with a young Creature of the most apparent worth, who returns his
+affection. Nothing is wanting to make two very miserable People extremely
+Blessed but a moderate portion of the greatest of human Evils. So
+Philosophers call it, and so it is called by Divines, whose word is the
+rather to be taken, as they are, many of them, more conversant with this
+Evil than ever Philosophers were. The Name of this man is Moore to whom
+you kindly destined that Laurel, which, though it hath long been withered,
+may not probably soon drop from the Brow of its present Possessor; but
+there is another Place of much the same Value now vacant: it is that of
+Deputy Licensor to the Stage. Be not offended at this Hint; for though I
+will own it impudent enough in one who hath so many Obligations of his own
+to you, to venture to recommend another man to your Favour, yet Impudence
+itself may possibly be a Virtue when exerted on the behalf of a Friend; at
+least I am the less ashamed of it, as I have known men remarkable for the
+opposite Modesty possess it without the mixture of any other good Quality.
+In this Fault then you must indulge me; for should I ever see you as high
+in Power as I wish, and as it is perhaps more my Interest than your own
+that you should be, I shall be guilty of the like as often as I find a Man
+in whom I can, after much intimacy discover no want, but that of the Evil
+above mentioned. I beg you will do me the Honour of making my Compliments
+to your unknown Lady, and believe me to be with the highest Esteem,
+Respect, Love, and Gratitude
+
+"Sir,
+"Y'r most obliged
+"Most obed't
+"humble Servant
+
+"Henry Fielding.
+
+"To the Hon'ble
+"George Lyttelton, Esqr." [13]
+
+This Edward Moore was a poet held worthy, it would seem, to possess the
+Laureat's 'withered' laurel (even in 1749 Fielding cannot refrain from a
+thrust at Colley Cibber); a journalist; a writer of whom Dibden declared
+that the tendency of all his productions was to "cultivate truth and
+morality"; a tradesman in the linen business; and the son of a dissenting
+minister: a combination of circumstances closely recalling Fielding's
+friendship for the good dissenter, jeweller, and poet, George Lillo. And
+it is to an undated letter by Edward Moore, hitherto overlooked, that we
+owe one of the rare references to Henry Fielding from a contemporary pen.
+Moore is writing to a dissenting minister at Taunton, one Mr John Ward, of
+whom it was said that venerable as he himself was for learning, worth, and
+piety he deemed it "_an honour to have his name connected with that of
+Moore_,"--a further proof of the quality of man whom Fielding choose for
+friend. Moore had been prevented, by Fielding's illness, from appointing
+an evening on which he might invite the Taunton minister to his lodgings
+to meet there some of the first wits of the day. "It is not," he writes,
+"owing to forgetfulness that you have not heard from me before. Fielding
+continues to be visited for his sins so as to be wheeled about from room
+to room; when he mends I am sure to see him at my lodgings; and you may
+depend upon timely notice. What fine things are Wit and Beauty, if a Man
+could be temperate with one, or a Woman chaste with the other! But he that
+will confine his acquaintance to the sober and the modest will generally
+find himself among the dull and the ugly. If this remark of mine should be
+thought to shoulder itself in without an introduction you will be pleased
+to note that Fielding is a Wit; that his disorder is the Gout, and
+intemperance the cause." It is of course idle to contend that Fielding
+always carried a cool head. Murphy tells us that to him might justly be
+applied a parody on a saying concerning Scipio,--"always over a social
+bottle or a book, he enured his body to the dangers of intemperance, and
+exercised his mind with Studies." But we must in justice remember that the
+Augustan age of English literature concerned itself but very little with
+our modern virtue of sobriety. That Fielding, with the other great men of
+his day, very often drank more than was good for him, amounts to little
+more than saying that he wore a laced coat when he had one, and carried a
+sword at his side.
+
+The execution of one of the Strand rioters, Bosavern Penlez by name, in
+September, had roused much controversy; and as the evidence in the case
+was in Justice Fielding's possession, and the attacks were levelled at the
+Government, we find him plunged once more into political pamphleteering in
+the publication, under the date of 1749, of the learned little treatise
+entitled "_A True State of the Case of Bosavern Penlez' who suffered on
+account of the late riot in the Strand. In which the Law regarding these
+Offences and the Statute of George I. commonly called the Riot Act are
+fully considered_." The pamphlet opens with a warm protest against the
+abuse to which Fielding had been subjected by his political opponents. "It
+may easily be imagined," he writes, "that a Man whose Character hath been
+so barbarously, even without the least Regard to Truth or Decency,
+aspersed, on account of his Endeavours to defend the present Government,
+might wish to decline any future Appearance as a political Writer"; but
+more weighty considerations move him to lay the defence of the Riot Act in
+general, and of this application of it in particular, before a public
+which had been imposed upon "in the grossest and wickedest manner." We
+have already quoted the vivid depositions concerning this Strand riot,
+which were sworn before Fielding, and which he here reproduces; and his
+historical defence of the public need of suppressing riots, from the days
+of Wat Tyler onwards, may be left to the curious reader. Needless to say,
+Fielding makes out an excellent case against the toleration of mob law:--
+"When by our excellent Constitution the greatest Subject, no not even the
+King himself, can, without a lawful Trial and Conviction divest the
+meanest Man of his Property, deprive him of his Liberty, or attack him in
+his Person; shall we suffer a licentious Rabble to be Accuser, Judge,
+Jury, and Executioner; to inflict corporal Punishment, break open Men's
+Doors, plunder their Houses, and burn their Goods?" And, at the close,
+this pamphlet reveals the warm-hearted magistrate no less than the erudite
+lawyer. For of the two condemned prisoners, Wilson and Penlez, the case of
+the former seemed to Fielding "to be the Object of true Compassion."
+Accordingly he laid the evidence in his possession before "some very noble
+Persons," and, he adds, "I flatter myself that it might be a little owing
+to my Representation, that the Distinction between an Object of Mercy, and
+an Object of Justice at last prevailed". So the felon gained his respite,
+and a lasting niche for his name, in that he owed his life partly if not
+wholly to the generous compassion of Henry Fielding. The pamphlet seems to
+have made its mark, for a second edition was advertised within a month of
+publication.
+
+This eventful year, the year which had seen the publication of _Tom
+Jones_, the shackling of Fielding's genius within the duties of a London
+magistrate, the issue of two pamphlets occupied with criminal reform and
+administration, the drafting of a proposed Criminal Bill, and the
+suppression of a riot, closed sadly with the death of Fielding's little
+daughter, Mary Amelia, when barely twelve months old. She was buried at St
+Paul's, Covent Garden, on the seventeenth of December, 1749. And some time
+in the autumn or early winter Fielding himself appears to have been
+dangerously ill. This we learn from the following paragraph in the
+_General Advertizer_ for December 28: "Justice Fielding has no
+Mortification in his Foot as has been reported: that Gentleman has indeed
+been very dangerously ill with a Fever, and a Fit of the Gout, in which he
+was attended by Dr Thompson, an eminent Physician, and is now so well
+recovered as to be able to execute his Office as usual."
+
+[1] His Commission in the Peace for Westminster bears date October 25.
+1748.
+
+[2] An application is reported for the 2nd of December before "Justice
+Fielding" of Meards Court, St. Anne's, but for reasons given below this
+_may_ refer to John Fielding.
+
+[3] From the autograph now at Woburn Abbey, and printed in the
+_Correspondence of John Fourth Duke of Bedford_. Vol. i. p. 589.
+
+[4] Middlesex Records. Volume of _Qualification Oaths for Justices of the
+Peace_. 1749. From an entry dated July 13, 1749, in the same volume,
+Fielding appears to have then owned leases in the three first named
+parishes only.
+
+[5] See the King's Writ, now preserved in the Record Office.
+
+[6] Middlesex Records. _Sacramental Certificates_.
+
+[7] Middlesex Records. _Oath Rolls_.
+
+[8] _Amelia_. Book i. Chapter ii.
+
+[9] The Westminster _Session Rolls_, preserved among the Middlesex
+Records, contain many recognizances all signed by Fielding.
+
+[10] "On Friday last," announces the General Advertiser for May 17,
+"Counsellor Fielding, one of his Majesty's Justices of the Peace was
+chosen Chairman of the Sessions at Hicks Hall for the County of
+Middlesex"; a statement not very compatible with the incontestable
+evidence preserved in the _General Orders Books_ of the Middlesex Records,
+by which it appears that John Lane Esq're was elected Chairman of the
+Middlesex General Sessions and General Quarter Session from Ladyday 1749
+to September 1752. The personal paragraphist of 1749 was perhaps no less
+inaccurate than his descendant of to-day. But a few weeks later this
+honour of chairmanship was certainly accorded to Fielding by his brethren
+of the Bench for Westminster. An entry in the _Sessions Book_ of
+Westminster, 1749 runs as follows: "May. 1749, Mr Fielding elected
+chairman of this present Session and to continue untill the 2nd day of the
+next." _MSS Sessions Books for Westminster. Vol. 1749_. Middlesex Records.
+
+[11] From the autograph now at Woburn Abbey, and printed in the
+_Correspondence of John, Fourth Duke of Bedford_, vol. ii. p. 35.
+
+[12] From the hitherto unpublished autograph now in the British Museum.
+
+[13] This letter is now in the Dreer Collection of the Historical Society
+of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, U.S.A.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+FIELDING AND LEGISLATION
+
+    "The Subject, as well as the Child, should be left without excuse
+    before he is punished: for, in that case alone, the Rod becomes
+    the Hand either of the Parent or the Magistrate."
+    _Inquiry Into the Causes of the late Increase of Robbers_.
+
+There is no Bill for the suppression of street robberies on the Statute
+Book for 1749 or 1750; so the draft which Fielding, with characteristic
+energy, despatched to the Lord Chancellor but a few months after his
+appointment to the Bench, was, presumably, pigeon-holed. Meanwhile, the
+criminal conditions of the metropolis seem to have become, if anything,
+more scandalous. In February 1750, the _Penny Post_ reports the gaols in
+and about London to be "now so full of Felons and desperate Rogues that
+the Keepers have not fetters enow to put upon them; so that in some
+Prisons two or three are chained together to prevent their escape." And on
+the fifth of the same month the _General Advertiser_ hears that "near 40
+Highwaymen, street Robbers, Burglars, Rogues, Vagabonds, and Cheats have
+been committed within a week last past by Justice Fielding." But however
+full of business the Bow Street court-room might be, that dreary routine
+[1] would make, as we have said, but equally dreary reading. And the fact
+that both John and Henry Fielding appear to have been known as 'Justice
+Fielding' during the lifetime of the latter, lessens whatever biographical
+value might be extracted from the constant newspaper paragraphs recording
+the Fielding cases. It is clear that the house in Bow Street was the
+centre of an active campaign against the thieves, murderers, professional
+gamblers, and highwaymen, who were then so rife. Military guards conducted
+thither prisoners, brought for examination from Newgate, for fear of
+rescue from gangs lurking in the neighbouring streets. All "Persons who
+have been robbed" and their servants, were desired, by public
+advertisement, to attend Justice Fielding "at his House in Bow Street," to
+identify certain prisoners under examination. And thither came the
+"porters and beggars," the composing of whose quarrels Henry Fielding
+himself has told us, occupied his days. The generous spirit in which he
+treated such poor clients, and his tenderness for those driven by want
+into crime, are eminently characteristic of the man. By adjusting, instead
+of inflaming, these squalid quarrels, and by "refusing to take a shilling
+from a man who must undoubtedly would not have had another left," he
+reduced a supposed income of £500 a year to £300. And if the picture of
+the poor wretch, driven to highway robbery by the sight of his starving
+family, whom Tom Jones relieved from his own scanty purse, be not proof
+enough of the compassion that tempered Justice Fielding's sternness, we
+have his own express pleading for these unhappy victims of circumstance:
+"what can be more shocking," he cries, "than to see an industrious poor
+Creature, who is able and willing to labour forced by mere want into
+Dishonesty, and that in a Nation of such Trade and Opulence." So justly
+could Fielding apportion the contributary negligence of society towards
+the criminals bred by its apathy.
+
+And it was not only the impoverished porter who found help at Bow Street.
+"When," says Murphy, "in the latter end of [Mr Fielding's] days he had an
+income of four or five hundred a-year, he knew no use of money but to keep
+his table open to those who had been his friends when young, and had
+impaired their own fortunes." As Mr Austin Dobson says, in commenting on
+one of Horace Walpole's scurrilous letters, [2] "it must always have been
+a more or less ragged regiment which met about that kindly Bow Street
+board." The man who parted with his own hardly won arrears of rent to
+relieve the yet greater need of a College friend, was little likely to be
+less generous when the tardy 'jade Fortune' at last put some secured
+income into his hands.
+
+No special event marks the spring and summer of 1750. On the 11th of
+January the Westminster General Quarter Sessions opened, and on the
+following day Fielding was again elected as chairman "for the two next
+Quarter Sessions"; which election was repeated, "for the two next
+Sessions, [3]" in July. The Registers of St Paul's Covent Garden record
+the baptism of a daughter, Sophia, on the 21st of January. And an
+indication that the zealous magistrate was plunged, personally, into some
+of the tumults of the time occurs in the following trifling note to the
+Duke of Bedford.
+
+
+"My Lord,
+
+"In obedience to the Commands I have the Honour to receive from your
+Grace, I shall attend tomorrow morning and do the utmost in my Power to
+preserve the Peace on that occasion.
+
+"I am, with gratitude and Respect,
+"My Lord,
+"Your Grace's most obliged
+"most obedient humble servant.
+
+"Henry Ffielding. [4]
+
+"Bow Street,
+
+"May 14, 1750."
+
+By the autumn, however, a rumour was abroad that the now famous author of
+_Tom Jones_ was engaged on pages of a very different nature. The _General
+Advertiser_, for October 9, announces:--
+
+"We hear that an eminent Magistrate is now employed in preparing a
+Pamphlet for the Press in which the several causes that have conspired to
+render Robberies so frequent of late will be laid open; the Defects of our
+Laws enquired into, and Methods proposed which may discourage and in a
+great measure prevent this growing Evil for the future."
+
+This pamphlet, in which many a later reform was urged by Fielding's
+far-sighted zeal, seems to have been still in preparation for the next two
+months. And in November the reform of the law had to give place to a more
+immediate urgency in protecting the Lord Chancellor. The keepers of three
+gaming houses, closed by his lordship's orders, were reported to be
+plotting against that exalted dignitary; and the case, as appears from the
+following letter to a lawyer, Mr Perkins, was in Fielding's hands. [5]
+
+
+"Sir
+
+"I have made full enquiry after the three Persons and have a perfect
+account of them all. Their characters are such that perhaps three more
+likely Men could not be found in the Kingdom for the Hellish Purpose
+mentioned in the Letter. As the Particulars are many and the Affair of
+such Importance I beg to see you punctually at six this evening when I
+will be alone to receive you--and am, Sir,
+
+"Yr. most obed;
+"humble servant
+
+"He Ffielding.
+
+"Bow Street. Nov. 25. 1750."
+
+When the keepers of gambling houses dared to fly at such high game as the
+person of the Lord Chancellor, there is no wonder that the safety of his
+Majesty's ordinary lieges was of small account. "Robbery," writes Horace
+Walpole, a few weeks before the date of the above letter, "is the only
+thing which goes on with any vivacity." And at the close of the year a
+Royal Proclamation was actually published, promising £100 over and above
+other rewards, and a free pardon, to any accomplice who should apprehend
+offenders committing murder, or robbery by violence, in London streets or
+within five miles of London, providing such an accomplice had not himself
+dealt a mortal wound. So startling a confession of impotence on the part
+of the Government served very fitly to introduce the pamphlet, then on the
+eve of publication. And if further proof be needed of the conditions of
+public safety at the beginning of the year 1751, it may be seen in the
+passage of the King's Speech delivered at the opening of Parliament on the
+17th of January, in which his Majesty exhorted the Commons to suppress
+outrages and violences on life and property; words representing, of
+course, the policy of the Ministry.
+
+The title of Fielding's little book, dedicated to Lord Hardwick, and
+published about January 22, is _An Enquiry into the Causes of the late
+Increase of Robbers &c. with some Proposals for remedying this growing
+Evil. In which the Present Reigning Vices are impartially exposed; and the
+Laws that relate to the Provision for the Poor and to the Punishment of
+Felons are largely and freely examined_. The _Enquiry_ opens with a
+powerful denunciation of the licence then allowed to the three great
+causes, in Fielding's opinion, of the increasing demoralisation of the
+'most useful Part' of the people. These were, first, the immense number of
+places of amusement, all seducing the working classes to squander both
+their money and their time; this being "indeed a certain Method to fill
+the Streets with Beggars and the Goals with Debtors and Thieves." Here, in
+Fielding's view, new legislation was demanded. The second cause of the
+late excessive increase of crime, according to the _Enquiry_, was an
+epidemic of gin drinking, "a new Kind of Drunkenness unknown to our
+Ancestors [which] is lately sprung up amongst us." Gin, says Fielding,
+appeared to be the principal sustenance of more than an hundred thousand
+Londoners, "the dreadful Effects of which I have the Misfortune every Day
+to see, and to smell too." The crime resulting from such drunkenness was
+obvious; but Fielding, looking far beyond the narrow confines of his
+court-room, beheld a future gin-sodden race, and he appeals to the
+legislature to put a stop to a practice, the consequences of which must
+alarm "the most sluggish Degree of Public Spirit." It is surely something
+more than a coincidence that a few weeks after these warnings were
+published, Hogarth issued his awful plate of _Gin Lane_. A third source of
+crime, in Fielding's eyes, was the gambling among the 'lower Classes of
+Life,'--a school "in which most Highwaymen of great eminence have been
+bred," and a habit plainly tending to the "Ruin of Tradesmen, the
+Destruction of Youth, and to the Multiplication of every Kind of Fraud and
+Violence." In this case the 'Eminent Magistrate' finds new legislation
+less needed than a vigorous enforcement of existing laws; such, he adds,
+"as hath lately been executed with great Vigour within the Liberty of
+Westminster." Before long the pages of _Amelia_ were to bring home yet
+more forcibly to Fielding's readers the cruel results of the pleasures (or
+speculations) of the needy gambler,--the 'Destruction of Familys,' thereby
+incurred, no less than the breeding of highwaymen. Who does not remember
+"that famous scene when Amelia is spreading, for the recreant who is
+losing his money at the Kings Arms, the historic little supper of hashed
+mutton, which she has cooked with her own hands, and denying herself a
+glass of white wine to save the paltry sum of sixpence, 'while her Husband
+was paying a Debt of several Guineas incurred by the Ace of Trumps being
+in the hands of his Adversary'--a scene which it is impossible to read
+aloud without a certain huskiness in the throat." [6] The last great cause
+of crime which the _Enquiry_ considers, and with much learning and detail,
+is the condition of the poor. Here Fielding's views on our modern problem
+of the unemployed may be read. And here occurs a splendid denunciation of
+the 'House of Correction' or Bridewell of the period, a prison for idle
+and disorderly persons where "they are neither to be corrected nor
+employed: and where with the conversation of many as bad and sometimes
+worse than themselves they are sure to be improved in the Knowledge and
+confirmed in the Practice of Iniquity." The most impudent of the wretches
+brought before him, Fielding tells us, were always "such as have been
+before acquainted with the Discipline of Bridewell." These prisons, from
+which the disorderly and idle came out, "much more idle and disorderly
+than they went in," were, says Fielding, no other than "Schools of Vice,
+Seminaries of Idleness, and Common-sewers of Nastiness and Disease." A
+fixed (and lower) rate of wages, it is curious to note, is one remedy
+advocated in the _Enquiry_, for raising the condition of the poor.
