Simplicity, such Manners, such deep Penetration into Nature; such Power to raise and alarm the Passions, few Writers, either ancient or modern, have been possessed of. My Affections are so strongly engaged, and my Fears are so raised, by what I have already read, that I cannot express my Eagerness to see the rest. Sure this Mr. Richardson is Master of all that Art which Horace compares to Witchcraft -Pectus inaniter angit, Irritat, mulcet, falsis terroribus implet Between the discontinuance of the True Patriot and the establishment of its successor occurred an event, the precise date of which has been hitherto unknown, namely, Fielding's second marriage. The account given of this by Lady Louisa Stuart is as follows: "His [Fielding's] 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 along 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." It has now been ascertained that the marriage took place at St. Bene't's, Paul's Wharf, an obscure little church. in the City, at present surrendered to a Welsh congregation, but at that time, like Mary-le-bone old church, much in request for unions of a private character. The date in the register is the 27th of November 1747. The second Mrs. Fielding's maiden name, which has been hitherto variously reported as Macdonnell, Macdonald, and Macdaniel, is given as Mary Daniel,1 and she is further described as "of St. Clement's Danes, Middlesex, Spinster." Either previously to this occurrence, or immediately after it, Fielding seems to have taken two rooms in a house in Back Lane, Twickenham, "not far," says the Rev. Mr. Cobbett in his Memorials, "from the site of Copt Hall." In 1872 this house was still standing,—a quaint old-fashioned wooden structure;2—and from hence, on the 25th February 1748, was baptized the first of the novelist's sons concerning whom any definite information exists-the William Fielding who, like his father, became a Westminster magistrate. Beyond suggesting that it may supply a reason why, during Mrs. Fielding's life-time, her husband's earliest biographer made no reference to the marriage, it is needless to dwell upon the proximity between the foregoing dates. In other respects the circumstance now first made public is not inconsistent with Lady Stuart's narrative; and there is no doubt, from the references to her in the Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon and elsewhere, that Mary Daniel did prove an excellent wife, mother, and nurse. Another thing is made clear by the date established, and this is that the verses "On Felix; Marry'd to a Cook-Maid” in the Gentleman's Magazine for July 1746, to which Mr. Lawrence refers, cannot possibly have anything to do with Fielding, 1 See note to Fielding's letter in Chap. vii. 2 Now (1883) it no longer exists, and a row of cottages occupies the site. although they seem to indicate that alliances of the kind were not unusual. Perhaps Pamela had made them fashionable. On the other hand, the supposed allusion to Lyttelton and Fielding, to be found in the first edition. of Peregrine Pickle, but afterwards suppressed, receives a certain confirmation. "When," says Smollett, speaking of the relations of an imaginary Mr. Spondy with Gosling Scrag, who is understood to represent Lyttelton, "he is inclined to marry his own cook-wench, his gracious patron may condescend to give the bride away; and may finally settle him in his old age, as a trading Westminster justice." That, looking to the facts, Fielding's second marriage should have gained the approval and countenance of Lyttelton is no more than the upright and honourable character of the latter would lead us to expect. The Jacobite's Journal ceased to appear in November 1748. In the early part of the December following, the remainder of Smollett's programme came to pass, and by Lyttelton's interest Fielding was appointed a Justice of the Peace for Westminster. From a letter in the Bedford Correspondence, dated 13th December 1748, respecting the lease of a house or houses which would qualify him to act for Middlesex, it would seem that the county was afterwards added to his commission. He must have entered upon his office in the first weeks of December, as upon the ninth of that month one John Salter was committed to the Gatehouse by Henry Fielding, Esq., "of Bow Street, Covent Garden, formerly Sir Thomas de Veil's." Sir Thomas de Veil, who died in 1746, and whose Memoirs had just been published, could not, however, have been Fielding's immediate predecessor. CHAPTER V. TOM JONES. WRITING from Basingstoke to his brother Tom, on the 29th October 1746, Joseph Warton thus refers to a visit he paid to Fielding : "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 [Warton no doubt uses the word here in the sense of 'maker' or 'creator'] till one or two in the morning, and were inexpressibly diverted. I find he values, as he justly may, his Joseph Andrews above all his writings: he was extremely civil to me, I fancy, on my Father's account.” 1 This mention of Joseph Andrews has misled some of Fielding's biographers into thinking that he ranked that novel above Tom Jones. But, in October 1746, Tom Jones had not been published; and, from the absence of any reference to it by Warton, it is only reasonable to conclude that it had not yet assumed a definite form, or Fielding, who was by no means uncommunicative, would in all probability have spoken of it 1 i.e. the Rev. Thomas Warton, Vicar of Basingstoke, and some. time Professor of Poetry at Oxford. as an effort from which he expected still greater things. It is clear, too, that at this date he was staying in London, presumably in lodgings with his sister; and it is also most likely that he lived much in town when he was conducting the True Patriot and the Jacobite's Journal. At other times he would appear to have had no settled place of abode. There are traditions that Tom Jones was composed in part at Salisbury, in a house at the foot of Milford Hill; and again that it was written at Twiverton, or Twerton-on-Avon, near Bath, where, as the Vicar pointed out in Notes and Queries for March 15th, 1879, there still exists a house called Fielding's Lodge, over the door of which is a stone crest of a phoenix rising out of a mural coronet. This latter tradition is supported by the statement of Mr. Richard Graves, author of the Spiritual Quixote, and rector, circa 1750, of the neighbouring parish of Claverton, who says in his Trifling Anecdotes of the late Ralph Allen, that Fielding while at Twerton used to dine almost daily with Allen at Prior Park. There are also traces of his residence at Bath itself; and of visits to the seat of Lyttelton's father at Hagley in Worcestershire. Towards the close of 1747 he had, as before stated, rooms in Back Lane, Twickenham; and it must be to this or to some earlier period that Walpole alludes in his Parish Register (1759): "Here Fielding met his bunter Muse a quatrain in which the last lines excuse the first. According to Mr. Cobbett's already-quoted Memorials of Twickenham, he left that place upon his appointment as a |