sanguine of temper, made for enjoyment, it raced like a torrent. Both had from the first their own way to make. Placed in a printer's office, Richardson followed the prosperous but narrowing career of the industrious apprentice. When he began to write, he had a comfortable income at his back. Thrown on his wits in London at twenty-one, Fielding had the choice (as he says himself) of becoming either a hackney coachman or a hackney writer. He chose the latter trade. He wrote for bread, with duns at his door, generally in poverty, often in want; and, in later years, in physical suffering.

As there is a traditional Rabelais, so there is a legendary Fielding. Scant justice was done by their own generation to the serious earnestness of either. A hard hitter, Fielding had made many enemies among party journalists. Personal abuse was showered upon him. "Several writers (he said in 1748) attempted to blacken my Name 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." Partly on these reports, which he was not unwilling to believe, partly on the assumption that, in Tom Jones and Captain Booth, Fielding was painting his own character and career, Richardson founded his view that his rival was a low blackguard, who had degraded his birth and education. On the same grounds, Dr. Johnson reached a similar conclusion. Novels are dangerous quarries for autobiographical material, and little is certain about Fielding's personal history. Tantalising gaps still defy research. His letters are few, and contemporary allusions rare. The notes of Lady Louisa Stuart, which embody the recollections of her grandmother, Lady Mary Wortley-Montagu, and of her mother, Lady Bute, are valuable. But Murphy, the only biographer who wrote when the facts were fresh, was intentionally sparing of details. Even Fielding's portrait was drawn from memory, and not from life.

Born in 1707 at the home of his maternal grandfather, Sharpham Park near Glastonbury, Henry Fielding died at Lisbon, October 8, 1754. His father, Edward, was a soldier who served under Marlborough " with much Bravery and Reputation." His mother, Sarah, was the daughter of Sir Henry Gould, one of the Judges of the King's Bench. In his paternal descent the most VOL. 243. No. 496.

interesting point is his relationship to Lady Mary WortleyMontagu; on the maternal side, it is the legal connection, which probably decided his ultimate choice of the Bar as his profession. The marriage was not to " the good likeing " of the Goulds. They distrusted the prudence of their son-in-law. The judge left a sum of money to be invested in the purchase of an estate for his daughter's sole use, " her husband having nothing to doe with it." If she died without a will the property was to be divided among her children. The estate, which was bought, was East Stour, in Dorsetshire. There Henry Fielding's brother and four sisters were born; and there, in 1718, Mrs. Fielding died, intestate.

Two years later, Colonel Fielding married again. This second marriage caused a family quarrel, which ended in a Chancery suit brought by Lady Gould on behalf of her grandchildren. In 1721, she filed an affidavit in which she alleged that Colonel Fielding had married, as his second wife, an Italian woman, who was a Roman Catholic, and had kept an eating-house in London; that the Colonel threatened to bring up his children in the religion of their stepmother; and that he was receiving the rents of East Stour. Edward Fielding, in reply, denied the eating-house, admitted the receipt of the rents, but pleaded that he spent more than the amount on the education of the children, and that his son Henry had been, for more than a year, maintained by him "at Eton Schoole, the yearely expence whereof costs upwards of £60." The case was decided in Lady Gould's favour. She obtained the custody of the children that they " may not be under the influence of the Defendant's Wife, who appeared to be a Papist." So the boy remained at Eton, spending his holidays with Lady Gould, at Salisbury.

Fielding carried away with him from Eton some life-long friendships and a lasting love of the classics. He read widely all his life. To Cervantes and Molière he owed much, and something to Le Sage, Scarron and Marivaux. But it was in the literature of Greece and Rome that he especially delighted. In the dregs of poverty he was found quietly reading the "De Consolatione "of Cicero; Plato accompanied him on his voyage to Lisbon; he projected translations of Aristophanes and his favourite Lucian; and in the library, which he left behind him at his death, were more than 130 volumes of Greek and Latin authors.

In February, 1728, his first play, the comedy of "Love in

Several Masks," was produced at Drury Lane. A month later he entered his name as a student at the University of Leyden. Returning to London eighteen months afterwards, he began his struggle to earn a living by his pen. Tall, handsome, well-born, well-educated, overflowing with mirth and wit, he grasped with both hands such pleasures as he could find. In his Lucianic "Journey from this World to the Next" (1743), he makes a statement which may be autobiographical. When the departed spirits are brought before Minos for judgment, the turn of the author himself comes. He confesses that he had in his youth indulged himself very freely with wine and women," but (he adds) he had never done an injury to any man living, nor avoided an opportunity of doing good." Minos curtly bids him enter through the gate and not waste time in trumpeting his virtues.

More often in debt than in funds, his laced coat and hat were so seldom out of pawn that they were less familiar to his associates than his tattered grey cloak. Whatever money he earned slipped through his fingers. He wooed fortune with many subjects and forms of literature. In the first nine years of his comparatively short life, he was a playwright, trying his hand on comedy, burlesque, and political farce. During the middle period he was mainly a journalist, the founder of four newspapers on the lines of the Spectator, an essayist, a versifier, a literary critic, a political writer. In his closing years he was a social reformer and pamphleteer. His four novels, published between 1742 and 1752, were all written in the nobler part of his career.