+
+Such were the 'temptations' to robbery that Fielding would have removed,
+nobly conceiving the highest office of the legislature to be that of
+prevention rather than cure. The _Enquiry_ concludes with offering some
+more immediate palliatives for the diseased state of the body politic, in
+the removing of actual 'Encouragement to Robbery.' First among such
+encouragements Fielding places the fact that "the Thief disposes of his
+goods with almost as much safety as the honestest Tradesman"; and he urged
+the need of legislation to prohibit the amazing advertisements by which
+our ancestors promised to give rewards for the recovery of stolen goods
+"_and no questions asked_." Such advertisements he declares to be "in
+themselves so very scandalous and of such pernicious Consequence, that if
+Men are not ashamed to own they prefer an old Watch or a Diamond Ring to
+the Good of [the] Society it is a pity some effectual Law was not
+contrived to prevent their giving this public Countenance to Robbery for
+the future." And, under this head, he advocates legislation either for the
+regulating of pawnbrokers, or for the entire extirpation of a "Set of
+Miscreants which, like other Vermin, harbour only about the Poor and grow
+fat sucking their Blood." The subsequent legislation by which prosecutors
+were recompensed for loss of time and money, when prosecuting the 'wolves
+in society,' may be added to the measures forseen if not actually promoted
+by Fielding's enlightened zeal. And in nothing was he more in advance of
+his age than in his denunciation of that scandal of the eighteenth
+century, the conduct and frequency of public executions. It has taken our
+legislators a hundred years to provide the swift, solemn and private
+executions urged by Henry Fielding, in place of the brutal 'Tyburn
+holiday' enacted every six weeks for the benefit of the Georgian mob.
+Another matter demanding legislation was the great probability of escape
+afforded to thieves by the narrow streets and the common-lodging houses of
+the day. Of the latter, crowded with miserable beds from the cellar to the
+garret, let out, at twopence a night the single beds, and threepence the
+double ones, Fielding draws a picture as terrible as any of his friend
+Hogarth's plates. And he concludes "Nay I can add what I myself once saw
+in the Parish of Shoreditch where two little Houses were emptied of near
+seventy Men and Women," and where the money found on all the occupants
+(with the exception of a pretty girl who was a thief) "did not amount to
+one shilling." In all these houses gin, moreover, was sold at a penny the
+quartern. Housed thus, in conditions destructive of "all Morality, Decency
+and Modesty," with the street for bed if they fall sick ("and it is almost
+a Miracle that Stench, Vermin, and Want should ever suffer them to be
+well"), oppressed with poverty, and sunk in every species of debauchery,
+"the Wonder in Fact is," cries Fielding, "... that we have not a thousand
+more Robbers than we have; indeed that all these wretches are not thieves
+must give us either a very high Idea of their Honesty or a very mean one
+of their Capacity and Courage." And, leaving for a moment legislative
+reform, Fielding delivers a vigorous attack on the national sluggishness
+of public spirit which helped to render robbery a fairly safe profession.
+With such sluggishness his ardent nature had very little sympathy. "With
+regard to Private Persons," he protests, "there is no Country I believe in
+the World where that vulgar Maxim so generally prevails that what is the
+Business of every Man is the business of no Man; and for this plain
+Reason, that there is no Country in which less Honour is gained by serving
+the Public. He therefore who commits no crime against the Public, is very
+well satisfied with his own Virtue; far from thinking himself obliged to
+undergo any Labour, expend any Money, or encounter any Danger on such
+Account." And in no part of the _Enquiry_ does the writer more truly show
+his wisdom than in the pages on 'false Compassion' that plausible weakness
+which refuses to prosecute the oppressors of the helpless and innocent,
+and which at that time, in the person of his Majesty, King George II. was,
+it appears, very active in pardoning offenders when convicted. Fielding's
+arguments are incontestable; but his apologue may have found even more
+favour in the age of wit. He hopes such good nature may not carry those in
+power so far, "as it once did a Clergyman in _Scotland_ who in the fervour
+of his Benevolence prayed to God that He would be graciously pleased to
+pardon the poor Devil."
+
+To the devil, whether in man or in society, Fielding was ever a 'spirited
+enemy'; and his first biographer tells us that "to the unworthy he was
+rather harsh." But the last page of this little book breathes that spirit
+of tenderness for hard pressed humanity which in Fielding was so
+characteristically mingled with a wholesome severity. If the legislature
+would take proper care to raise the condition of the poor, then he
+declares the root of the evil would be struck: "nor in plain Truth will
+the utmost severity to Offenders be justifiable unless we take every
+possible Method of preventing the offence ... the Subject as well as the
+child should be left without Excuse before he is punished: for in that
+Case alone the Rod becomes the Hand either of the Parent or the
+Magistrate." And his last word is one of compassion for the "many
+Cart-loads of our Fellow-creatures [who] once in six weeks are carried to
+Slaughter"; of whom much the greater part might, with 'proper care and
+Regulations' have been made "not only happy in themselves but very useful
+Members of the Society which they now so greatly dishonour in the Sight of
+all Christendom."
+
+Henry Fielding is himself his own best illustration when he declares that
+the "good Poet and the good Politician do not differ so much as some who
+know nothing of either art affirm; nor would _Homer_ or _Milton_ have made
+the worst Legislators of their Times."
+
+To the reader of to-day the _Enquiry_ betrays no party flavour, but its
+sedate pages clearly stirred up the hot feeling of the times. Early in
+February the Advertiser announced "_This Day is published A Letter to
+Henry Fielding Esqre. occasioned by his Enquiry into the causes of the
+late increase of Robbers &c_." And about the end of the month there
+appeared _Considerations_, in two numbers of the _True Briton_, "on
+Justice Fielding's 'Enquiry,' shewing his Mistakes about the Constitution
+and our Laws and that what he seems to propose is dangerous to our
+Properties, Liberties and Constitution." On March 7 was announced
+_Observations on Mr Fielding's Enquiry_, by one B. Sedgley. Some
+opposition squib, too, must have been launched, to judge by the following
+item from an advertisement column of the same date: "a Vindication of the
+Rights and Privileges of the Commonality of England, in Opposition to what
+has been advanced by the Author of the Enquiry, or to what may be
+promulgated by any Ministerial Artifices against the public Cause of Truth
+and Liberty. _By_ Timothy Beck_ the Happy Cobler of Portugal-street_."
+[7] Perhaps some collector of eighteenth century pamphlets may be able to
+reveal these comments of the '_Happy Gobler of Portugal-street_' upon the
+'artifices' of Henry Fielding. [8]
+
+In the February following the publication of the _Enquiry_ a Parlimentary
+Committee was appointed "to revise and consider the Laws in being, which
+relate to Felonies and other Offences against the Peace." [9] The
+Committee included Lyttelton and Pitt, and there is of course every
+probability that Fielding's evidence would be taken; but it seems
+impossible now to discover what share he may have had in this move by the
+Government towards fresh criminal legislation. There is, however, the
+evidence of his own hand that in the matter of prison administration his
+efforts were not limited to academic pamphlets, or to the indictment, so
+soon to be published, contained in the terrible prison scenes of _Amelia_.
+The following letter to the Duke of Newcastle [10] shows an anxious
+endeavour to secure such good government as was possible for at least one
+of the gaols.
+
+
+"My Lord
+
+"It being of the utmost consequence to the Public to have a proper Prison
+Keeper of the new Prison at the Time, I beg leave to recommend Mr William
+Pentlow a Constable of St George Bloomsbury to your Grace's Protection in
+the present Vacancy. He is a Man of whose Courage and Integrity I have
+seen the highest Proofs, and is indeed every way qualified for the
+charge. I am with the most Perfect Respect,
+
+"My Lord,
+"Your Grace's most obedient
+"and most humble servant,
+
+"Henry Ffielding
+"Bow Street Jan. 15. 1750 [1751]."
+
+A second edition of the _Enquiry_ appeared early in the spring; and
+according to the _Journals of the House of Commons_ it was resolved, in
+April, that a Bill be brought in on the resolution of the Committee
+appointed two months previously to consider criminal legislation. Again it
+can only be surmised that Fielding's assistance would be invoked in the
+drafting of this Bill. That his vigorous denunciations of the national
+danger of the gin curse were in complete accord with the feeling of the
+Government is apparent from the fact that two months later, in June 1751,
+the _Tippling Act_ [11] received the royal assent, by which Act very
+stringent restrictions were imposed on the sale of spirits.
+
+In June Fielding again appears as Chairman of the Westminster Sessions.
+[12] And in September cases occur as brought before John Fielding and
+others "at Henry Fielding's house in Bow Street," [13] from which it
+appears that Fielding's blind half-brother was already acting as his
+assistant. In the following month John Fielding appears among the Justices
+of the Westminster Quarter Sessions. [14]
+
+The year that had seen the publication of the _Enquiry_, affords proof
+enough of Fielding's active labours in criminal and social reform; but the
+last month of this year is marked by an occurrence of much greater import
+for English literature, the publication of the third great novel,
+_Amelia_.
+
+[1] Doubtless faithfully rendered in the old print, here reproduced, of
+Fielding's blind half-brother, assistant, and successor, Sir John
+Fielding, hearing a Bow Street case.
+
+[2] See Appendix.
+
+[3] Middlesex Records. _MSS. Sessions Books_. 1750.
+
+[4] From the hitherto unpublished autograph, now at Woburn Abbey.
+
+[5] This hitherto unpublished letter is now in the British Museum. It is
+addressed to "--Perkins, Esq. at his Chambers No. 7, in Lincolns Inn
+Square," and is sealed with Fielding's seal, a facsimile of which appears
+on the cover of the present volume.
+
+[6] _Fielding_. Austin Dobson. p. 156.
+
+[7] _The General Advertiser_. March 7, 1751.
+
+[8] The _London Magazine_ for February devoted five columns to an
+"Abstract of Mr Fielding's Enquiry"; and in the following month the
+_Magazine_ again noticed the book, by printing a long anonymous letter in
+which Fielding is attacked as a 'trading author' and a 'trading justice,'
+and in which the writer shows his intellectual grasp by advocating in all
+seriousness a law prohibiting the sovereign from gambling!
+
+[9] See _Journals of the House of Commons_. Vol. xxii. p. 27, and the
+_London Magazine_. Vol. xx. p. 82. The _Catalogue of Printed Papers. House
+of Commons_, 1750-51, includes "A Bill for the more effectual preventing
+Robberies Burglaries and other Outrages within the City and Liberty of
+Westminster--" &c.
+
+[10] This hitherto unpublished letter is now in the British Museum. It is
+endorsed "Jan. 15, 1750(1)."
+
+[11] 24 George II. c. 40. June 1751.
+
+[12] Middlesex Records. _Sessions Book_. 1751.
+
+[13] _General Advertiser_. Sept. 9. 1751.
+
+[14] Middlesex Records. _Sessions Book_. October, 1751.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+AMELIA
+
+    "of all my Offspring she is my favourite Child."
+    The _Covent Garden Journal_. No. 8.
+
+On the 2nd of December 1751 the _General Advertiser_ announces that
+
+    _On Wednesday the 18th of this Month will be published_
+
+    IN FOUR VOLUMES DUODECIMO
+
+    AMELIA
+
+    By HENRY FIELDING, Esq;
+    _Beati ter et amplius
+    Quos irrupta tenet Copula_. HOR.
+
+And the puff preliminary of the period may be read in the same columns,
+declaring that the "earnest Demand of the Publick" had necessitated the
+use of four printing presses; and that it being impossible to complete the
+binding in time, copies would be available "sew'd at Half-a-Guinea a
+Sett." Sir Walter Scott tells us that, at a sale to booksellers before
+publication, Andrew Millar, the publisher, refused to part with _Amelia_
+on the usual discount terms; and that the booksellers, being thus
+persuaded of a great future for the book, eagerly bought up the
+impression. Launched thus, and heralded by the popularity with which _Tom
+Jones_ had now endowed Fielding's name, the entire edition was sold out on
+the day of publication; an event which evoked the observation from Dr
+Johnson that _Amelia_ was perhaps the only book which being printed off
+betimes one morning, a new edition was called for before night. The Doctor
+gave not only unstinted praise, but also an involuntary tribute to
+_Amelia_. He read the book through, without pausing, from beginning to
+end. And he pronounced Amelia herself to be "the most pleasing heroine of
+all the romances." [1]
+
+But to the majority of readers Amelia is, assuredly, something more than
+the most charming of heroines. She is the delightful companion; the wise
+and tender friend; a woman whose least perfection was that dazzling beauty
+which shone with equal lustre in the 'poor rags' lent her by her old
+nurse, or in her own clothing, just as the happy purity of her nature only
+glows more brightly for the dark scenes through which she moves. In the
+whole range of English literature there is surely no figure more warmly
+human, and yet less touched with human imperfection; none more simply and
+naturally alive, and yet truer in every crisis (and there were few of the
+sorrowful things of life unknown to her) to the best qualities of generous
+womanhood. And if it is largely for her glowing vitality that we love
+Amelia, we love her none the less in that she is no fool. It was hardly
+necessary to tell us, as Fielding is careful to do, that her sense of
+humour was keen, and that her insight into the ridiculous was tempered
+only by the deeper insight of her heart. Her understanding of her husband
+is as perfect as her love for him; and that love is far too profound to
+allow a moment's suggestion of mere placid amiability. Amelia, whether
+quizzing the absurdities of the affected fine ladies of her own rank, or
+cooking her husband's supper in the poor lodgings of their poverty;
+whether so radiant with happiness after seeing her little children
+handsomely entertained that with flushed cheeks and bright eyes, "she was
+all a blaze of beauty," or, pale with distress, bravely carrying her own
+clothes and the children's trinkets to the pawnbroker; whether betraying
+her own noble qualities of silence and forgiveness, or losing her temper
+with Mrs Bennett,--commands equal affection and admiration. "They say,"
+wrote Thackeray, "that it was in his own home that Fielding knew her and
+loved her: and from his own wife that he drew the most charming character
+in English fiction--Fiction? Why fiction! Why not history? I know Amelia
+just as well as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu."
+
+Lady Mary, and her daughter Lady Bute, have left very definite statements
+concerning this portrait which their cousin was alleged to have hidden
+under the fair image of Amelia. Lady Bute we are told was no stranger "to
+that beloved first wife whose picture he drew in his Amelia, where, as she
+said, even the glowing language he knew how to employ did not do more than
+justice to the amiable qualities of the original...." [2] And Lady Mary
+herself writes, "H. Fielding has given a true picture of himself and his
+first wife, in the characters of Mr and Mrs Booth [Amelia and her
+husband], some compliments to his own figure excepted; and I am persuaded
+several of the incidents he mentions are real matters of fact." [3]
+Against these persuations we must place the fact that this book contains
+no such explicit statement as that which in _Tom Jones_ assures us of the
+original of the beautiful Sophia. But we shall not love Amelia the less if
+we see her, with her courage and her beauty, her happy gaiety of spirit,
+her tenderness and strength, solacing the distresses and calming the
+storms of Fielding's restless genius, rather than devoting those qualities
+to assuaging the misfortunes of Captain William Booth. For indeed Captain
+Booth has but one substantial title to our regard, and that is his
+adoration for his wife. True, he is a pretty figure of a man; he has a
+handsome face; he fights bravely, and would kick a rogue through the
+world; he believes in and loves his friends; and he plays charmingly with
+his children. But, deprive him of the good genius of his life, and Captain
+Booth would very speedily have sunk into the ruin and despair of any other
+profligate young gamester about the Town; and for this his adoration the
+culprit wins our forgiveness, even as Amelia not only forgave but forgot,
+when by virtue of her own unconscious goodness the Captain retrieved
+himself, at last, from the folly of his ways. Undoubtedly the man whom
+Amelia loved, and who had the grace to return that passion, was no
+scoundrel at heart.
+
+It is impossible, now, to discover with any certainty the incidents which
+Lady Mary was persuaded were matters of fact. The experiences of Captain
+Booth, when essaying to turn gentleman farmer, have been quoted as copies
+of Fielding's own ambitions at East Stour; but surely on very slender
+evidence. Much more personal seem many of the later scenes in the poor
+London lodgings, scenes of cruel distress and perfect happiness, of bitter
+disappointments and sanguine hope. Here, very probably, we have echoes of
+the struggles of Harry and Charlotte Fielding, in the days of hackney
+writing and of baffled efforts at the Bar; just as the dry statement by
+Arthur Murphy, that Fielding was "remarkable for ... the strongest
+affection for his children," comes to life in the many touching pictures
+of Amelia and Booth with their little son and daughter. The pursuit of
+such identity of incident may the more cheerfully be left to the
+anecdotist, in that the biographical value of _Amelia_, is far more than
+incidental. For the book is, as has been said, a one-part piece. Round the
+single figure of Amelia all the other characters revolve; and it was of
+Amelia that Fielding himself has told us, in words that are a master key
+to his own character "of all my offspring she is my favourite Child." As
+surely as a man may be known by his choice in a friend, so is the nature
+of the artist betrayed when he avows his partiality for one alone among
+all the creations of his genius.
