Fielding

s given in Burke, fully justifies the splendid but sufficiently quoted eulogy of Gibbon. From that first Jeffrey of Hapsburgh, who came to England, temp. Henry III., and assumed the

ounger branch of the Denbigh family, Henry Fielding directly descended. The Earl of Desmond's fifth son, John, entered the Church, becoming Canon of Salisbury and Chaplain to William III. By his wife Bridget, daughter of Scipio Cockain, Esq., of Somerset, he had three sons and three daughters. Edmund, the third son, was a soldier, who fought with distinction under Marlborough. When about the age of thirty, he married Sarah, daughter of Sir Henry Gould, Knt., of Sharpham Par

tary, and possibly impecunious, son-in-law. This money, it is also important to remember, was to come to her children at her death. Sir Henry Gould did not long survive the making of his will, and died in March 1710. [Footnote: Mr. Keightley, who seems to have seen the will, dates it-doubtless by a slip of the pen-May 1708. Reference to the original, however, now at Somerset House, shows the correct date to be March 8, 1706, before which time the marriage of Fielding's parents must therefore be placed.] The Fieldings must then have removed to a small house at East Stour (now Stower), in Dorsetshire, where Sarah Fielding was born in the following November. It may be that this property was purchased with Mrs. Fielding's money; but

t by the "pleasant Banks of sweetly-winding Stour" which passes through it, and to which he subsequently refers in Tom Jones. His education during this time was confided to a certain Mr. Oliver, whom Lawrence designates the "family chaplain." Keightley supposes that he was the curate of Eas

ton boys were then, as at present, divided into collegers and oppidans. There are no registers of oppidans before the end of the last century; but the Provost of Eton has been good enough to search the college lists from 1715 to 1735, and there is no record of any Henry Fielding, nor indeed of any Fielding at all. It may therefore be concluded that he was an oppi

drank mild punch at the "Christopher," and, no doubt, was occasionally brought back by Jack Cutler, "Pursuivant of Runaways," to make his explanations to Dr. Bland the Head-Master, or Francis Goode the Usher. Among his school-fellows were some who subsequently attained to high dignities in the State, and still remained his friends. Foremost of these was George Lyttelton, later the statesman and orator, who had already commenced poet as an Eton boy with his "Soliloquy of a Beauty in the Country." Another was the future Sir Charles Hanbury Williams, the wit and squib- writer, then known as Charles Hanbury only. A third was Thomas Winnington, for whom, in after years, Fielding fou

hat place, young Fielding appears to have become desperately enamoured of her, and to have sadly fluttered the Dorset dovecotes by his pertinacious and undesirable attentions. At one time he seems to have actually meditated the abduction of his "flame," for an entry in the town archives, discovered by Mr. George Roberts, sometime Mayor of Lyme, who tells the story, declares that Andrew Tucker, Esq., went in fear of his life "owing to the behaviour of Henry Fielding and his attendant, or man." Such a state of things (especially when guardians have sons of their own) is clearly not to be endured; and Miss Andrew was prudently transferred to the care of another guardian, Mr. Rhodes of Modbury, in South Devon, to whose son, a young gentleman of Oxford, she was promptly married. Burke (Landed Gentry, 1858) dates the marriage in 1726, a date which is practically

rgely revised subsequent to that date, for it contains references to Mrs. Clive, Mrs. Woffington, Cibber the younger, and even to Richardson's Pamela. It has no special merit, although some of the couplets have the true Swiftian turn. If Murphy's statement be correct, that the author "went from Eton to Leyden," it must have been planned at the latter place, where, he tells us in the preface to Don Quixote in England, he also be

was, that not long after the arrival of the latter in the Metropolis he had given up all idea of pursuing the law, to which his mother's legal connections had perhaps first attracted him, and had determined to adopt the more seductive occupation of living by his wits. At this date he was in the prime of youth. From the portrait by Hogarth representing him at a time when he was broken in health and had lost his teeth, it is difficult to reconstruct his likeness at twenty. But we may fairly assume the "

