interest in reform, and his keen appreciation of the defects which existed both in the law itself and in the administration of the law; while the numerous cases heard before him, and periodically reported in his paper by his clerk, afford ample evidence of his judicial activity. How completely he regarded himself (Bathurst and Rigby notwithstanding) as the servant of the public, may be gathered from the following regularly repeated notice:"To the PUBLIC.

"All Persons who shall for the Future, suffer by Robbers, Burglars, &c., are desired immediately to bring, or send, the best Description they can of such Robbers, &c., with the Time and Place, and Circumstances of the Fact, to Henry Fielding, Esq.; at his House in Bow Street."

Another instance of his energy in his vocation is to be found in the little collection of cases entitled Examples of the Interposition of Providence, in the Detection and Punishment of Murder, published, with Preface and Introduction, in April 1752, and prompted, as advertisement announces, "by the many horrid Murders committed within this last Year." It appeared, as a matter of fact, only a few days after the execution at Oxford, for parricide, of the notorious Miss Mary Blandy, and might be assumed to have a more or less timely intention; but the purity of Fielding's purpose is placed beyond a doubt by the fact that he freely distributed it in court to those whom it seemed calculated to profit.

The only other works of Fielding which precede the posthumously published Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon are the Proposal for Making an Effectual Provision for the Poor, etc., a pamphlet dedicated to the Right Honble. Henry Pelham, published in January 1753; and the

Clear State of the Case of Elizabeth Canning, published in March. The former, which the hitherto unfriendly Gentleman's patronisingly styles an "excellent piece," conceived in a manner which gives a high idea of his [the author's] present temper, manners and ability," is an elaborate project for the erection, inter alia, of a vast building, of which a plan, "drawn by an Eminent Hand," was given, to be called the County-house, capable of containing 5000 inmates, and including work-rooms, prisons, an infirmary, and other features, the details of which are too minute to be repeated in these pages, even if they had received any attention from the Legislature, which they did not. The latter was Fielding's contribution to the extraordinary judicial puzzle, which agitated London in 1753-4. It is needless to do more than recall its outline. On the 29th of January 1753, one Elizabeth Canning, a domestic servant aged eighteen or thereabouts, and who had hitherto borne an excellent character, returned to her mother, having been missing from the house of her master, a carpenter in Aldermanbury, since the 1st of the same month. She was half starved and half clad, and alleged that she had been abducted, and confined during her absence in a house on the Hertford Road, from which she had just escaped. This house she afterwards identified as that of one Mother Wells, a person of very indifferent reputation. An ill-favoured old gipsy woman named Mary Squires was also declared by her to have been the main agent in illusing and detaining her. The gipsy, it is true, averred that at the time of the occurrence she was a hundred and twenty miles away; but Canning persisted in her statement. Among other people before whom she came was

Fielding, who examined her, as well as a young woman called Virtue Hall, who appeared subsequently as one of Canning's witnesses. Fielding seems to have been strongly impressed by her appearance and her story, and his pamphlet (which was contradicted in every particular by his adversary, John Hill) gives a curious and not very edifying picture of the magisterial procedure of the time. In February, Wells and Squires were tried; Squires was sentenced to death, and Wells to imprisonment and burning in the hand. Then, by the exertions of the Lord Mayor, Sir Crisp Gascoyne, who doubted the justice of the verdict, Squires was respited and pardoned. Forthwith London was split up into Egyptian and Canningite factions; a hailstorm of pamphlets set in; portraits and caricatures of the principal personages were in all the print shops; and, to use Churchill's words,

“—Betty Canning was at least,

With Gascoyne's help, a six months feast."

In April 1754, however, Fate so far prevailed against her that she herself, in turn, was tried for perjury. Thirtyeight witnesses swore that Squires had been in Dorsetshire; twenty-seven that she had been seen in Middlesex. After some hesitation, quite of a piece with the rest of the proceedings, the jury found Canning guilty; and she was transported for seven years. At the end of her sentence she returned to England to receive a legacy of £500, which had been left her by an enthusiastic old lady of Newington-green.1 Her "case" is full of the most inexplicable contradictions; and it occupies in the State Trials some four hundred and twenty closely-printed

pages of the most curious and picturesque eighteenthcentury details. But how, from the 1st of January 1753 to the 29th of the same month, Elizabeth Canning really did manage to spend her time is a secret that, to this day, remains undivulged.

1 So says the Annual Register for 1761, p. 179. But according to later accounts (Gent. Mag. xliii. 413), she never returned, dying in 1773 at Weathersfield in Connecticut.

CHAPTER VII.

THE JOURNAL OF A VOYAGE TO LISBON,

IN March 1753, when Fielding published his pamphlet on Elizabeth Canning, his life was plainly drawing to a close. His energies indeed were unabated, as may be gathered from a brief record in the Gentleman's for that month, describing his judicial raid, at four in the morning, upon a gaming-room, where he suspected certain highwaymen to be assembled. But his body was enfeebled by disease, and he knew he could not look for length of days. He had lived not long, but much; he had seen in little space, as the motto to Tom Jones announced, "the manners of many men;" and now that, prematurely, the inevitable hour approached, he called Cicero and Horace to his aid, and prepared to meet his fate with philosophic fortitude. Between

and

66

Quem fors dierum cunque dabit, lucro
Appone,"

"Grata superveniet, quæ non sperabitur, hora,

he tells us in his too-little-consulted Proposal for the Poor, he had schooled himself to regard events with equanimity, striving above all, in what remained to him of