+
+As to the remaining figures in this "model of human life," to quote
+Fielding's own descriptive phrase of his book, those which tell us most of
+their author are that worthy, authoritative, humourous clergyman, Dr
+Harrison; the good Sergeant Atkinson; and that fiery pedant Colonel Bath,
+with his kind heart hidden under a ferocious passion for calling out every
+man whom he conceived to have slighted his honour. Dr Harrison does not
+win quite the same place in our hearts as the man whom Thackeray calls
+'dear Parson Adams'; his cassock rustles a little too loudly; the saint is
+a trifle obscured in the Doctor. But yet we love him for his warm and
+protecting affection for his 'children' as he calls Amelia and Booth; for
+his dry humour; and for that generosity which was for ever draining his
+ample purse. And perhaps we like him none the less for his scholar's
+raillery of that early blue-stocking Mrs Bennet; while his dignity never
+shows to greater advantage than when he throws himself bodily on the
+villain Murphy, achieving the arrest of that felon by the strength of his
+own arm, and the nimbleness of his own legs. And to this good Doctor is
+given a saying eminently characteristic of Justice Fielding himself. We
+are told that "it was a maxim of his that no man could descend below
+himself in doing any act which may contribute to protect an innocent
+person, or to bring a rogue to the gallows." Another trait of the Doctor
+recalls Fielding's oft reiterated aversion to what he calls grave formal
+persons: "You must know then, child," said he, to poor Booth, sunk in the
+melancholy problem of supporting a wife and three children on something
+less than £40 a year, "that I have been thinking on this subject as well
+as you; for I can think, I promise you, with a pleasant countenance." Of
+Amelia's foster-brother Sergeant Atkinson (from whom Major William Dobbin
+is directly descended) it is enough to say that the noble qualities
+concealed beneath the common cloth of his sergeant's coat perfectly
+confirm a sentence written many years before by the hand of his author. "I
+will venture to affirm," Fielding declares, in his early essay on the
+_Characters of Men_, "that I have known ... _a Fellow whom no man should
+be seen to speak to_, capable of the highest acts of Friendship and
+Benevolence."
+
+Fielding's energies in this his last novel, a novel be it remembered
+written in the midst of daily contact with the squalid vices exhibited in
+an eighteenth century court-room, seem to have been almost wholly absorbed
+in creating the most perfect escape from those surroundings in the person
+of Amelia. Beside the figure of his 'favourite child,' the vicious
+criminals of his stage, the malefic My Lord, the loathsome Trent, the
+debased Justice, the terrible human wrecks in Newgate, are but dark
+figures in a shadowy back-ground. Still, the great moralist shows no lack
+of vigour in his delineations of such offspring of vice. The genius that
+knew how to rouse every reader of _Tom Jones_ to 'lend a foot to kick
+Blifil downstairs,' awards in the last pages of _Amelia_, a yet more
+satisfying justice to that nameless connoisseur in profligacy, My Lord.
+
+In his Dedication to Ralph Allen, Fielding states that his book "is
+sincerely designed to promote the Cause of Virtue, and to expose some of
+the most glaring Evils, as well public as private, which at present infest
+this Country". The statement seems somewhat needless when prefacing pages
+which enshrine Amelia; and where also are displayed Blear Eyed Moll in the
+prison yard of Newgate, as Newgate was twenty years before the prison
+reforms of Howard were heard of; Justice Thrasher and his iniquities; the
+'diabolisms' of My Lord and of his tool Trent; the ruinous miseries of
+excessive gambling; and the abuses of duelling. Indeed the avowedly
+didactic purpose of the moralist seems at times to cloud a little the fine
+perception of the artist. There are passages, in this book which, much as
+they redound to the honour of their writer, are indisputably heavy
+reading. But what shall not be forgiven to the creator of Amelia. "To have
+invented that character," cries Thackeray, also becoming didactic, "is not
+only a triumph of art, but it is a good action." And he tells us how with
+all his heart he loves and admires the 'kindest and sweetest lady in the
+world'; and how he thinks of her as faithfully as though he had
+breakfasted with her that morning in her drawing-room, or should meet her
+that afternoon in the Park.
+
+It is recorded that Fielding received from Andrew Millar £1000 for the
+copyright of _Amelia_. But the reception of the new novel, after the first
+rush for copies, seems to have done little credit either to the brains or
+to the heart of the public. And in the month following _Amelia's_
+appearance, Fielding satirises the comments of the Town, in two numbers of
+his _Covent Garden Journal_; protesting that though he does not think his
+child to be entirely free from faults--"I know nothing human that is
+so,"--still "surely she does not deserve the Rancour with which she hath
+been treated by the Public." As ironic specimens of the faults complained
+of in his heroine, he quotes the accusations that her not abusing her
+husband "for having lost Money at Play, when she saw his Heart was already
+almost broke by it, was _contemptible Meanness_"; that she condescends to
+dress her husband's supper, and to dress her children, to whom moreover
+she shows too much kindness; that she once mentions the DEVIL; that she is
+a _low_ character; and that the beauty of her face is hopelessly flawed by
+a carriage accident. Such are some of the charges brought against the
+lovely Amelia by the "Beaus, Rakes, fine Ladies, and several formal
+Persons with bushy wigs and canes at their Noses," who, in Fielding's
+satire, crowd the Court where his book is placed on trial for the crime of
+dullness. Then Fielding himself steps forward, and after pleading for this
+his 'favourite Child,' on whom he has bestowed "a more than ordinary Pains
+in her Education," he declares, with the same hasty petulance that
+characterised that previous outburst in the preface to _David Simple_,
+that indeed he "will trouble the World no more with any children of mine
+by the same Muse." Two months later the _Gentleman's Magazine_ prints a
+spirited appeal against this resolution. "His fair heroine's nose has in
+my opinion been too severely handled by some modern critics," [4] writes
+Criticulus, after a passage of warm praise for the characterisation, the
+morality, and the 'noble reflections of the book'; and he proceeds to
+point out that the writings of such critics "will never make a sufficient
+recompense to the world, if _Mr Fielding_ adheres to what I hope he only
+said in his warmth and indignation of this injurious treatment, that he
+will never trouble the public with any more writings of this kind." The
+words of the enlightened _Criticulus_ echo sadly when we remember that in
+little more than two years the great genius and the great heart of Henry
+Fielding were to be silenced.
+
+The _London Magazine_ for 1751 devotes the first nine columns of its
+December number to a resume of the novel, and continues this compliment in
+another nine columns of appendix. With a fine patronage the reviewer
+concludes that "upon the whole, the story is amusing, the characters kept
+up, and many reflections which [sic] are useful, if the reader will but
+take notice of them, which in this unthinking age it is to be feared very
+few will." Some imperfections he kindly excuses on the score of "the
+author's hurry of business in administering impartial justice to his
+majesty's good people"; but he cannot excuse what he declares to be the
+ridicule of _Liberty_ in Book viii.; and he solemnly exhorts the author
+that as "he has in this piece very justly exposed some of the private
+vices and follies of the present age" so he should in his next direct his
+satire against political corruption, otherwise 'he and his patrons' will
+be accused of compounding the same. [5] It seems incredible that any
+suggestion should ever have attached to the author of _Pasquin_ and the
+_Register_, as to one who could condone public corruption. And as for the
+accusation of tampering with "Liberty" the like charge was brought, we may
+remember, by the "Happy Cobler of Portugal Street" against Fielding's
+_Inquiry into the Encrease of Robbers_. The literary cobblers who pursued
+_Amelia_ with the abuse of their poor pens may very well be consigned to
+the oblivion of their political brother. The comment of one hostile pen
+cannot however be dismissed as coming from a literary cobbler, and that is
+the 'sickening' abuse, to use Thackeray's epithet, which Richardson
+dishonoured himself in flinging at his great contemporary. That abuse the
+sentimentalist poured out very freely on _Amelia_; but, as Mr Austin
+Dobson says, "in cases of this kind _parva seges satis est_, and Amelia
+has long since outlived both rival malice and contemporary coldness. It is
+a proof of her author's genius that she is even more intelligible to our
+age than she was to her own." [6]
+
+In Fielding's satiric description of the Court before which his Amelia
+stood her trial, he describes himself as an 'old gentleman.' The adjective
+seems hardly applicable to a man of forty five; but, to quote again from
+Mr Austin Dobson, "however it may have chanced, whether from failing
+health or otherwise, the Fielding of _Amelia_ is suddenly a far older man
+than the Fielding of _Tom Jones_. The robust and irrepressible vitality,
+the full veined delight of living, the energy of observation and strength
+of satire, which characterise the one, give place in the other to a calmer
+retrospection, a more compassionate humanity, a more benignant criticism
+of life." Murphy's Irish tongue declares a similar feeling in his
+comparison of the pages of this, the last of the three great novels, to
+the calm of the setting sun; a sun that had first broken forth in the
+'morning glory' of _Joseph Andrews_, and had attained its 'highest warmth
+and splendour' in the inimitable pages of _Tom Jones_. There is indeed a
+mature wisdom and patience in Amelia such as none but a pedant could
+demand of her enchanting younger sister Sophia. In these later pages
+Sophia has grown up into a gracious womanhood, while losing none of her
+girlhood's gaiety and charm. That Amelia, his older and wiser though
+scarce sadder child, was the nearest, as he himself tells us, to
+Fielding's own heart, is one more indication that here is the perfected
+image of that beloved wife, from whose youthful grace and beauty his
+genius had already modelled one exquisite memorial.
+
+[1] _Anecdotes_. Mrs Piozzi. p. 221.
+
+[2] Letters and Works of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Introductory
+Anecdotes, p. cxxiii.
+
+[3] Ibid. Vol. ii. p. 289.
+
+[4] It is curious that to this unlucky incident, based according to Lady
+Louisa Stuart, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's grand-daughter, on a real
+accident to Mrs Fielding, Dr Johnson attributed the failure of the book
+with the public: "that vile broken nose ruined the sale," he declared.
+Early in January Fielding himself protests in his _Covent Garden Journal_
+that every reader of any intelligence would have discovered that the
+effects of Amelia's terrible carriage accident had been wholly remedied by
+"a famous Surgeon"; and that "the Author of her History, in a hurry,
+forgot to inform his Readers of that Particular." The particular has by
+now fallen into its due insignificance, and, save for Johnson's
+explanation therein of the poor sale of the book, is scarce worth
+recalling.
+
+[5] _London Magazine_. December 1751. p. 531 and Appendix.
+
+[6] _Fielding_. Austin Dobson. p. 161.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+JOURNALIST AND MAGISTRATE
+
+    "However vain or romantic the Attempt may seem I am sanguine
+    enough to aim at serving the noble Interests of Religion, Virtue,
+    and good Sense, by these my lucubrations."
+    The _Covent Garden Journal_. No. 5.
+
+Nothing could be more characteristic of Fielding's active spirit than were
+the early months of 1752. For, no sooner had he deposited the four volumes
+of _Amelia_ in the hands of the public, essaying to win his readers over
+to a love of virtue and a hatred of vice, by placing before their eyes
+that true "model of human life," than we find him launching a direct
+attack on the follies and evils of the age, by means of his old weapon,
+the press.
+
+The first number of the _Covent Garden Journal_ appeared on the 4th of
+January, and its pages, produced under Fielding's own management and
+apparently largely written by his own pen, provided satires on folly,
+invectives against vice, and incitements to goodness and sense, delivered
+in the name of one _Sir Alexander Drawcansir, Knt. Censor of Great
+Britain_. [1] The new paper ran but for seventy-two numbers; perhaps for
+all the wit and learning, the fire and zest of its columns, the public
+were reluctant to buy their own lashings. But it may be doubted whether,
+except in the pages of his three great novels, Henry Fielding ever
+revealed himself more completely than in these his last informal
+'lucubrations.' Here, the active Justice, the accomplished scholar, the
+lawyer, and man of the world, the first wit of his day, talks to us of a
+hundred topics, chosen indeed on the spur of the moment, but discussed in
+his own incomparable words, and with the now mature authority of one, who
+had "dived into the inmost Recesses of Human Nature." No subject is too
+abstruse, none too trifling, for _Mr Censor_ to illumine. Freed from the
+political bands of the earlier newspapers, this last _Journal_, produced
+be it remembered by a man in shattered health, and distracted by the
+squalid business of a Bow Street Court-room, ranges over an amazing
+compass of life and manners.
+
+Thus, one January morning, _Sir Alexander's_ readers would open their
+paper to find him deploring the decline of "a Religion sometime ago
+professed in this Country, and which, if my Memory fails me not was called
+Christian." The following Saturday they are presented with a learned and
+pleasant argument to prove that every male critic should be eighteen years
+of age, and "BE ABLE TO READ." A few days later the pages of writers
+purveying the prevalent "Infidelity, Scurrility, and Indecency" are
+ingeniously allotted to various uses. In February the _Journal_ accords a
+noble tribute "to that great Triumvirate Lucian, Cervantes, and Swift";
+not indeed "for that Wit and Humour alone, which they all so eminently
+possesst, but because they all endeavoured with the utmost Force of their
+Wit and Humour, to expose and extirpate those Follies and Vices which
+chiefly prevailed in their several Countries." The design of Aristophanes
+and Rabelais on the other hand, appears to _Mr Censor_, if he may speak
+his opinion freely, "very plainly to have been to ridicule all Sobriety,
+Modesty, Decency, Virtue, and Religion out of the world." From such
+considerations it is an easy passage to a definition of 'real Taste' as
+derived from a "nice Harmony between the Imagination and the Judgment";
+and to these final censorial warnings:--"_Evil Communications corrupt good
+Manners_ is a quotation of St Paul from Menander. EVIL BOOKS CORRUPT AT
+ONCE BOTH OUR MANNERS AND OUR TASTE." Four days after this learned
+'lucubration' the voice of the warm-hearted magistrate speaks in a
+reminder of the prevailing abject misery of the London poor who "in the
+most miserable lingering Manner do daily perish for Want in this
+Metropolis." And in almost the next number his Honour gives his readers
+letters from the fair _Cordelia_, from _Sarah Scandal_, and from other
+correspondents, of a wit pleasant enough to drive London's poverty far
+from their minds. Two days after attending to these ladies, the _Censor_
+takes up his keenest weapons in an attack on that "detestable vice of
+slander" by which is taken away the "_immediate Jewel of a Man's Soul_,"
+his good name; a crime comparable to that of murder. Here we have _Sir
+Alexander_ speaking with the same voice as did the playwright and
+journalist of ten years previously, when he declared, in his
+_Miscellanies_, that to stab a man's character 'in the dark' is no less an
+offence than to stab his flesh in the same treacherous manner. Indeed,
+throughout these last columns of weekly satire, wit, and learning,
+Fielding remains true to the constant tenor of his genius. He exposes the
+miser, the seducer of innocence, the self-seeker, the place-hunter, the
+degraded vendor of moral poison, the 'charitable' hypocrite, with the same
+fierce moral energy as that with which, when but a lad of one and twenty,
+he first assailed the vices of the society in which his own lot was cast.
+His unconquerable energy, an energy that neither sickness nor distress
+could abate, still assaults that "cursed Maxim ... that Everybody's
+business is Nobody's." And his wit has lost none of its point when
+thrusting at the lesser follies of the day; at the fair Clara's devotion
+to her pet monkey; at the insolence of the Town Beau at the playhouse; at
+the arrogance of carters in the streets; at the vagaries of fashion
+according to which Belinda graces the theatre with yards of ruff one day,
+and on the next discards that covering so entirely that the snowy scene in
+the boxes "becomes extremely delightful to the eyes of every Beholder."
+
+It is quite impossible to convey, within the limits of a few pages, all
+that _Sir Alexander_ tells us of what he sees and hears, as the
+tragi-comedy of life passes before his Bow Street windows. For Fielding
+possessed in the highest degree the art of hearing, to use his own
+analysis, not with the ear only (an organ shared by man with "other
+Animals") but also with the head, and with the heart; just as his eye
+could penetrate beneath the velvet coat of the prosperous scoundrel, the
+reputation of the illiterate author, or the sorry rags of some honest hero
+of the gutter. And his _Covent Garden Journal_ is, in truth, his journal
+of eleven months of a life into the forty odd years of which were
+compressed both the insight of genius, and the activities of twenty
+average men. Such a record cannot be sifted into a summary. The
+acknowledged motive of this last of Fielding's newspapers is, however,
+concise enough; and does equal honour to his patriotism and his humanity.