that dividing

. His natural bias was towards literature, and his opportuniti

ghting the cognoscenti by Dite che fa, the echo-air in the same composer's Tolomeo. Opposite the Opera House, and, in position, only "a few feet distant" from the existing Haymarket Theatre, was the New, or Little Theatre in the Haymarket, which, from the fact that it had been opened eight years before by "the French Comedians," was also sometimes styled the French House. Next comes the no-longer-existent theatre in Lincoln's Inn Fields, which Christopher Rich had rebuilt in 1714, and which his son John had made notorious for pantomimes. Here the Beggar's Opera, precursor of a long line of similar productions, had

Entertainment which engrosses the whole Talk and Admiration of the Town,"-i.e. the Beggar's Opera. He also acknowledges the kindness of Wilks and Cibber "previous to its Representation," and the fact that he had thus acquired their suffrages makes it doubtful whether his stay at Leyden was not really briefer than is generally supposed, or that he left Eton much earlier. In either case he must have been in London some mon

it or no; and then perhaps he tells you it won't do, and returns it you again, reserving the Subject, and perhaps the Name, which he brings out in his next Pantomime; but if he should receive the Play, then you must attend again to get it writ out into Parts, and Rehears'd. Well, Sir, at last the Rehearsals begin; then, Sir, begins another Scene of Trouble with the Actors, some of whom don't like their Parts, and all are continually plaguing you with

ll replies, with

s," he says, "which pretend to give a picture of manners and to deal in knowledge of human nature must necessarily be founded on affectation." To this rule the personages of Love in Several Masques are no exception. They are drawn rather from the stage than from life, and there is little constructive skill in the plot. A certain booby squire, Sir Positive Trap, seems like a first indication of some of the later successes in the novels; but the rest of the dramatis personae are puppets. The success of the piece was probably owing to the acting of Mrs. Oldfield, who took the

ffend the Fair

blush to hear,

he might honestly think that the work which had received the imprimatur of a stage-queen and a lady of quality should fairly be regarded as mo

f U-n G- (alias New Hog's Norton) in Com. Hants, which Mr. Keightley has identified with Upton Grey, near Odiham, in Hampshire. It is a burlesque description of a tumbledown country-house in which the writer was staying, and is addressed to Rosalinda. The other is entitled To Euthalia, from which it must be concluded that, in 1728, Sarah Andrew had found more than one successor. But in spite of some biographers, and of the apparent encouragement given to his first comedy, Fielding does not seem to have followed up dramatic authorship with equal vigour, or at all events with equal success. His real connection with the stage does not begin until January 1730, when the Temple Beau was produced by Giffard

Wit, in each

r'd the Trophie

, and Shew, wi

's the Darlin

and under thin disguises no doubt depicts much which was within the writer's experience. At all events, Luckless, the author in the play, has more than one of the characteristics which distinguish the traditional portrait of Fielding himself in his early years. He wears a laced coat, is in love, writes plays, and cannot pay his landlady, who declares, with some show of justice, that she "would no more depend on a Benefit-Night of an un-acted Play, than she wou'd on a Benefit-Ticket in an un-drawn Lottery." "Her Floor (she laments) is all spoil'd with Ink-her Windows with