Between 1728 and 1737, Fielding produced some twenty plays, which were acted on the stage. If his social comedies were not by the author of "Tom Jones " they would be unread. Hastily produced to meet pressing needs, scribbled on the paperwrappings of his beloved tobacco, many of them would have gone into the fire, if his dinner had not gone with them. The artificial form, into which social comedy was cast, cramped his powers. He had neither the light manner which was needed for an echo of Congreve, nor the dramatic genius to break the mould and create a new model which would give scope for his common-sense view of society, his genuine scorn for its hypocrisies, his hearty laughter at its follies. The cynical tone of jaded worldlings was he could hit hard, but he could not be playful nor quizzical. In burlesque, he could be more natural

uncongenial to him;

and sincere. The cudgel fitted his hand better than the rapier, and he used the weapon with effect against the rant of tragedians. His "Life and Death of Tom Thumb the Great" takes off, with broad rather than subtle humour, the bombastic extravagances of tragic dramatists. Much of the fun is now lost, because the text of the writers satirised is forgotten. But the play has at least one claim to be remembered. Swift told Mrs. Pilkington that he "had not laugh'd above twice in his life," and that one of the occasions was the scene in the original version of the play, where Lord Grizel kills the ghost of Tom Thumb. The other occasion, characteristically added the Dean, was at the antics of a MerryAndrew.

The social comedies are a hastily-gathered, loosely-bound sheaf of a young man's wild oats. They show little of the real Fielding. His marriage was the turning-point of his life. On November 28, 1734, at Charlcombe, near Bath, he married Charlotte Cradock. Their courtship had begun at least four years earlier. She was the passion of his life; the Celia of his youthful love-verses; in her maiden beauty his Sophia Western; as wife and mother his Amelia. Mrs. Fielding may have had much to forgive her husband. But in two important points he was not the original of his own Captain Booth. At no time of his life is there any evidence that he gambled, and Murphy testifies to "his tenderness and constancy to his wife." Lady Bute, who knew them both, sums up the gist of the matter when she says " he loved her passionately and she returned his affection."

Charlotte Fielding had nothing beyond what she might inherit from her mother, who was still living. With a wife to support, Fielding staked much on the success of "The Universal Gallant," produced at Drury Lane in February, 1735. The total failure of his play was a disaster. Relief came at the nick of time. Mrs. Cradock died at the end of the month, and by her will, with the exception of one shilling bequeathed to her daughter Catherine, left her whole fortune to her" dearly beloved daughter," Charlotte Fielding. On this legacy of £1,500, the young couple retired to the country, probably to the home of his childhood, East Stour.

In Murphy's well-known account of Fielding's extravagance as a country squire, his yellow liveries, and his coach and four, there are obvious inaccuracies. Probably the whole story greatly exaggerated. Enough of the money was left to enable

Fielding, in 1736, to take the New Theatre in the Haymarket. Financially his venture as a manager succeeded. In politics, first as a dramatist, then as a journalist, he revealed the seriousness of his character, and his genuine detestation of hypocrisy and meanness. His "Pasquin," produced at the New Theatre in April, 1736, satirised theatrical, social and political conditions, and vigorously attacked the corrupt methods of Walpole's Government. The play equalled the run of " The Beggar's Opera," and it filled Fielding's purse. In the following year he renewed the attack with his "Historical Register for 1736," in which, under the name of Mr. Quiddam, he brought Walpole on the stage, leading a chorus of false patriots, and filling their pockets with gold. His political farces were a menace to the Government, which Walpole could not afford to ignore. In June, 1737, the Licensing Act imposed a censorship on plays. Fielding's career as a political dramatist was closed. He wrote no more for the stage.

In the following November he entered the Middle Temple as a student for the Bar, and was called in June, 1740. Where and how he and his family lived during these and the following years is uncertain. Probably it was at this period that he was helped by George Lyttelton and Ralph Allen, of Bath. He made little or nothing at his profession. Money was scarce, for in 1738 he sold his share in East Stour for £250. "Joseph Andrews " (1742) brought him in £183 11s. od. His "Miscellanies " (1743), in which appeared his second novel, "Jonathan Wild," were published by subscription, and paid him better. But he wrote in the midst of troubles, laid up with 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." To his credit, he did not find party journalism lucrative. As Captain Hercules Vinegar in "The Champion," he was in the forefront of the Opposition. But in 1741, when he bade farewell to party politics, he describes the Opposition waggon, drawn by a team of illmatched asses, with a driver who had lost his way and restive passengers. One protested that he would drive through no more dirt; another got out; a third observed that the asses were the worst-fed animals he had ever seen. "That long-sided Ass they call 'Vinegar,' which the Drivers call upon so often to 'gee up