+The age, as it seemed to him, was an age of public degradation. Religion
+was vanishing from the life of the people; politics were a petty question
+of party jealousy; literary taste was falling to the level of alehouse wit
+and backstairs scandal; the youth of the nation were completing their
+education, when fifteen or sixteen years old, by a course of the Town, and
+then qualifying for a graduate's degree in like knowledge, by a foreign
+tour; the 'mob' was gaining a dangerous excess of power; the leaders of
+society were past masters and mistresses of vice and folly; the poor in
+the streets were sunk in misery, or brutalised into reckless crime. This
+was the England that _Mr Censor_ saw from his house in Bow Street; this
+was the England which he set out to purify; and the means which he chose
+were his own familiar weapons of satire and ridicule. Of these, ridicule,
+he declares, when his _Journal_ was but four weeks old, "is commonly a
+stronger and better method of attacking Vice than the severer kind of
+Satire." In accordance with which view, _General Sir Alexander_ is
+represented, in a mock historic forecast, as having, in the space of
+twelve months, entirely cleansed his country from the evils afflicting it,
+by means of a "certain Weapon called a Ridicule." These evils moreover
+Fielding held to be most readily combated by assailing "those base and
+scandalous Writings which the Press hath lately poured in such a torrent
+upon us that the Name of an Author is in the ears of all good Men become
+almost an infamous appelation"; and, accordingly, the first number of his
+new paper discloses _Sir Alexander_ in full crusade against these
+Grub-Street writers. But that he soon perceived the quixotic impolicy of
+such a campaign, appears very clearly, as early as the fifth number of the
+_Journal_:--"when Hercules undertook to cleanse the Stables of Augeas (a
+Work not much unlike my present Undertaking) should any little clod of
+Dirt more filthy perhaps than all the rest have chanced to bedawb him, how
+unworthy his Spirit would it have been to have polluted his Hands, by
+seizing the dirty clod, and crumbling it to Pieces. He should have known
+that such Accidents were incident to such an Undertaking: which though
+both a useful and heroic office, was yet none of the cleanliest; since no
+Man, I believe, ever removed great quantities of Dirt from any Place
+without finding some of it sticking to his skirts." Such dirty clods were
+undoubtedly thrown by nameless antagonists, as unworthy of Fielding's
+steel as was one whose name has come down to us, the despicable Dr John
+Hill, who once suffered a public caning at Ranelagh; and one clod, "more
+filthy perhaps than all the rest," soiled the hands of Smollett. [2] But
+the dirt which was very freely flung on to our eighteenth-century Hercules
+has, by now, fallen back, with great justice, on to the heads of his
+abusers. Fielding has placed on record, in the _Journal_, his conviction
+that the man who reads the works of the five heroic satirists, Lucian,
+Cervantes, Swift, Moliere and Shakespeare, "must either have a very bad
+Head, or a very bad Heart, if he doth not become both a Wiser and a better
+Man." To-day, 'party and prejudice' having subsided, we are ready to say
+the same of the readers of the _Covent Garden Journal_; perceiving that,
+if _Mr Censor_, like his five great forerunners, chose to send his satire
+"laughing into the World," it was that he might better effect the
+'glorious Purpose' announced in the fifth number of his paper: "However
+vain or romantic the Attempt may seem, I am sanguine enough to aim at
+serving the noble Interests of Religion, Virtue, and good Sense, by these
+my Lucubrations."
+
+To most men the production, twice a week, of a newspaper so wide in scope
+as the _Covent Garden Journal_ (for its columns included the news of the
+day, as well as the manifold 'censorial' energies of _Sir Alexander_)
+would have been occupation enough; especially with a "constitution now
+greatly impaired and enfeebled," and when "labouring under attacks of the
+gout, which were, of course, severer than ever."
+
+But there is no hint of either editorial or valetudinarian seclusion in
+the fragmentary glimpses obtainable of Mr Justice Fielding during these
+eleven months of 1752. Thus, by an advertisement recurring throughout the
+_Journal_, he expressly invites to his house in Bow Street, "All Persons,
+who shall for the Future suffer by Robbers Burglars &c.," that they may
+bring him "the best Description they can of such Robbers, &c., with the
+Time, and Place, and Circumstances of the Fact"; and that this invitation
+was likely to bring half London within his doors appears from Fielding's
+own description of the condition of the capital at the time. "There is not
+a street," he declares, speaking of Westminster, "which doth not swarm all
+day with beggars, and all night with thieves. Stop your coach at what shop
+you will, however expeditious the tradesman is to attend you, a beggar is
+commonly beforehand with him; and if you should directly face his door the
+tradesman must often turn his head while you are talking to him, or the
+same beggar, or some other thief at hand will pay a visit to his shop!"
+And nothing could prove more conclusively the arduousness of Fielding's
+work as a magistrate than the record of the last ten days of January,
+1752. On the night of the 17th a peculiarly brutal murder had been
+perpetrated on a poor higgler in Essex; and the _Journal_ for January 28,
+tells us how Fielding "spent near eight hours," examining, separately,
+suspected persons, "at the desire of several gentlemen of Fortune in the
+County of Essex"; having on the previous Friday and Saturday, been engaged
+"above Twenty hours in taking Depositions concerning this Fact." Then, on
+the day after the arrival of the murder suspects, we find two of the
+Shoreditch constables bringing no fewer than ten "idle lewd and
+disorderly" men and women before the Justice; a woman was charged by a
+diamond seller on suspicion of feloniously receiving "three Brilliant
+Diamonds"; Mr Welch, the notable High Constable of Holborn, brought
+seventeen "idle and lewd Persons" whom he had apprehended the night
+before; and, to complete this single day's work, an Italian was brought
+in, "all over covered with [the] Blood" of a brother Italian, whose head
+he had almost cut off. Twenty-nine cases on one day, and these in the
+midst of eight hour examinations concerning a murder, were surely work
+enough to satisfy even Fielding's energies. And, as another entry in his
+_Journal_ mentions the examination of a suspected thief "very late at
+Night," there seems to have been no hour out of the twenty-four in which
+the great novelist did not hold himself at the service of the public.
+
+Meanwhile, the criminal licence of the streets was now receiving
+Ministerial attention. The King's Speech, delivered at the opening of
+Parliament in the previous November, had contained a passage which might
+have been inspired by Fielding himself: "I cannot conclude," said His
+Majesty, "without recommending to you in the most earnest manner, to
+consider seriously of some effectual provisions to suppress those
+audacious crimes of Robbery and Violence which are now become so
+frequent...and which have proceeded in great Measure from that profligate
+Spirit of Irreligion, Idleness, Gaming, and Extravagance, which has of
+late extended itself in an uncommon degree, to the Dishonour of the
+Nation, and to the great Offence and Prejudice of the sober and
+industrious Part of the People." Six weeks later the first number of the
+_Journal_, makes comment on the need of fresh legislation to suppress
+drunkenness; and on the twenty first of the month _Sir Alexander_
+announces, with something of special information in his tone, that the
+immediate suppression of crimes of violence "we can with Pleasure assure
+the Public is at present the chief attention of Parliament."
+
+It must have been with something of the pleasure which he so earnestly
+desires in one of the last utterances of his pen--"the pleasure of
+thinking that, in the decline of my health and life, I have conferred a
+great and lasting Benefit on my Country,"--that Fielding saw the royal
+assent given, in the following March, to an Act for the "_better
+preventing Thefts and Robberies and for regulating Places of Public
+Entertainment, and punishing Persons keeping disorderly Houses_."
+[3] For this Act is directed to the suppression of four of the abuses so
+strongly denounced, twelve months previously, in his own _Enquiry_; and
+when we recall the fact that he had already submitted, to the Lord
+Chancellor, draft legislation for the suppression of robberies, it is at
+least a plausible surmise that here we have a memorial of Henry Fielding's
+patriotic energy, preserved on the pages of the Statute Book itself.
+[4] The four points so specially urged in the _Enquiry_, and here made
+law, are the suppression of the "multitude of places of Entertainment" for
+the working classes; the better suppression of Gaming Houses; the
+punishment of the scandalous advertisements offering rewards 'and no
+questions asked' for stolen goods; and the payment of certain prosecutors
+for their expenses in time and trouble, when a conviction had been
+obtained.
+
+In this same month of March another Act, which closely concerned
+Fielding's official work, received the royal assent. This was an Act "for
+better preventing the horrid Crime of Murder." [5] The pressing need of
+such a measure had been already urged in the _Covent Garden journal_. In
+February the _Journal_ declares that _"More shocking Murders have been
+committed within the last Year, than for many Years before. To what can
+this be so justly imputed as to the manifest decline of Religion among the
+lower People. A matter, which even, in a Civil Sense, demands the
+attention of the Government."_ And Mr Censor returns to the subject on
+March 3: _"More Murders and horrid Barbarities have been committed within
+the last twelvemonth, than during many preceding years. This as we have
+before observed, is principally to be attributed to the Declension of
+Religion among the Common People."_ By the end of the month the
+above-named Act had received the royal assent; and the first clause
+thereof again yielded Fielding the satisfaction of seeing a measure which
+he had warmly recommended in his Enquiry now placed on the Statute Book,
+namely the clause that the execution of the criminal be made immediate on
+his conviction. This Act, moreover, provides for the abatement of another
+scandal exposed by Fielding many years previously, in the pages of
+Jonathan Wild, that of the excessive supply of drink allowed to condemned
+prisoners.
+
+In the following month Fielding carried out a scheme, conceived he tells
+us "some time since," for combating this prevalence of murder. This was
+his shilling pamphlet, published about April 14, entitled "Examples of the
+Interposition of Providence in the _Detection_ and _Punishment_ of MURDER.
+Containing above thirty cases, in which this dreadful crime hath been
+brought to light in the most extraordinary and miraculous manner." The
+advertisement describes the _Examples_ as _"very proper to be given to all
+the inferior Kind of People; and particularly to the Youth of both sexes,
+whose natural Love of Stories will lead them to read with Attention what
+cannot fail of Infusing in to their tender Minds an early Dread and
+Abhorrence of staining their Hands with the Blood of their
+Fellow-creatures"_ Low as was the price, a "large allowance" was made by
+Andrew Millar to those who bought any quantity; and Fielding distributed
+the little volume freely in Court.
+
+The thirty-three _Examples_ are introduced and concluded by Fielding's own
+denunciation of this, "the blackest sin, which can contaminate the hands,
+or pollute the soul of man." And from these pages we may learn his own
+solemnly declared belief in a peculiarly "immediate interposition of the
+Divine providence" in the detection of this crime; and also his faith in
+"the fearful and tremendous sentence of eternal punishment" as that
+divinely allotted to the murderer. He warns the murderer, moreover, that
+by hurrying a fellow-creature to a sudden and unprepared death he may be
+guilty of destroying not only his victim's body, but also his soul. And it
+may be questioned whether Fielding ever put his unrivalled mastery of
+style to a nobler intention than in the closing words of this pamphlet,
+words designed to be read by the lowest of the people: "Great courage may,
+perhaps, bear up a bad mind (for it is sometimes the property of such)
+against the most severe sentence which can be pronounced by the mouth of a
+human judge; but where is the fortitude which can look an offended
+Almighty in the face? Who can bear the dreadful thought of being
+confronted with the spirit of one whom we have murdered, in the presence
+of all the Host of Heaven, and to have justice demanded against our guilty
+soul, before that most awful judgement-seat, where there is infinite
+justice as well as infinite power?"
+
+The dedication of this pamphlet, dated Bow Street, April 8, 1752, is
+addressed to Dr Madox, Bishop of Worcester, and in it Fielding recalls a
+conversation he had some time previously had with that prelate, in which
+he had mentioned the plan of such a book, and received immediate
+encouragement from his lordship. A further appreciation of the _Examples_
+appears in a paragraph in the _Journal_ for May 5: "Last week a certain
+Colonel of the Army bought a large number of the book called _Examples of
+the Interposition of Providence in the Detection and Punishment of
+Murder_, in Order to distribute them amongst the private soldiers of his
+Regiment. An Example well worthy of Imitation!"
+
+Fielding never allows us to forget for any length of time one or another
+of his contrasting activities, however absorbed he may seem to be in some
+one field of action. Now, when he is plunged in a hand-to-hand struggle
+with the criminal conditions of London, when he is admonishing the gayer
+end of the Town with his weekly censorial satire and ridicule, and while
+he is watching the enactment of new legislation for which he had so
+strenously pleaded,--he suddenly reappears in his earlier rôle of
+classical scholar. On June 17, the columns of the _Journal_ advertise
+proposals for "A New Translation into English of the Works of LUCIAN. From
+the original Greek. With Notes, Historical, Critical and Explanatory. By
+Henry Fielding Esquire; and the Rev. Mr William Young." To which notice
+there is added, a few days later, the assurance that "Everything which
+hath the least Tendency to the Indecent will be omitted in this
+Translation." The most delightful, perhaps, of all the leading articles in
+the _Covent Garden Journal_ is that in which the merits of this "Father of
+True Humour" are delineated. The facetious wit, the "attic Elegance of
+Diction," the poignant satire, the virtues and abilities of Lucian are
+here so persuasively presented that scarce a reader but surely would
+hasten, as he laid his paper down, to Mr Fielding's or Mr Young's house,
+or to Millar in the Strand or Dodsley in Pall Mall, where orders (with a
+guinea to be paid on booking the same) were received. And this essay is
+also memorable for the express declaration therein contained that Fielding
+had "formed his stile" upon that of Lucian; and, again, as betraying a
+note of disappointment, an acknowledgment that worldly fortune had indeed
+treated him somewhat harshly, such as Fielding's sanguine courage very
+seldom permits him to utter. The concluding words, written on his own
+behalf and on that of Mr Young, are words of gentle protest to the public
+for their lack of support to "two gentlemen who have hitherto in their
+several capacities endeavoured to be serviceable to them without deriving
+any great Emolument to themselves from their Labours." And when he tells
+us how that 'glory of human Nature, Marcus Aurelius' employed Lucian "in a
+very considerable Post in the Government," since that great emperor "did
+not, it seems, think, that a Man of Humour was below his Notice or unfit
+for Business of the gravest Kind," we cannot but remember that the
+business on which the Government of George II. thought fit to employ the
+inimitable genius of Henry Fielding was that of a Bow Street magistrate.
+
+The onerous drudgery of that business, or else lack of response from a
+public deaf to its own interests, seems to have brought to nothing the
+project of this translation; and so English literature is the poorer for
+the loss of the works of the 'Father of Humour' translated by the
+incomparable pen of the 'Father of the English Novel.'[6]
+
+Four months after the publication of the proposals for _Lucian_, Fielding
+took formal leave of the readers of his _Covent Garden Journal_, telling
+them that he no longer had "Inclination or Leisure," to carry on the
+paper. His brief farewell words contain an assurance very like that
+solemnly made, we may remember, five years before the publication of _Tom
+Jones_. At present, he declares, he has "No intention to hold any further
+correspondence with the gayer Muses"; just as eight years before he had
+announced that henceforth the 'infamous' Nine should have none of his
+company. To this declaration is added a protest against the injustice of
+attributing abuse to a writer who "never yet was, nor ever shall be the
+author of any, unless to Persons who are or ought to be infamous." From
+the tenor of this parting speech it is clear that Fielding was, at the
+time, feeling keenly the imputation, flung by some of his contemporaries,
+of producing 'scandalous Writings'; unmindful for the moment of his own
+calmer and wiser utterance, when he declared that men who engage in an
+heroic attempt to cleanse their age will undoubtedly find some of the dirt
+thereof sticking to their coats. "As he disdained all littleness of
+spirit, where ever he met with it in his dealings with the world, his
+indignation was apt to rise," says his contemporary Murphy; and we know
+from earlier protests how cruelly Fielding suffered from the attribution
+to his pen of writings utterly alien to his character. "... really," he
+cries, in the last words of the _Journal_, "it is hard to hear that
+scandalous Writings have been charged on me for that very Reason which
+ought to have proved the Contrary namely because they have been
+Scandalous."
+
+The year 1752 closes with the birth of another daughter, born presumably
+in the house in Bow Street, as her baptism under the name of Louisa is
+entered in the registers of St Paul's, Covent Garden.
+
+The curtain that, in Fielding's case, hangs so closely over all the
+pleasant intimate details of life, lifts once or twice during this year of
+incessant activity, and discloses just those warmhearted acts of kindness
+that help us to think of Harry Fielding with an affection almost as warm
+and personal as that we keep for Dick Steele or Oliver Goldsmith.
+Fielding, we know, had "no other use for money" than to help those even
+less fortunate than himself; and several incidents of this year show how
+he turned his opportunities, both as journalist and magistrate, to like
+generous uses. Thus there is the story of how, one day in March, "A poor
+girl who had come from Wapping to see the new entertainment at Covent
+Garden Theatre had her pocket cut off in the crowd before the doors were
+opened. Tho' she knew not the Pickpocket she came immediately to lay her
+complaint before the Justice and with many tears lamented not the loss of
+her Money, but of her Entertainment. At last, having obtained a sufficient
+Passport to the Gallery she departed with great satisfaction, and
+contented with the loss of fourteen shillings, though she declared she had
+not much more in the world." [7] Another day, or night rather, it is a
+poor troup of amateur players who had good reason to be grateful to the
+kindly Justice:--"last Monday night an Information was given to Henry
+Fielding Esquire: that a set of Barber's apprentices, Journeymen
+Staymakers, Maidservants &c. had taken a large room at the Black House in
+the Strand, to act the Tragedy of the Orphan; the Price of Admittance One
+shilling. About eight o'clock the said Justice issued his Warrant,
+directed to Mr Welch, High Constable, who apprehended the said Actors and
+brought them before the said Justice, who out of compassion to their Youth
+only bound them over to their good behaviour. They were all conducted
+through the streets in their Tragedy Dresses, to the no small diversion of
+the Populace." [8] And in May both the ample energies and scanty purse of
+Justice Fielding were occupied in collecting a subscription for a young
+baker and his wife and child, who, by a disastrous fire, were suddenly
+plunged into destitution. For these poor people Fielding obtained no less
+a sum than £57, within a fortnight of his announcement of their distress
+in the columns of the _Journal_. The list of subscribers, published on May
+16, shows a guinea against his own name, and a like sum, it may be noted,
+from the wealthy Lyttelton.
+
+The splendour of Fielding's genius has shone, as Gibbon foretold,
+throughout the world. His indefatigable labours in cleansing England from
+some of the evils that then oppressed her deserve to be remembered, if not
+by all the world, at least by the citizens of that country which, in the
+decline of 'health and life,' he yet strove so eagerly to benefit.
+
+[1] A dramatic satire, advertised in March at Covent Garden Theatre and
+written (as stated by Dibdin, _History of the Stage_. Vol. v. p. 156), by
+the actor Macklin, bore for sub-title _Pasquin turned Drawcansir, Censor
+of Great Britain_. The name, and the further details of the advertisement,
+recall Fielding's early success with his political _Pasquin_: but all
+further trace of this 'Satire' seems lost. See Appendix C.
+
+[2] _A faithful Narrative..._. By Drawcansir.... Alexander. 1752.
+
+[3] 25. G II. cap 36.
+
+[4] All trace seems now lost of the actual part Fielding may have taken in
+the drafting of this Act.
+
+[5] 25. G. II. c. 37.
+
+[6] It would seem, from the following advertisement, that Fielding's
+inexhaustible pen published, about this time, a sixpenny pamphlet on 'a
+late Act of Parliament'; but all trace of it has been lost:--"A speech
+made in the Censorial Court of Alexander Drawcansir, Monday, 6th June,
+1752, concerning a late Act of Parliament. Printed for the Author. Price
+6d." _The General Advertiser_, June 27, 1752.
+
+[7] The _General Advertiser_ March 4. 1752.
+
+[8] The _General Advertiser_, April 15, 1752.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+POOR LAW REFORM
+
+  "... surely there is some Praise due to the bare Design of doing a
+  Service to the Public."--Dedication of the _Enquiry_.
+
+
+It is evident that the beginning of the year 1753 found Fielding fully
+conscious that now he could only anticipate a 'short remainder of life.'
+But neither that consciousness, nor the increasing burden of ill-health,
+availed to dull the energies of these last years. Scarcely had that
+indomitable knight, General Sir Alexander Drawcansir retired from the
+active public service of conducting the _Covent Garden Journal_ when his
+creator reappeared with an astonishingly comprehensive and detailed plan
+of poor-law reform; a plan adapted to the whole kingdom, and which
+according to a legal comment involved "nothing less than the repeal of the
+Act of Elizabeth and an entire reconstruction of the Poor Laws." [1]
+Poor-law reform was at this time occupying the attention of the
+nation, and apparently also of the legislature. And we know, from the
+_Enquiry into the Increase of Robberies_, that the question of lessening
+both the sufferings and the criminality of the poor had for years occupied
+Fielding's warm heart and active intellect. But the extent to which he
+devoted these last months of his life to the cause of the poorest and most
+degraded deserves more than a passing recognition. He tells us, in the
+_Introduction_ to the pamphlet embodying his great scheme, that he has
+applied himself long and constantly to this subject; that he has "read
+over and considered all the Laws, in anywise relating to the Poor, with
+the utmost Care and Attention," in the execution of which, moreover, he
+has been for "many Years very particularly concerned"; and that in
+addition to this exhaustive study of the laws themselves, he has added "a
+careful Perusal of everything which I could find that hath been written on
+this Subject, from the Original Institution in the 43d. of _Elizabeth_ to
+this Day." Such was the laborious preparation, extending presumably over
+many months, which the author of _Tom Jones_, and the first wit of his
+day, devoted to solving this vast problem of social reform.
+
+Fielding was far too well skilled in the art of effective construction to
+present the public with undigested note-books from his voluminous reading.
+His scheme, based on all the laws, and upon all the comments on all the
+laws, regarding the poor, enacted and made for two hundred years, is a
+marvel of conciseness and practical detail; and, together with an
+_Introduction_ and an _Epilogue_, does but occupy the ninety pages of a
+two-shilling pamphlet.
+
+The pamphlet was published at the end of January 1753, with the title _A
+Proposal for making an effectual Provision for the Poor, for amending
+their Morals, and for rendering them useful Members of the Society. To
+which is added a Plan of the Buildings proposed, with proper
+Elevations ... By Henry Fielding, Esq.; Barrister-at-Law, and one of His
+Majesty's Justices of the Peace for the County of Middlesex_. The
+dedication, dated January 19, is to Henry Pelham, then Chancellor of the
+Exchequer, and from it we learn that Fielding had personally mentioned his
+scheme to this Minister. The Introduction presents an eloquent appeal for
+some effectual remedy for the intolerably diseased state of the body
+politic as regarded the distresses and vices of the poor, their unseen
+sufferings no less than their frequent misdeeds. Fielding protests against
+the popular ignorance of these sufferings in words that might have been
+spoken by some pleader for the East End 'Settlements' of to-day. "If we
+were," he declares, "to make a Progress through the Outskirts of this
+Town, and look into the Habitations of the Poor, we should there behold
+such Pictures of human Misery as must move the Compassion of every Heart
+that deserves the Name of human. What indeed must be his Composition who
+could see whole Families in Want of every Necessary of Life, oppressed
+with Hunger, Cold, Nakedness, and Filth, and with Diseases, the certain
+Consequence of all these; what, I say, must be his Composition, who could
+look into such a Scene as this, and be affected only in his Nostrils?" As
+an instance of Fielding's personal knowledge of the London slums of his
+day, a reference made by Mr Saunders Welch to their joint work is of
+interest. Writing in the same year, 1753, he mentions assisting "Mr Henry
+Fielding in taking from under one roof upwards of seventy lodgers of both
+sexes." [2]
+
+To this little known misery of the poor, who "starve and freeze and rot
+among themselves," was added the problem of streets swarming with beggars
+during the day, and with thieves at night. And the nation groaned under
+yet a third burden, that of the heavy taxes levied for the poor, by which
+says Fielding "as woeful experience hath taught us, neither the poor
+themselves nor the public are relieved." To attack such a three-headed
+monster as this was an adventure better fitted, it might seem, for that
+club which "Captain Hercules Vinegar" had wielded thirteen years before,
+when in the full tide of his strength, than for the pen of a man in
+shattered health, and already serving the public in the daily labours of a
+principal magistrate. But nothing could restrain the ardour of Fielding's
+spirit, how frail so ever had become its containing 'crust of clay,' when
+great abuses and great misery made their call on his powers; or
+countervail against the hope, with which the _Introduction_ to his plan
+concludes. If that plan fails, he shall indeed, he declares have "lost
+much Time, and misemployed much Pains; and what is above all, shall miss
+the Pleasure of thinking that in the Decline of my Health and Life, I have
+conferred a great and lasting Benefit on my Country."
+
+The _Plan_ is that of the erection of a vast combined county workhouse,
+prison, and infirmary; where the unemployed should find, not only work but
+_skilled instruction_, the poor relief, and the sick a hospital; where
+discipline and good order should be stringently enforced; and where two
+chaplains should labour at that 'correction and amendment' of the mind
+which "in real truth religion is alone capable of effectually executing."
+The entire scheme is worked out with extraordinary detail, in fifty-nine
+clauses; and is preceded by an elaborate architectural plan of the
+proposed institution (which was to house no less than five thousand six
+hundred persons) with its workshops, its men's quarters rigorously divided
+from those for the women, its recreation ground, its provision shops, its
+cells for the refractory and for prisoners, and its whipping post. And the
+pamphlet concludes by lengthy arguments in favour of the various clauses;
+and by a personal protest concerning the disinterestedness of proposals
+which "some few enemies" might assert to show signs of a design for
+private profit. Fielding touchingly disavows any thought of occupying,
+officially, the great house raised by his imagination. To a man in his
+state of health such a project would, he says, be to fly in the face of
+the advice of his 'Master,' Horace; "it would be indeed _struere dotnos
+immemor sepulchri_." And, he adds, those who know him will hardly be so
+deceived "by that Chearfulness which was always natural to me; and which,
+I thank God, my Conscience doth not reprove me for, to imagine that I am
+not sensible of my declining Constitution." The concluding words of this,
+Fielding's last legislative effort, betray a like calm assurance that his
+day's work was drawing to its close. He has now, he tells us, "no farther
+Design than to pass my short Remainder of Life in some Degree of Ease, and
+barely to preserve my Family from being the Objects of any such Laws as I
+have here proposed."
+
+It is wholly in keeping with the genius of Henry Fielding that almost the
+last endeavour of his intellect should have been devoted to relieving the
+wretchedness and lessening the vices of the poorest and most miserable of
+his countrymen. The _Proposal for ... the Poor_ is written by the hand of
+the accomplished lawyer and indefatigable magistrate; but the energy that
+accomplished so great a labour, in spite of broken health and among a
+thousand interruptions, sprang from the heart which had already
+immortalised the ragged postilion of _Joseph Andrews_ and the starving
+highwayman of _Tom Jones_.
+
+This last January but one of Fielding's life was not only occupied by the
+publication of proposals for an 'entire reconstruction of the Poor Laws.'
+In 1753 a London magistrate, or at least Mr Justice Fielding, was at the
+service of the public on Sunday no less than during the week; and on the
+first Sunday of the New Year the Bow Street room echoed to threats that
+read strangely enough when we think of the unknown petty thief,
+threatening sudden death to 'our immortal Fielding.' "Yesterday," says the
+_General Advertiser_ for Monday, January 8, "John Simpson and James Ellys
+were commited to Newgate by Henry Fielding Esq., for shop-lifting." The
+charge was one of stealing five silk handkerchiefs, and when the two men
+"were brought before the Justice they behaved in a very impudent saucy
+manner, and one of them said hewished he had a Pistol about him, he would
+blow the Justice's Brains out; upon which a Party of the Guards was sent
+for who conducted them safe to Newgate." The Bow Street house, moreover,
+must have been full not only of prisoners and witnesses brought before the
+Justice, but also of victims of all manner of theft. For two comprehensive
+notices appear in the _Advertiser_ for this month, repeating the previous
+invitation accorded to such sufferers in the _Covent Garden Journal_. On
+January 1, all persons cognizant of any burglary robbery or theft are
+desired to communicate immediately with Mr Brogden, clerk to Justice
+Fielding, "at his office at the said Justice's in Bow Street." And again,
+towards the end of the month, "All Persons that have been robbed on the
+Highway in the County of Middlesex within this three months last past, are
+desired to apply to Mr Brogden, at Mr Justice Fielding's in Bow Street,
+Covent Garden." And here, too, came the solicitors that sought counsel's
+opinion on their client's behalf, with their fees; the magistrate of this
+period being under no disability in regard to his private practice.
+
+It was to his reputation as an advising barrister, and perhaps a little to
+the kindness of heart that must have been familiar to all who knew him,
+that Fielding owed his connection with that extraordinary popular
+excitement of 1753, the mysterious case of the servant girl Elizabeth
+Canning. On the 29th of January 'Betty Canning' presented herself, after a
+month's disappearance, at the door of her mother's house in London, in a
+deplorable state of weakness and distress, and declared that she had been
+kidnapped by two men on New Year's night, taken to a house on the Hertford
+road, and there confined by an old gipsy woman for twenty-eight days, in a
+hay loft, with a pitcher of water and a few pieces of bread for sole
+sustenance. On the twenty ninth day, according to her own account, she
+escaped through a window and made her way back to her home. Her
+neighbours, fired with pity for her sufferings, subscribed means for a
+prosecution; and, says Fielding, in the pamphlet which he published two
+months after these events, "Mr. _Salt_, the Attorney who hath been
+employed in this Cause, ... upon this Occasion, as he hath done upon many
+others, ... fixed upon me as the Council to be advised with." Then we have
+the following little domestic sketch, the only picture left to us of Henry
+Fielding as a practising barrister: "Accordingly, upon the _6th of
+February_, as I was sitting in my Room, Counsellor _Maden_ being then
+with me, my Clerk delivered me a Case, which was thus, as I remember,
+indorsed at the Top, The Case of Elizabeth Canning _for_ Mr Fielding's
+_opinion_, and at the Bottom, _Salt_, Solr. Upon the Receipt of this Case,
+with my Fee, I bid my Clerk give my Service to Mr. _Salt_ and tell him,
+that I would take the Case with me into the Country, whither I intended to
+go the next Day, and desired he would call for it the _Friday_ Morning
+afterwards; after which, without looking into it, I delivered it to my
+Wife, who was then drinking Tea with us, and who laid it by."
+
+Mr Brogden however presently returned upstairs, bringing the solicitor
+with him, who earnestly desired his counsel not only to read the case at
+once but also to undertake in his capacity of magistrate an examination of
+the injured girl, and of a supposed confederate of the gipsy. This task
+Fielding at first declined, principally on the ground that he had been
+"almost fatigued to death with several tedious examinations" at that time,
+and had intended to refresh himself with a day or two's interval in the
+country, where he had not been "unless on a Sunday, for a long time." The
+persuasions of the solicitor, curiosity as to the extrordinary nature of
+the case, and "a great compassion for the dreadful condition of the girl,"
+however induced him to yield; and the next day the eighteen year old
+heroine of a story that was soon to set all London quarrelling, was
+brought in a chair to Bow Street, and then led upstairs, supported by two
+friends, into the presence of the Justice. An issue of warrants followed
+upon her examination, and a further examination of a suspected confederate
+of the gipsy; the gipsy herself and her chief abettor having already been
+arrested by another magistrate. Some days later, Fielding being then out
+of town, "several noble Lords" sent to his house, desiring to be present
+while he examined the gipsy woman; and the matter being arranged, "Lord
+Montfort," says Fielding, "together with several gentlemen of fashion came
+at the appointed time." The company being in the Justice's room, the
+prisoners and witnesses were brought up; and apparently some charge was
+afterwards brought against Fielding as to the manner of his examination,
+for he here takes occasion to declare, what all who knew him must have
+known to be the truth, "I can truly say, that my Memory doth not charge me
+with having ever insulted the lowest Wretch that hath been brought before
+me." Public opinion became hotly divided as to whether Betty Canning had
+indeed suffered all she declared at the hands of the gipsy, Mary Squires,
+or had maliciously endeavoured to perjure away the old woman's life. The
+Lord Mayor, Sir Crisp Gascoyne, and Fielding's old antagonist the
+despicable Dr Hill ardently supported the gipsy; Fielding, in the pamphlet
+already quoted, and which was published in March, as warmly espoused the
+cause of the maid servant whom he calls "a poor, honest, innocent, simple
+Girl, and the most unhappy and most injured of all human Beings." The
+excitement of the Town over this melodramatic mystery is reflected in the
+fact that a second edition of Fielding's pamphlet (entitled _A clear state
+of the Case of Elizabeth Canning_) was advertised within a few days of its
+first publication. [3] And, also, in the appearance of the sixpenny print,
+here for the first time reproduced, in which occurs the only
+representation of Henry Fielding known to have been drawn during his life
+time. This print, which bears the inscription "drawn from the life by the
+Right Honourable the Lady Fa--y K--w," shows Fielding's tall figure, his
+legs bandaged for gout, the sword of Justice in his hand and her scales
+hanging out of his pocket, speaking on behalf of his trembling client
+Elizabeth Canning; while opposed to him are my Lord Mayor, the notorious
+Dr Hill, and the old gipsy. The background is adorned with pictures of the
+newly built Mansion House, and of the College of Surgeons. [4]
+
+But for the glimpses it affords us of Fielding as a barrister, and for his
+characteristic championship of what he was convinced was the cause of
+innocence oppressed, this once famous case might have been left
+undisturbed in the dust of the _State Trials_, had it not incidentally
+been the means of preserving two of the extremely rare letters of the
+novelist. These letters, [5] hitherto unpublished, are addressed by
+Fielding to the Duke of Newcastle, and were both written in the month
+following the publication of his pamphlet. The fact that both letters are
+dated from Ealing shows that his connection with what was then a pleasant
+country village was earlier than has been supposed; and the acute
+suggestions in the second letter seem to indicate a suspicion of some of
+Betty Canning's supporters, if his conviction in the girl's own innocence
+still remained unshaken.
+
+
+"My Lord Duke
+
+"I received an order from my Lord Chancellor immediately after the
+breaking up of the Council to lay before your Grace all the Affidavits I
+had taken since the Gipsey's Trial which related to that Affair. I then
+told the Messenger that I had taken none, as indeed the fact is the
+Affidavits of which I gave my Lord Chancellor an Abstract having been all
+sworn before Justices of the Peace in the Neighbourhood of Endfield, and
+remain I believe in the Possession of an Attorney in the City.
+
+However in Consequence of the Commands with which your Grace was pleased
+to honour me yesterday, I sent my Clerk immediately to the Attorney to
+acquaint him with these Commands, which I doubt not he will instantly
+obey. This I did from my great Duty to your Grace for I have long had no
+Concern in this Affair, nor have I seen any of the Parties lately unless
+once when I was desired to send for the Girl (Canning) to my House that a
+great Number of Noblemen and Gentleman might see her and ask her what
+Questions they pleased. I am, with the highest Duty,
+
+"My Lord,
+"Your Graces most obedient
+"and most humble servant
+"Henry Ffielding.
+"Ealing. April 14, 1753
+"His Grace the
+"Duke of Newcastle."
+
+
+"My Lord Duke,
+
+"I am extremely concerned to see by a Letter which I have just received
+from Mr Jones by Command of your Grace that the Persons concerned for the
+Prosecution have not yet attended your Grace with the Affidavits in
+Canning's Affair. I do assure you upon my Honour that I sent to them the
+Moment I first received your Grace's Commands and having after three
+Messages prevailed with them to come to me I desired them to fetch the
+Affidavits that I might send them to your Grace being not able to wait
+upon you in Person. This they said they could not do, but would go to Mr
+Hume Campbell their Council, and prevail with him to attend your Grace
+with all their Affidavits many of which, I found were sworn after the Day
+mentioned in the order of Council. I told them I apprehended the latter
+could not be admitted, but insisted in the strongest terms on their
+laying the others immediately before your Grace, and they at last
+promised me they would, nor have I ever seen them since. I have now again
+ordered my Clerk to go to them to inform them of the last Commands I have
+received, but as I have no Compulsory Power over them I can not answer
+for their Behaviour, which indeed I have long disliked, and have
+therefore long ago declined giving them any Advice, nor would I unless in
+Obedience to your Grace have anything to say to a set of the most
+obstinate Fools I ever saw; and who seem to me rather to act from a
+Spleen against my Lord Mayor, than from any Motive of protecting
+Innocence, tho' that was certainly their Motive at first. In Truth, if I
+am not deceived, I Suspect they desire that the Gipsey should be
+pardoned, and then to convince the World that she was guilty in order to
+cast the greater Reflection on him who was principally instrumental in
+obtaining such Pardon. I conclude with assuring your Grace that I have
+acted in this Affair, as I shall on all Occasions with the most dutiful
+Regard to your Commands, and that if my Life had been at Stake, as many
+know, I could have done no more.
+
+"I am, with the highest Respect,
+"My Lord Duke
+"Y Grace's most obedient,
+"and most humble servant,
+"Henry Ffielding.
+"Ealing
+"April 27. 1753.
+"His Grace the Duke of Newcastle."
+
+The dates of these letters show Fielding to have been at Ealing in the
+early spring of this year; and thus afford some confirmation of Lysons'
+remark in his _Environs of London_, published forty years later that
+"Henry Fielding had a country house at Ealing where he resided the year
+before his death." [6] In May a connection with Hammersmith is indicated,
+in the burial there of his little daughter Louisa. The entry in the
+Hammersmith Registers is as follows: "May 10th. Louisa, d. of Henry
+Fielding Esqr."
+
+The nearer Fielding's life draws to its premature close, the greater his
+physical suffering, so much the more eager seems his desire to leave
+behind him some practical achievement. We have already seen and wondered
+at his gigantic scheme for poor-law reform, published in the beginning of
+this year of fast declining 'health and life.' Six months later came the
+commission in the execution of which the remains of that health and life
+were literally sacrificed in the effort to win some provision for his
+family, in the event of his own death. Early in August the distinguished
+Court surgeon John Ranby had persuaded him to go immediately to Bath. And
+he tells us, in that _Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon_, [7] from which we
+have, from his own lips, the details of these last months, "I accordingly
+writ that very night to Mrs Bowden, who, by the next post, informed me she
+had taken me a lodging for a month certain." At this moment, when
+preparing for his journey, and while "almost fatigued to death with
+several long examinations, relating to five different murders, all
+committed within the space of a week, by different gangs of street
+robbers," Fielding received what might indeed be called a fatal summons to
+wait on the Duke of Newcastle, at his house in Lincoln's Inn Fields, to
+consult on a means for "putting an immediate end to those murders and
+robberies which were every day committed in the streets." This visit cost
+him a severe cold; but, notwithstanding, he produced, in about four days,
+a scheme for the destruction of the "then reigning gangs" of robbers and
+cut-throats, and for the future protection of the public, which was
+promptly accepted, and the execution of which was confided into Fielding's
+hands. "I had delayed my Bath-journey for some time," he proceeds,
+"contrary to the repeated advice of my physical acquaintance, and to the
+ardent desire of my warmest friends, tho' my distemper was now turned to a
+deep jaundice; in which case the Bath-waters are generally reputed to be
+almost infallible. But I had the most eager desire of demolishing this
+gang of villains and cut-throats." After some weeks the requisite funds
+were placed at Fielding's disposal; and so successful were his methods,
+that within a few days, the whole gang was dispersed, some in custody,
+others in flight. His health was by this time "reduced to the last
+extremity"; but still, he tells us, he continued to act "with the utmost
+vigour against these villains." And, amid all his 'fatigues and
+distresses,' the satisfaction he so ardently desired came to him. During
+the "remaining part of the month of November and in all December," those
+darkest of months, not only was there no such thing as a murder, but not
+one street robbery was committed. When we recall the amazing condition of
+London at this time, when street robberies and murders were of almost
+daily occurrence, we realise the magnitude of this achievement on the part
+of a dying man. "Having thus fully accomplished my undertaking," Fielding
+continues, "I went into the country in a very weak and deplorable
+condition, with no fewer or less diseases than a jaundice, a dropsy, and
+an asthma, altogether uniting their forces in the destruction of a body so
+entirely emaciated, that it had lost all its muscular flesh." It was now
+too late to apply the Bath treatment; and even had it been desirable it
+was no longer possible, for the sick man's strength was so reduced that a
+ride of six miles fatigued him intolerably. The Bath lodgings, which
+Fielding, surely with his old invincible hopefulness, had hitherto kept
+were accordingly relinquished; and even his sanguine nature realised the
+desperate condition of his case. At this point in his narration he breaks
+off with a characteristically frank disclosure of the chief motive which
+had inspired him to the heroic exertions of these later months of 1753. At
+the beginning of the winter his private affairs it seems, "had but a
+gloomy aspect." The aspect of his own tenure of life we know. And hence to
+distress of body was added that keenest of all distresses of the mind, the
+despair of putting his family beyond the reach of necessity. It was gladly
+therefore that Fielding offered up the 'poor sacrifice' of his shattered
+health, in the hope of securing a pension for his family, in case his own
+death were hastened by these last labours for the public.
+
+If sickness was not allowed to hinder Fielding's energies for the benefit
+of the public, and for the future provision of his family, neither did he
+permit it to dull the activities of friendship. Early in December, when
+his illness must have been acute, he wrote the following hitherto
+unpublished letter to the Lord Chancellor, on behalf of his friend Mr
+Saunders Welch: [8]
+
+
+"My Lord,
+
+"As I hear that a new Commission of the Peace is soon to pass the Great
+Seal for Westm'r. give me Leave to recommend the name of Saunders Welch,
+as well as to the next Commission for Middx. Your Lordship will, I hope,
+do me the Honour of believing, I should not thus presume, unless I was
+well satisfied that the Merit of the Man would justifie my Presumption.
+For this besides a universal Good Character and the many eminent services
+he hath done the Public, I appeal in particular to Master Lane; and shall
+only add, as I am positive the Truth is, that his Place can be filled
+with no other more acceptable to all the Gentlemen in the Commission, and
+indeed to the Public in general. I am with the highest Duty and Respect,
+
+"My Lord,
+"Your Lordship's most obedient
+"and most humble servant,
+"Henry Ffielding."
+"Decr 6. 1753
+"To the Lord High Chancellor"
+
+[1] _Life of Henry Fielding_. Frederick Lawrence, p. 138.
+
+[2] Saunders Welch. _A Letter on the subject of Robberies, wrote in the
+year 1753_.
+
+[3] See the _Public Advertiser_ 1753 March 17, 20, 24 &c.
+
+[4] This unique contemporary print of Fielding may be seen in the British
+Museum, Print Room, _Social Satires_, No. 3213.
+
+[5] Record Office. _State Papers. Domestic_ G. II., 127, no. 24.
+
+[6] Lysons. _Environs of London_. 1795. Vol. ii. p. 229.
+
+[7] The quotations from the _Voyage to Lisbon_ are from the edition
+recently prepared by Mr Austin Dobson, for the 'World's Classics.'
+
+[8] This letter is now in the British Museum. The endorsement on the back
+is: "Dec. 6, 1753 from Mr Fielding recommending Mr. Saunders Welch to be
+in the Com. of ye Peace for Westmr and Middx."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+VOYAGE TO LISBON--DEATH
+
+    "satisfied in having finished my life, as I have probably lost it in
+     the service of my country."
+    _Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon_.
+
+To a man dying of a complication of disorders the terrible winter of
+1753-4 brought added danger; a winter which, says Fielding, "put a lucky
+end, if they had known their own interests, to such numbers of aged and
+infirm valetudinarians." But this, too, his splendid constitution
+struggled through; and in February 1754, he was back in town, in a
+condition less despaired of, he tells us, by himself than by any of his
+friends.
+
+And if he did not allow himself to despair, neither did he, even now,
+relinquish all his magistrate's work. On the 26th of February cases are
+actually recorded as brought before him. [1] But within a few days,
+apparently, of this date treatment employed on the advice of Dr Joshua
+Ward, so weakened a body already 'enervate' and emaciated, that at first
+the patient "was thought to be falling into the agonies of death." On
+March 6, he was, he tells us, at his worst--that "memorable day when the
+public lost Mr Pelham. From that day I began slowly, as it were, to draw
+my feet out of the grave; till in two months time I had again acquired
+some little degree of strength."
+
+Before the expiration of these two months that 'little degree of strength'
+was again being expended in the drudgery of the Bow Street court-room.
+"Yesterday," states the _Public Advertiser_ of April 17, "Elizabeth Smith
+was committed to Newgate by Henry Fielding Esqre; being charged with
+stealing a great quantity of Linnen." [2] And five days later, on April
+22, a committal is recorded in the Middlesex _Sessions Book_. [3]
+
+Although Fielding could now leave his sickroom, when called thence to
+commit a thief to Newgate, a newspaper paragraph, dated a little earlier
+in this same month of April, shows that the public were apprehensive that
+the protection afforded them by their indefatigable magistrate was now of
+a very precarious duration. The writer refers to the complete success of
+Mr Fielding's _Plan_ for the subjugation of criminals, executed the
+previous winter, pointing out that "the Public who had such Reason to
+suspect the contrary have suffered fewer Outrages than have happened any
+Winter this Twenty years." And without making any direct statement as to
+the fast failing strength of the author and executor of that _Plan_, he
+continues in words that plainly indicate the abdication of those zealous
+energies: "The whole Plan we are assured is communicated to Justice John
+Fielding and Mr Welch who are determined to bring it to that perfection of
+which it is capable." This 'assurance' of the _Advertiser_ is confirmed by
+Fielding's own words in the _Voyage to Lisbon_. "I therefore" he says,
+speaking clearly of the winter or spring of 1753-4, "resigned the office
+[of principal Justice of the Peace in Westminster] and the farther
+execution of my plan to my brother, who had long been my assistant."
+
+This blind brother, who in his turn became famous as a London magistrate,
+was now a Justice of the Peace for Middlesex [4] as well as for
+Westminster; and was at this time living in the Strand, as the Resident
+Proprietor [5] of that enterprising _Universal Register Office_ which has
+won incidental immortality in his brother's pages, and which combined such
+heterogeneous activities as those of an Estate Office, Registry for
+servants of good character, Lost Property Office, Curiosity Shop and
+General Agency.
+
+Another announcement in the columns of the _Advertiser_ links this last
+Spring of Fielding's life with that earlier Spring of 1743, when as a
+popular play-wright and a struggling barrister, absorbed in anxiety for
+the health of a beloved wife and with his own health already attacked, he
+published that masterpiece of irony _Jonathan Wild_. Now, while he was
+still slowly drawing his 'feet out of the grave,' after those critical
+first days of March, a new edition of the _History_ of that "Great Man,"
+with "considerable Corrections and Additions," was advertised; the actual
+date of publication being, apparently, about March 19. The new edition
+appeared with a prefatory note, "from the Publisher to the Reader," which
+although it bears no signature conveys, undoubtedly, Fielding's intention,
+if not his actual words. There is the familiar protest against the
+"scurrility of others," the odium of which had fallen on the innocent
+shoulders of "the author of our little book"; and there is a solemn
+declaration that the said little book shows no reason for supposing any
+'personal application' to be meant in its pages "unless we will agree that
+there are without those Walls [i.e. of Newgate], some other bodies of men
+of worse morals than those within; and who have consequently, a right to
+change places with its present inhabitants." Then follows an explicit
+reference to a chapter in the _History_ of the arch-villain Wild, which is
+obviously designed to satirise the condition of English politics, if not
+the person of any one politician. The disclaimer, seems on the whole, to
+partake very properly of the ironic nature of the ensuing pages; although
+it recalls that youthful declaration of the young dramatist, prefixed to
+his first comedy acted nearly thirty years before, that no private
+character was the target of his pen.
+
+At the end of these two months of March and April, spent as we have seen
+in acquiring some little degree of strength, and in at least attempting to
+expend the same on the consignment of petty thieves to Newgate, Fielding
+again submitted his dropsy to the surgeon, the consequences of which he
+now bore much better. This improvement, he tells us, he attributed greatly
+to "a dose of laudanum prescribed by my surgeon. It first gave me the most
+delicious flow of spirits, and afterwards as comfortable a nap." Lady Mary
+Wortley Montagu has recorded how her cousin's 'happy constitution,' even
+when half-demolished, could enjoy, with undiminished zest "a venison
+pasty, or a flask of champagne." Surely none other than Henry Fielding
+could have recorded with like zest this 'delicious flow of spirits' and
+'comfortable nap' derived from a dose of laudanum.
+
+The month of May, with its promise of relief from the still lingering
+winter, had now begun. Fielding therefore resolved, he says, to visit a
+little country house of his "which stands at Ealing, in the county of
+Middlesex, in the best air, I believe, in the whole kingdom." [6] Towards
+the end of the month, he had resort to a long forgotten eighteenth century
+panacea, the tar-water discovered by Bishop Berkeley; and very soon
+experienced effects far beyond his "most sanguine hopes." Success beyond
+Fielding's most sanguine hopes must have been great indeed; and
+accordingly we hear how this tar-water, from the very first, lessened his
+illness, increased his appetite, and very slowly added to his bodily
+strength. By the end of the month a third application by his surgeon
+revealed distinctly favourable symptoms; but still both the dropsy and the
+asthma were becoming more serious; and the summer, which the doctors
+seemed to think the sick man's 'only chance of life' seemed scarce likely
+to visit England at all in that sunless year. "In the whole month of May
+the sun scarce appeared three times" we learn, from the _Voyage_. Fearing
+therefore the renewed assaults of winter, before he had recruited his
+forces so as "to be in anywise able to withstand them," Fielding resolved,
+with the approval of a very eminent physician, to put an already formed
+project into immediate execution. This was to seek further recovery in
+some warmer climate. At first Aix was thought of, but here the
+difficulties of travel in the reign of George II. for invalids of slender
+means, proved insuperable. The journey by land, "beside the expense of
+it," Fielding found to be "infinitely too long and fatiguing"; and no ship
+was announced as sailing within 'any reasonable time' for that part of the
+Mediterranean. Lisbon accordingly was decided upon; and John Fielding soon
+discovered a ship with excellent passenger accommodation, and which was
+due to sail in three days. "I eagerly embraced the offer," writes
+Fielding, as though he were starting on a pleasure cruise, instead of
+facing all the miseries of travel, when unable to make the least use of
+his limbs, and when his very appearance "presented a spectacle of the
+highest horror"; and he adds "I began to prepare my family for the voyage
+with the utmost expedition." Twice, however, the captain put off his
+sailing, and at length his passenger invited him to dinner at Ealing, a
+full week after the declared date of departure. Meanwhile Fielding's
+condition seems at least to have become no worse, for the _Public
+Advertiser_ of June 22 has "the pleasure to assure the Publick that the
+Report of the Death of Henry Fielding Esquire; inserted in an Evening
+paper of Thursday is not true, that Gentleman's Health being better than
+it has been for some Month's past."
+
+It was not till the 26th of June that, in the memorable opening words of
+the _Voyage_, "the most melancholy sun I had ever beheld arose, and found
+me awake at my house at Fordhook. By the light of this sun, I was, in my
+own opinion, last to behold and take leave of some of those creatures on
+whom I doated with a mother-like fondness, guided by nature and passion,
+and uncured and unhardened by all the doctrine of that philosophical
+school where I had learnt to bear pains and to despise death." The morning
+was spent with his children, the eldest of whom was then a boy of six; and
+"I doubt not," he writes, "whether, in that time, I did not undergo more
+than in all my distemper." At noon his coach was at the door, and this
+"was no sooner told me than I kiss'd my children round, and went into it
+with some little resolution." His wife, behaving "more like a heroine and
+philosopher, tho' at the same time the tenderest mother in the world," and
+his eldest daughter, followed him; and the invalid was swiftly driven the
+twelve miles to Rotherhithe. Here the task of embarking a man quite bereft
+of the use of his limbs had to be accomplished. This difficulty was
+overcome with the aid of Saunders Welch, the friend of whom Fielding says
+"I never think or speak of but with love and esteem" [7]; and, at last,
+the traveller was "seated in a great chair in the cabin," after fatigues,
+the most cruel of which he declares to have been the inhuman jests made
+upon his wasted and helpless condition by the rows of sailors and watermen
+through whom he had been compelled to pass.
+
+From this moment we may read of the pleasures and thoughts, the
+experiences and meditations, but scarcely ever of the sufferings of the
+dying novelist, in the pages of what has been well called "one of the most
+unfeigned and touching little tracts in our own or any other literature"
+[8] Confined for six weeks in the narrow prison of an eighteenth century
+trading vessel; unable to move save when lifted by unskilled hands; with
+food often intolerable to the healthiest appetite; with no relaxation save
+the company of the rough old sea-dog who commanded the _Queen of
+Portugal_; and fully conscious that his was a mortal illness,--the
+inexhaustible courage, the delight in man and in nature, the genius of
+Henry Fielding still triumphed over every external circumstance.
+Throughout the voyage, fortune, moreover, seemed determined to heap on the
+unhappy traveller all manner of additional discomforts; and yet when we
+lay down this little volume "begun in pain, and finished almost at the
+same period with life," [9] the pictures left on the mind glow almost as
+brightly as those which fill the pages written in the full vigour of
+Fielding's manhood, and which, as Coleridge said, breathe the air of a
+spring morning.
+
+First came a delay of three days off the squalid shores of Wapping and
+Rotherhithe, whereby opportunity was afforded of "tasting a delicious
+mixture of the air of both these sweet places," and of enjoying such a
+concord of the voices of seamen, watermen, fishwomen, oyster women and
+their like as Hogarth indicated "in that print of his which is enough to
+make a man deaf to look at." This delay, moreover, threatened to bring
+Fielding within need of a surgeon when none should be procurable. His
+friend Mr William Hunter of Covent Garden, brother of the more famous John
+Hunter, relieved this apprehension; but now fresh trouble occurred in the
+torments of toothache which befell Mrs Fielding. A servant was despatched
+in haste to Wapping, but the desired 'toothdrawer,' arrived after the ship
+had at last, on Sunday morning, the 30th of June, left her unsavoury
+moorings. That Sunday morning "was fair and bright," and the diarist
+records how, dropping down to Gravesend, "we had a passage thither I think
+as pleasant as can be conceiv'd." The yards of Deptford and Woolwich were
+'noble sights'; the Thames with its splendid shipping excelled all the
+rivers of the world; and the men of war, the unrivalled Indiamen, the
+other traders, and even the colliers and small craft, all combined to form
+"a most pleasing object to the eye, as well as highly warming to the heart
+of an Englishman, who has any degree of love for his country, or can
+recognise any effect of the patriot in his constitution." And here
+Fielding gives us a notable example of his own healthy taste in
+recreation; a taste agreeing very ill with the scurrilous popular myths
+concerning him, but entirely consonant with the manifest atmosphere of his
+genius. He deplores the general neglect of "what seems to me the highest
+degree of amusement: that is, the sailing ourselves in little vessels of
+our own"; an amusement which need not "exceed the reach of a moderate
+fortune, and would fall very short of the prices which are daily paid for
+pleasures of a far inferior rate."
+
+Fortune, as we have said, seemed to grudge every little pleasure that
+could have alleviated the condition of the helpless invalid on board the
+_Queen of Portugal_. The relief obtained from Mr Hunter, he tells us, "the
+gaiety of the morning, the pleasant sailing with wind and tide, and the
+many agreeable objects with which I was constantly entertained during the
+whole way, were all suppressed and overcome by the single consideration of
+my wife's pain, which continued incessantly to torment her." The second
+despatch of a messenger, in great haste to bring the best reputed operator
+in Gravesend recalls Murphy's words: "Of sickness and poverty he was
+singularly patient and under pressure of those evils he could quietly read
+_Cicero de Consolatione_; but if either of them threatened his wife he was
+impetuous for her relief." The remedies both of the Gravesend 'surgeon of
+some eminence,' and of yet another practitioner, who was sent for from
+Deal, were ineffectual; but about eight in the evening of the following
+day, when the ship under contrary winds, was at anchor in the Downs, Mrs
+Fielding fell asleep; and to that accident we owe one of the most
+characteristic passages in the _Voyage_. His wife's relief from pain
+would, Fielding tells us, "have given me some happiness, could I have
+known how to employ those spirits which were raised by it: but
+unfortunately for me, I was left in a disposition of enjoying an agreeable
+hour, without the assistance of a companion, which has always appeared to
+me necessary to such enjoyment; my daughter and her companion were both
+retired sea-sick to bed; the other passengers were a rude school boy of
+fourteen years old, and an illiterate Portuguese friar, who understood no
+language but his own, in which I had not the least smattering. The captain
+was the only person left, in whose conversation I might indulge myself;
+but unluckily for me, besides his knowledge being chiefly confined to his
+profession, he had the misfortune of being so deaf, that to make him hear
+my words, I must run the risque of conveying them to the ears of my wife,
+who, tho' in another room (called, I think, the state-room; being indeed a
+most stately apartment capable of containing one human body in length, if
+not very tall, and three bodies in breadth) lay asleep within a yard of
+me. In this situation necessity and choice were one and the same thing;
+the captain and I sat down together to a small bowl of punch, over which
+we both soon fell fast asleep, and so concluded the evening." In the
+record of the previous day, while sketching the humours of Jacks in
+office, Fielding incidentally shows himself as no less careful of the
+respect due to his wife than he was solicitous for her comfort. A
+ruffianly custom-house officer had appeared in their cabin, wearing a hat
+adorned with broad gold lace, and 'cocked with much military fierceness.'
+On eliciting the information that 'the gentleman' was a riding surveyor,
+"I replied," says Fielding, "that he might be a riding surveyor, but could
+be no gentleman, for that none who had any title to that denomination,
+would break into the presence of a lady, without any apology or even
+moving his hat. He then took his covering from his head, and laid it on
+the table, saying he asked pardon." To this 'riding surveyor' we owe also
+an indication that Fielding found room in the narrow confines of a cabin
+for his Plato; for the rude insolence of that functionary recalls to his
+mind the Platonic theory of the divine original of rulers, and he proceeds
+to quote a long passage from the _Laws_, which even his ready scholarship
+could scarce have had by heart.
+
+Contrary winds continued to baffle all Captain Veal's seamanship, and
+afforded his passenger opportunities for a spirited protest concerning the
+need of some regulation both of the charges of long-shore boatmen, and of
+the manners of captains in the Royal Navy. On the evening of July 8 the
+_Voyage_ records that "we beat the sea off Sussex, in sight of Dungeness,
+with much more pleasure than progress; for the weather was almost a
+perfect calm, and the moon, which was almost at the full, scarce suffered
+a single cloud to veil her from our sight"; and on the 18th of the month
+the _Queen of Portugal_ put in to Ryde, at which place she remained
+wind-bound for no less than eleven days.
+
+These eleven days Fielding spent, by his wife's persuasions, on shore, at
+the poor village inn which, together with a little church and some thirty
+houses, then constituted the village of Ryde. Of the hardships and humours
+of that sojourn the _Voyage_ affords an account worthy of a place among
+the pages of either of the three great novels. The landlady, an incredibly
+mean and heartless shrew, inflicted daily annoyances and extortions on her
+wind-bound victims. The squalid building, partly constructed of
+wreck-wood, could scarce house the party. The food supplies, other than
+those the visitors brought with them, were chiefly 'rusty bacon, and worse
+cheese,' with very bad ale to drink. And on the first afternoon, the house
+was found to be so damp from recent scrubbing that Mrs Fielding, who
+"besides discharging excellently well her own, and all the tender offices
+becoming the female character; who besides being a faithful friend, an
+amiable companion, and a tender nurse, could likewise supply the wants of
+a decrepit husband, and occasionally perform his part," hastily snatched
+the invalid from "worse perils by water than the common dangers of the
+sea," and ordered dinner to be laid in a dry and commodious barn. So
+seated, "in one of the most pleasant spots, I believe, in the kingdom,"
+and regaled on bacon, beans, and fish, "we completed," says Fielding, "the
+best, the pleasantest, and the merriest meal, with more appetite, more
+real, solid luxury, and more festivity, than was ever seen in an
+entertainment at White's."
+
+On Sunday the three ladies went to church, "attended by the captain in a
+most military attire, with his cockade in his hat, and his sword by his
+side" (Captain Veal had commanded a privateer); and Fielding, while left
+alone, pursued those researches into human nature of which he never
+wearied by conversation with the landlord, a fine example of henpecked
+humanity. On the following day the ladies, again attended by Captain Veal,
+enjoyed a four mile walk, professing themselves greatly charmed with the
+scenery, and with the courtesy of a lady who owned a great house on this
+part of the coast, and who "had slipt out of the way, that my wife and her
+company might refresh themselves with the flowers and fruits with which
+her garden abounded." Within twenty four hours this generous householder
+had sent a message to the inn, placing all that her garden or house
+afforded at the disposal of the travellers. Fielding's man-servant was
+despatched with proper acknowledgements, and returned "in company with the
+gardener, both richly laden with almost every particular which a garden at
+this most fruitful season of the year produces."
+
+That evening, on a change of wind, Captain Veal came to demand his
+passengers' instant return. This would have been "a terrible circumstance
+to me, in my decayed condition," admits Fielding, "especially as very
+heavy showers of rain, attended with a high wind, continued to fall
+incessantly; the being carried thro' which two miles in the dark, in a wet
+and open boat, seemed little less than certain death." Happily the wind
+again veered till the following morning, when Fielding and the three
+ladies, together with their manservant and maid, were safely re-embarked,
+not however without much agitation over the temporary loss of their
+tea-chest. This calamity was first compensated by the prompt aid of the
+hospitable lady aforementioned, and then averted by the diligent search of
+William the footman who at last discovered the hiding place of the missing
+'sovereign cordial,' and thus, concludes his master, "ended this scene,
+which begun with such appearance of distress, and ended with becoming the
+subject of mirth and laughter." Once more on board, Ryde and its beautiful
+prospect, its verdant elms, its green meadows, and shady lanes all
+combining in Fielding's opinion to make a most delightful habitation,
+faded from view. And, by seven o'clock, "we sat down" he says, "to regale
+ourselves with some roasted venison, which was much better drest than we
+imagined it would be, and an excellent cold pasty which my wife had made
+at Ryde, and which we had reserved uncut to eat on board our ship, whither
+we all cheerfully exulted in being returned from the presence of Mrs
+Humphreys, [the landlady] who by the exact resemblance she bore to a fury,
+seemed to have been with no great propriety settled in Paradise."
+
+It is while commenting on the charm of the view from Ryde,--"I confess
+myself so entirely fond of a sea prospect, that I think nothing on the
+land can equal it,"--that Fielding incidentally utters that extraordinary
+reference to Sir Robert Walpole as "one of the best of men and of
+ministers." The only explanation of these words at all consonant with what
+we know of Fielding's life seems to be that here he adopts once more his
+familiar use of irony.
+
+The cheerfulness of spirit with which the invalid encountered every fresh
+distress, and 'exulted' in every pleasant sight and trifling pleasure,
+during those days at Ryde, is very fully reflected in the following
+letter, happily preserved from the untoward fate which has apparently
+befallen every other intimate word from his pen. It was written to his
+brother John, on the first day of anchorage off Ryde.
+
+
+"On board the Queen of Portugal, Richd. Veal at anchor on the Mother Bank,
+off Ryde, to the care of the Post Master of Portsmouth--this is my Date
+and y'r Direction.
+
+"July 12 1754
+
+"Dear Jack, After receiving that agreeable Lre from Mess'rs. Fielding &
+Co., we weighed on monday morning and sailed from Deal to the Westward
+Four Days long but inconceivably pleasant passage brought us yesterday to
+an Anchor on the Mother Bank, on the Back of the Isle of Wight, where we
+had last Night in Safety the Pleasure of hearing the Winds roar over our
+Heads in as violent a Tempest as I have known, and where my only
+Consideration were the Fears which must possess any Friend of ours (if
+there is happily any such), who really makes our Well being the Object of
+his Concern especially if such Friend should be totally inexperienced in
+Sea Affairs. I therefore beg that on the Day you receive this Mrs Daniel
+may know that we are just risen from Breakfast in Health and Spirits this
+twelfth Instant at 9 in the morning. Our Voyage hath proved fruitful in
+Adventures all which being to be written in the Book you must postpone
+yr. Curiosity. As the Incidents which fall under yr Cognizance will
+possibly be consigned to Oblivion, do give them to us as they pass. Tell
+yr Neighbour I am much obliged to him for recommending me to the care of
+a most able and experienced Seaman to whom other Captains seem to pay
+such Deference that they attend and watch his Motions, and think
+themselves only safe when they act under his Direction and Example. Our
+Ship in Truth seems to give Laws on the Water with as much Authority and
+Superiority as you Dispense Laws to the Public and Examples to yr
+Brethern in Commission, Please to direct yr Answer to me on Board as in
+the Date, if gone to be returned, and then send it by the Post and
+Pacquet to Lisbon to
+
+"Y'r affec't. Brother
+"H. Fielding [10]
+
+"To John Fielding Esq. at his House in Bow Street Cov. Garden London."
+
+It is probable, as Mr Austin Dobson has pointed out, that the Mrs Daniel,
+whose anxieties Fielding here shows himself anxious to relieve, was his
+second wife's mother. And by this time his brother was doubtless occupying
+that house in Bow Street so frequently advertised to the public, when any
+work was on foot for their protection, as the residence of 'Henry
+Fielding, Esqre.'
+
+The almost diabolic figure of the Ryde landlady had scarcely left his
+pages, when Fielding found a new subject for his portraiture, in the
+pretentious ill-bred follies of a young officer, a nephew of the captain,
+who arrived on board to visit his uncle, and who serves as an excellent
+foil for the simple-hearted merits of the elder man. A rising wind,
+however, cut short the Lieutenant's stories, and two nights later blew a
+hurricane which Fielding declares, "would have given no small alarm to a
+man, who had either not learnt what it is to die, or known what it is to
+be miserable"; continuing, in words that need no comment, "my dear wife
+and child must pardon me, if what I did not conceive to be any great evil
+to myself, I was not much terrified with the thoughts of happening to
+them: in truth, I have often thought they are both too good, and too
+gentle, to be trusted to the power of any man." The sea he loved so well
+was not to be Fielding's grave. Early the next morning the _Queen of
+Portugal_ was at anchor in Torbay; and the whole party sat down "to a very
+chearful breakfast."
+
+For a whole week the travellers were kept wind-bound off the Devon coast,
+now at anchor, now making vain efforts to proceed. We hear of the 'fine
+clouted cream,' and the delicious cyder of the county (two hogsheads of
+which latter Fielding purchased as presents for his friends); of the
+excellence of the local fish named 'john dóree,' of the scandalous need of
+legislation for the protection of sea-men when ashore from land-sharks, a
+digression which includes a pleasant interpretation of the myth of Ulysses
+and Circe as none other than the dilemma of a Homeric merchant skipper
+whose crew Circe "some good ale-wife," had made drunk "with the spirituous
+liquors of those days"; of the difficulty with which Fielding could
+persuade his wife "whom it was no easy matter for me to force from my
+side" to take a walk on shore; and of the captain's grievous lamentations,
+which "seemed to have some mixture of the Irish howl in them," [11] when
+his cat was accidentally suffocated. Also, to these last wind-bound days
+belongs that famous incident which does perhaps no less honour to the hot
+tempered tyrannical old skipper than to his illustrious passenger.
+
+Fielding, having just finished dinner, was enjoying some good claret in
+the cabin, with his wife and her friend--a cheerful moment, when
+conversation 'is most agreeable,' when Tom, the captain's general
+factotum, burst in on them and began, without saying a 'by your leave', to
+bottle half a hogshead of small beer. After requests and protests, equally
+unavailing, this functionary found himself, says Fielding, threatened
+"with having one bottle to pack more than his number, which then happened
+to stand empty within my reach." Thereupon Tom reported his version of the
+matter to the captain, who came thundering down to the cabin in a rage
+that knew no bounds of language or civility. This behaviour from a man who
+had received not only liberal payment from his passenger for
+accommodation, but also such frequent stores of fresh provisions that
+Fielding's private purse had indeed gone some way in maintaining the
+ship's crew, that passenger justly resented, and to a hasty resolve of
+quitting the ship by a hoy that should carry him to Dartmouth, he added
+threats of legal action. The 'most distant sound of law,' however, he
+tells us, "frightened a man, who had often, I am convinced, heard numbers
+of cannon roar round him with intrepidity. Nor did he sooner see the hoy
+approaching the vessel, than he ran down again into the cabin, and his
+rage being perfectly subsided, he tumbled on his knees, and a little too
+abjectly implored for mercy. I did not suffer a brave man and an old man,
+to remain a moment in this posture; but I immediately forgave him." It is
+this incident that Thackeray chooses to complete his picture of the great
+novelist; adding that memorable comparison between the "noble spirit and
+unconquerable generosity" of Fielding, and the lives of many unknown
+heroes of the sea: "Such a brave and gentle heart, such an intrepid and
+courageous spirit I love to recognise in the manly the English Harry
+Fielding."
+
+Within a week of this reconciliation the ship had made such progress
+southward that the captain 'in the redundancy of his good humour, declared
+he would go to church at Lisbon on Sunday next' (not the least pleasant of
+the pictures which Fielding gives us of the privateer is that of his
+summoning all hands on deck on a Sunday morning and then reading prayers
+'with an audible voice'); but again the wind played him false, becalming
+him near Cape Finisterre. This last calm, however, brought with it
+sufficient compensation: "tho' our voyage was retarded, we were
+entertained with a scene which as no one can behold without going to sea,
+so no one can form an idea of anything equal to it on shore. We were
+seated on the deck, women and all, in the serenest evening that can be
+imagined. Not a single cloud presented itself to our view, and the sun
+himself was the only object which engrossed our whole attention. He did
+indeed set with a majesty which is incapable of description, with which,
+while the horizon was yet blazing with glory, our eyes were called off to
+the opposite part to survey the moon, which was then at full, and which in
+rising presented us with the second object that this world hath offered to
+our vision. Compared to these the pageantry of theatres, or splendor of
+courts, are sights almost below the regard of children."
+
+Four days later, at midnight, the anchor was cast off Lisbon, after a calm
+and moonlit passage up the Tagus, a passage, Fielding writes, "incredibly
+pleasant to the women, who remained three hours enjoying it, while I was
+left to the cooler transports of enjoying their pleasures at second-hand;
+and yet, cooler as they may be, whoever is totally ignorant of such
+sensation, is, at the same time, void of all ideas of friendship."
+
+On the day following, the 24th of June, he landed, and that evening
+enjoyed the long unknown luxury of a good supper, in a kind of
+coffee-house "very pleasantly situated on the brow of a hill, about a mile
+from the city, [which] hath a very fine prospect of the River Tajo from
+Lisbon to the sea." With that pleasant prospect the Voyage closes. Begun
+as it was to while away the enforced solitude of his cabin, a condition,
+which no man, he tells us, disliked more than himself and which mortal
+sickness rendered especially irksome, these pages, some of which "were
+possibly the production of the most disagreeable hours which ever haunted
+the author," reveal Fielding to us if not as Mr Lowell has said "with
+artless inadvertence" at least with perfect fullness. The undimmed gaiety
+of spirit, the tender affection, the constant desire to remove those evils
+which he found oppressing his country-men by sea not less than on land,
+the 'enthusiasm for righteousnes,' the humour of the first of English
+novelists, burn here as brightly as though the writer were but midway in
+his life's voyage. The hand that exposed evil in its native loathsomeness
+in a Blifil and a Wild has not lost its cunning in depicting Mrs
+Humphreys; the eye that delighted in the green fields of England saw in
+the southern sunset that which made human creations 'almost below the
+regard of children.' And to the last the patriotic energies of the author
+of _Pasquin_ and of the _Champion_, of the whole hearted social reformer,
+of the tireless magistrate, knew no relaxation. Page after page of the
+_Voyage_ justify the passage in which he tells us how "I would indeed have
+this work, which, if I live to finish it (a matter of no great certainty,
+if indeed of any great hope to me), will be probably the last I shall ever
+undertake, to produce some better end than the mere diversion of the
+reader"; and manifest his desire, here explicitly stated, to finish life
+"as I have probably lost it, in the service of my country."
+
+We have no knowledge concerning the four months following the last entry
+in the pages of the _Voyage to Lisbon_. On October 8, 1754, the end so
+calmly expected came; and in the beautiful English cemetery, facing the
+great Basilica of the Heart of Jesus, was laid to rest all that an alien
+soil could claim of 'our immortal Fielding.'
+
+[1] The _Public Advertiser_, 1754, February 26.
+
+[2] The _Public Advertiser_ 1754, April 17.
+
+[3] Middlesex Records. _Sessions Book_. 1754.
+
+[4] See the Middlesex Records.
+
+[5] See the _Public Advertiser_. February, 1754.
+
+[6] This little house was apparently replaced by a larger house; and it is
+probably this second building of which a sketch is inserted in a copy of
+Lysons' _Environs_ to be seen in the Guildhall Library. It is now pulled
+down.
+
+[7] Dr Johnson spoke of Saunders Welch as "one of my best and dearest
+friends."
+
+[8] Austin Dobson. _Fielding_, p. 170.
+
+[9] "Dedication" of the _Voyage_, written possibly by John Fielding.
+
+[10] Austin Dobson. _Fielding_, p. 179. From the autograph in the
+possession of Mr Frederick Locker.
+
+[11] This and the following passage occur in the second version of the
+_Voyage to Lisbon_.
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX A
+
+_The Hapsburg genealogy_
+
+It appears that the Hapsburg descent, formerly claimed by the Denbigh
+family, must now be abandoned. The arguments against this descent,
+published by Mr Horace Round, have been accepted by Burke. Further, Dr G.
+F. Warner permits me to publish his statement that "I have myself seen
+the documents upon which it [the claim] rests, and found them to be
+unmistakeable forgeries."
+
+As regards Henry Fielding's family it is interesting to find that his
+grandfather the Rev. and Hon. John Fielding was not only Canon of
+Salisbury, and a Doctor of Divinity, but also Archdeacon of Dorsetshire.
+Canon John Fielding was buried at Salisbury. His son George (Henry
+Fielding's uncle) was Lt. Colonel of the "Royal Regiment of the Blues,"
+and Groom of the Bed-chamber to Queen Anne and to George II. He is buried
+in St George's Chapel, Windsor. (J. Nichols. _History and Antiquities
+of Leicestershire_. 1810. Vol. iv. pt. i. p. 394.)
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX B
+
+_Receipt and Assignment of "Tom Jones"_
+
+The following documents are in the possession of Alfred Huth Esq., and
+are now first published
+
+June 11 1748.
+
+Rec'd. of Mr. Andrew Millar Six hundred Pounds being in full for the sole
+Copy Right of a Book called the History of a Foundling in Eighteen Books.
+And in Consideration of the said Six Hundred Pounds I promise to asign
+over the said Book to the said Andrew Millar his Executors and assigns
+for ever when I shall be thereto demanded.
+
+£   s   d
+£600, 00, 00. Hen. Ffielding
+
+The said Work to contain Six Volumes in Duodecimo.
+
+Know all Men by these Presents that I Henry Fielding of St. Paul's Covent
+Garden in the County of Middlesex Esq'r. for & in consideration of the
+Sum of Six hundred Pounds of lawful Money of Great Britain to me in hand
+paid by Andrew Millar of St. Mary le Strand in the County afores'd.
+Bookseller the Receipt whereof is hereby acknowledged and of which I do
+Acquit the s'd. Andrew Millar his Executors & Assigns, have bargained
+sold delivered assigned & set over all that my Title Right and Property
+in & to a certain Book printed in Six Volumes, known & called by the Name
+& Title of The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, inv'd. written by me
+the s'd. Henry Fielding, with all Improvements, Additions or Alterations
+whatsoever which now are or hereafter shall at any time be made by me the
+s'd. Henry Fielding, or any one else by my authority to the s'd. Book To
+Have and to Hold the s'd. bargained Premises unto the s'd. Andrew Millar,
+his Ex'ors Adm'ors or Assigns for ever And I do hereby covenant to & with
+the s'd. Andrew Millar his Ex'ors Adm'ors & Assigns that I the s'd. Henry
+Fielding the Author of the s'd. bargained Premises have not at any time
+heretofore done committed or suffered any Act or thing whatsoever by
+means whereof the s'd bargained Premises or any part thereof is or shall
+be impeached or encumbered in any wise And I the s'd Henry Fielding for
+myself my Ex'ors Adm'ors & Assigns shall warrant & defend the s'd
+bargained Premises for ever against all Persons whatsoever claiming under
+me my Ex'ors Adm'ors or Assigns.
+
+In Witness whereof I have hereunto set my hand & seal this twenty fifth
+day of March One thousand seven hundred & forty nine.
+
+H F fielding [Illustration: Seal.]
+
+Signed sealed & delivered
+by the within named Henry
+Fielding the day and year within
+mentioned, in the presence of
+Jos. Brogden
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX C
+
+    "_Pasquin turned Drawcansir_"
+
+The _General Advertiser_ for March 13, 1752, Page 3, advertises, as
+for Macklin's Benefit, at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden,
+
+"A New Dramatic Satire of Two Acts, call'd
+Covent Garden Theatre; or Pasquin turned Drawcansir
+Censor of Great Britain
+
+Written on the Model of the Comedies of Aristophanes and the Pasquinades
+of the Italian Theatre in Paris; With Chorusses of the People after the
+manner of the Greek Drama. The Parts of the Pit, and Boxes, the Stage,
+and the Town to be performed by themselves for their Diversion; the Part
+of several dull disorderly Characters in and about St. James, to be
+performed by certain Persons for Example; and the Part of
+Pasquin-Drawcansir to be performed by his Censorial Highness, for his
+Interest.
+
+The Satire to be introduced by an Oration, and to conclude by a
+Peroration: Both to be spoken from the Rostrum, in the Manner of certain
+Orators by Signer Pasquin."
+
+This advertisement is also in the _Covent Garden Journal_, with the
+addition of "galleries" after the word _Boxes_. According to Dibdin,
+_History of the Stage_, Vol. V. (preface dated 1800) p. 156, this satire
+was _by_ Macklin.
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX D
+
+_The Walpole 'anecdote'_
+
+The following reference to Fielding occurs in a letter by Horace Walpole,
+to George Montagu, dated May 18, 1749. It may be prefaced by the
+statement that Fielding's strenuous opposition to Sir Robert Walpole was
+not likely to be overlooked by Sir Robert's son; and by Mr Austin
+Dobson's comment "his [Horace Walpole's] absolute injustice, when his
+partisan spirit was uppermost, is everywhere patent to readers of his
+Letters ... the story no doubt exaggerated when it reached him, loses
+nothing under his transforming and malicious pen." Walpole writes: "He
+[Rigby] and Peter Bathurst t'other night carried a servant of the
+latter's, who had attempted to shoot him, before Fielding; who, to all
+his other vocations, has, by the grace of Mr Lyttelton, added that of
+Middlesex justice. He sent them word he was at supper, that they must
+come next morning. They did not understand that freedom, and ran up,
+where they found him banqueting with a blind man, a whore, and three
+Irishmen, on some cold mutton and a bone of ham, both in one dish, and
+the dirtiest cloth. He never stirred nor asked them to sit. Rigby, who
+had seen him so often come to beg a guinea of Sir C. Williams, and
+Bathurst, at whose father's he had lived for victuals, understood that
+dignity as little, and pulled themselves chairs; on which he civilised."
+
+The 'blind man' was doubtless the half brother later to be knighted for
+his distinguished public services, Sir John Fielding; and, adds Mr Austin
+Dobson, "it is extremely unlikely the lady so discourteously
+characterised could have been any other than his wife, who Lady Stuart
+tells us 'had few personal charms.' There remain the 'three Irishmen' who
+may, or may not, have been perfectly presentable members of society. At
+all events, their mere nationality, so rapidly decided upon, cannot be
+regarded as a stigma." Bearing in mind, on the one hand, our knowledge of
+Fielding as he reveals himself in his own pages, and in his friendships,
+and on the other the character earned by Horace Walpole's pen, it seems
+matter for doubt whether this 'anecdote' deserves even a place in an
+appendix.
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX E
+
+_Fielding's Will_
+
+Fielding's will was discovered in the Prerogative Court of Canterbury, by
+Mr G. A. Aitken. It is undated:--
+
+IN THE NAME OF GOD AMEN--I HENRY FIELDING of the parish of Ealing in the
+County of Middlesex do hereby give and bequeath unto Ralph Allen of Prior
+Park in the County of Somerset Esqr and to his heirs executors
+administrators and assigns for ever to the use of the said Ralph his
+heirs &c all my Estate real and personal wheresoever and whatsoever and
+do appoint him sole EXECUTOR of this my last Will--Beseeching him that
+the whole (except my shares in the Register Office) may be sold and
+forthwith converted into Money and Annuities purchased thereout for the
+lives of my dear Wife Mary and my daughters Harriet and Sophia and what
+proportions my said Executor shall please to reserve to my sons William
+and Allen shall be paid them severally as they shall attain the age of
+twenty and three And as for my Shares in the Register or Universal
+Register Office I give ten thereof to my aforesaid Wife seven to my
+Daughter Harriet and three to my daughter Sophia my Wife to be put in
+immediate possession of her shares and my Daughters of theirs as they
+shall severally arrive at the Age of 21 the immediate Profits to be then
+likewise paid to my two Daughters by my Executor who is desired to retain
+the same in his Hands until that time--Witness my Hand--HENRY
+FIELDING--Signed and acknowledged as his last Will and Testament by the
+within named Testator in the presence of--MARGARET COLLIER--RICHD
+BOOR--ISABELLA ASH--
+
+Proved 14th November 1754.
+
+Extracted from the Principal Registry of the Probate Divorce and
+Admiralty Division of the High Court of Justice
+
+In the Prerogative Court of Canterbury
+
+November 1754
+
+HENRY FIELDING Esquire--On the fourteenth day Administration (with the
+Will annexed) of the Goods Chattels and Credits of Henry Fielding late of
+Ealing in the County of Middlesex but at Lisbon in the Kingdom of
+Portugal Esquire deceased was granted to John Fielding Esquire the Uncle
+and Curator or Guardian lawfully assigned to Harriet Fielding Spinster a
+Minor and Sophia Fielding an Infant the natural and lawfull Daughters of
+the said Deceased and two of the Residuary Legatees named in the said
+Will for the use and benefit of the said Minor and Infant and until one
+of them shall attain the age of twenty one years for that Ralph Allen
+Esquire the sole Executor and Residuary Legatee in Trust named in the
+said Will hath renounced as well the Execution thereof as Letters of
+Administration (with the said Will annexed) of the Goods Chattels and
+Credits of the said deceased and Mary Fielding Widow the Relict of the
+said deceased and the other Residuary Legatee named in the said Will hath
+also renounced Letters of Administration (with the said Will annexed) of
+the Goods Chattels and Credits of the said deceased--the said John
+Fielding having been first sworn duly to administer.
+
+In addition to the property mentioned here, Fielding possessed a library,
+as Mr Austin Dobson discovered, [1] which when sold six months after his
+death, "for the Benefit of his Wife and Family," realised £364, 7s. 1d. or
+"about £l00 more than the public gave in 1785 for the books of Johnson."
+[2] Also according to the _Recollections of the Late John Adolphus_, by
+Henderson, Fielding purchased a 90 years' lease of a house near
+Canterbury, for one of his daughters.
+
+Of the children mentioned in this will, William became, a contemporary
+writer tells us, "an eminent barrister at law and inherits the integrity
+of his father and a large share of his brilliant talents." [3] Mr Austin
+Dobson refers to William Fielding as being like his father "a strenuous
+advocate of the poor and unfortunate," and adds that the obituary notice
+in the _Gentleman's Magazine_ records his worth and piety. [4] Harriet
+Fielding is said to have been of "a sweet temper and great understanding."
+[5] Allen Fielding became Vicar of S6. Stephens Canterbury, and was
+"greatly beloved by all, especially the little children," writes a
+descendant. Allen Fielding's four sons all took Orders, and of the second,
+Charles, it was written on his death, that "he had not only a heart that
+could feel for others, but a heart that lived in giving." [6] The noble
+qualities of Henry Fielding found their echo in his descendants.
+
+[1] Austin Dobson. _Fielding_. Appendix IV. p. 212-13; _and Eighteenth
+Century Vignettes_, 1896, pp. 164-178.
+
+[2] Austin Dobson. _Fielding_. Appendix IV. p. 212-13; _and Eighteenth
+Century Vignettes_, 1896, pp. 164-178.
+
+[3] J. Nichols. _History and Antiquities of Leicestershire_. 1810. Vol.
+iv. Pt. I. p. 594.
+
+[4] Austin Dobson. _Fielding_, p. 192.
+
+[5] T. Whitehead. _Original Anecdotes of the late Duke of Kingston_, 1795.
+p. 95.
+
+[6] _Some Hapsburghs, Fieldings, Denbighs and Desmonds_, by J. E. M. F.
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX F
+
+_Fielding's Tomb and Epitaph_
+
+Fielding's present tomb, in the beautiful English cemetery at Lisbon, was
+erected in 1830. On one side is inscribed:
+
+    LUGET BRITANNIA GREMIO NON DARI
+    FOVERE NATUM
+
+On the other side are the following lines:
+
+    Henrici Fielding
+    A Somersetensibus apud Glastoniam oriundi
+    Viri summo ingenio
+    en quae restant:
+    Stylo quo non alius unquam
+    Intima qui potuit cordis reserare mores hominum excolendos
+    suscepit
+    Virtuti decorum, vitio foeditatem asseruit, suum cuique tribuens;
+    Non quin ipse subinde irritaretur evitandis
+    Ardensin amicitia, in miseria sublevanda effusus
+    Hilaris urbanus et conjux et pater adamantus.
+    Aliis non sibi vixit
+    Vixit sed mortem victricem vincit dum natura durat dum saecula
+    currunt
+    Naturae prolem scriptis prae se ferens
+    Suam et sua genlis extendet famam. [1]
+
+[1] _Somerset and Dorset Notes and Queries_. Vol. viii. p. 353.
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX G
+
+_Fielding's posthumous play "The Fathers"_
+
+Fielding's play _The Fathers_ or _The Good-natured Man_ seems to have been
+lost (apparently after being submitted to Sir Charles Hanbury Williams)
+till twenty years after Fielding's death. It was discovered by M'r Johnes,
+M.P. for Cardigan, in 1775, or 1776, who sent it to Garrick. Garrick
+recognised it as "Harry Fielding's Comedy"; and, after revision, it was
+produced at Drury Lane on November 30, 1778. Garrick not only appeared in
+the cast, but also wrote both prologue and epilogue. A note, in the
+Morrison Manuscripts, from Garrick to D'r John Hoadley, dated January 3,
+1776, concludes thus "We have found the lost sheep, Henry Fielding's Good
+Natured Man which was mislaid near twenty years." [1] In the following
+pleasant letter Sir John Fielding commends Mrs Fielding's Benefit night to
+Dr Hunter.
+
+"Sir John Fielding presents his compliments to Dr. Hunter, and acquaints
+him that the Comedy of 'The Good-natured Man' written by the late Mr.
+Henry Fielding will be performed at Drury Lane next Monday being the
+Author's Widow's night.
+
+"He was your old and sincere friend. There are no other of his Works left
+unpublished. This is the last opportunity you will have of shewing any
+respect to his Memory as a Genius, so that I hope you will send all your
+Pupils, all your Patients, all your Friends, & everybody else to the Play
+that Night, by which Means you will indulge your benevolent feelings and
+your Sentiments of Friendship. [2]
+
+"Bow Street, Dec'r 4, 1778."
+
+[1] Morrison Manuscripts. Catalogue.
+
+[2] _The Athenaeum_. February 1. 1890.
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX H
+
+_Undated Accounts of Fielding at Salisbury and at Barnes_
+
+Research has so far failed to identify the period of Fielding's
+traditional residence in Salisbury. According to the following passage in
+_Old and New Sarum or Salisbury_, by R. Benson and H. Hatcher, 1843, he
+occupied three houses in or near Salisbury. "It is well known that
+Fielding the Novelist married a lady of Salisbury named Craddock [sic] and
+was for a time resident in our City. From tradition we learn that he first
+occupied the house in the Close at the south side of St Anne's Gate. He
+afterwards removed to that in St Anne's Street next to the Friary; and
+finally established himself in the Mansion at the foot of Milford Hill,
+where he wrote a considerable portion of his _Tom Jones_." [1]
+
+Fielding's residence in Barnes is no less illusive. The following passage
+occurs in the edition of 1795 of _Lyson's Environs of London_: "Henry
+Fielding, the celebrated Novelist, resided at Barnes, in the house which
+is now the property of Mr Partington." [2] In the edition of 1811 the
+house is described as "now the property of Mrs Stanton, widow of the late
+Admiral Stanton." [3] In Manning and Bray's _Surrey_ the name of the house
+is given: "On Barnes Green is a very old house called Milbourne House....
+It was once the residence of Henry Fielding the celebrated novel writer.
+The widow of Admiral Stanton is the present owner of this house." [4] The
+Barnes Rate-books appear to throw no light on the date of Fielding's
+residence at Milbourne House. It is noteworthy that both the Barnes and
+Salisbury statements indicate a man of some means, living as befitted a
+Fielding.
+
+[1] _History of Wiltshire_. Sir R. C. Hoare; volume entitled "Old and New
+Sarum or Salisbury," by R. Benson and H. Hatcher, 1843. p 602.
+
+[2] Lysons. _Environs of London_, edition of 1795. Vol. i. part iii. p.
+544.
+
+[3] _Ibid_. Edition 1811. Vol. i. p. 10.
+
+[4] Manning and Bray. _History of Surrey_, 1814, vol. iii. p. 316.
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX I
+
+_An undated letter of Fieldings to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu_
+
+The following undated letter is printed in _The Letters and Works of
+Lady Mary Wortley Montagu_ edited by Lord Wharncliffe and W. M.
+Thomas. Lord Wharncliffe includes it with the letters from originals
+among the Wortley papers. [1]
+
+
+Wednesday evening
+
+Madam,--I have presumed to send your ladyship a copy of the play which
+you did me the honour of reading three acts of last spring, and hope it
+may meet as light a censure from your ladyship's judgment as then; for
+while your goodness permits me (what I esteem the greatest, and indeed
+only happiness of my life) to offer my unworthy performances to your
+perusal, it will be entirely from your sentence that they will be
+regarded, or disesteemed by me. I shall do myself the honour of calling
+at your ladyship's door to-morrow at eleven, which, if it be an improper
+hour, I beg to know from your servant what other time will be more
+convenient. I am with the greatest respect and gratitude, madam,
+
+Your ladyship's most obedient, most devoted humble servant.
+
+[1] Letters and Works of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, edited by Lord
+Wharncliffe and W. M. Thomas. Vol. ii. p. 3, note I, and p. 22.
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX J
+
+FIELDING'S _Tom Thumb_
+
+This play appears to have carried some political significance in
+Fielding's day; if it was not, indeed, written with a political intention.
+This may be gathered from an article in the _Daily Post_ of March 29,
+1742, apropos of a performance of the _Tragedy of Tragedies_, that night,
+at Drury Lane. The article attributes, in detail, political intentions to
+the _Tragedy_--"a Piece at first calculated to ridicule some particular
+Persons and Affairs in Europe (at the Time it was writ) but more
+especially in this Island."
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Henry Fielding: A Memoir, by G. M. Godden
+
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