, Mr. Index, wh

ve brought

mor, & nos cedamus Amori, Sixpence-For Difficile est Satyram non scribere, Sixpence-Hum! hum! hum! Sum total, for Thirty-six Latin Motto's,

t either of the Universities, I

ember that I must have two Latin Seditious Motto's and on

d to look on that, Sir, and print me Five

Of the Nature of the Gods and his Tusculan Questions, by Jeremy Index, E

he Book that I ever intend to publish. It is only a

not translated a W

a single

ble in your Bills for the future, or I shall deal with you no longer; for I have a certain Fellow of

llow some difference between a neat fresh Piece, piping hot out of the Classicks

. This, however, will be more conveniently treated under its proper date, and it is only necessary to say here that the slight sketches of Marplay and Sparkish given in the first edition, were presumably intended for Cibber and Wilks, with whom, notwithstanding the "civil and kind Behaviour" for

at dost think

one, for ought I know; but I

Interest, and

st sways as much in the Theatre as at Court.-And you k

e expectations which warranted the civilities of Messrs. Wilks and Cibber; but the "Luckless" of two years later had probably convinced them that his dramatic performances

, The Justice caught in his own Trap, 1730, succeeded the Author's Farce. The leading idea, that of a tradesman who neglects his shop for "foreign affairs," appears to be derived from Addison's excellent character-sketch in the Tatler of the "Political Upholsterer." This is the more likely, in that Arne the musician, whose father is generally supposed to have been Addison's original, was Fielding's contemporary at Eton. Justice Squeezum, another character contained in this play, is a kind of first draft of the later Justice Thrasher in Amelia. The representation of the trading justice on the stage, however, was by no means new, since Justice Quorum in Coffey's Beggar's Wedding (with whom, as will appear presently, Field

some of all commercial pursuits, the traffic of a husband in his wife's dishonour, appears, oddly enough, to have been regarded by its author with especial complacency. Its prologue lays stress upon the moral purpose; it was dedicated to Sir Robert Walpole; and from a couple of letters printed in Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's Corresponde

ble reception. In the following year it was enlarged to three acts (in the first version there had been but two), and reproduced at the same theatre as the Tragedy of Tragedies; or, The Life and Death of Tom Thumb the Great, "with the Annotations of H. Scriblerus Secundus." It is certainly one of the best burle

sba, Sopho

arod

nca, Hunca

The annotations, which abound in transparent references to Dr. B[entle]y, Mr. T[heobal]d, Mr. D[enni]s, are excellen

of King Arthur. Petnis Burmanus makes three Tom Thumbs, one whereof he supposes to have been the same Person whom the Greeks called Hercules, and that by these Giants are to be understood the Centaurs slain by that Heroe. Another Tom Thumb he contends to have been no other than the Hermes Trismegistus of the Antients. The third Tom Thumb he

Court Tom Th

l he proper to place that Court out of Britain, where no Giants were ever heard of.

a salvage

eous G

the sam

th two Brethr

which had

ther

eneatis

s, and now utterly forgotten. But the following lines from one of the speeches of Lord Grizzle-a part admirably acted by Liston in later year

long, I will

the slighted

ooding Tempest

ollow Cavern

rl, shall rowl

Land of all the

'ry Chink of H

, in some dark

rush down the

Streets with ter

outs, and wash wh

ps, the throngi

m the Dirty

oe-Boy in the

r versions, omitted in deference to the critics, for which the reader will seek vainly in the play as now printed; and he will, moreover, discover that Mrs. Pilkington's memory served her imperfectly, since it is not Tom Thumb who kills the ghost, but the ghost of Tom Thumb which is killed by his jealous rival, Lord Grizzle. A trifling inaccuracy of this sort, however, is rather in favour of the trut

le touches of his own, as, for instance, where Gregory (Sganarelle) tells his wife Dorcas (Martino), whom he has just been beating, that as they are but one, whenever he beats her he beats half of himself. To this she replies by requesting that for the future he will beat the other half. An entire scene (the thirteenth) was also added at the desire of Miss Raftor, who played Dorcas, and thought her part too short. This is apparently intended as a burlesque of the notorious quack Misaubin, to whom the Mock-

'Avare at Drury Lane in the following year, which entirely outshone the older versions of Shadwell and Ozell, and gained from Voltaire the praise of having added to the original "quelques beautes de dialogue part

e forward. In default of the always deferred allowance, his father's house at Salisbury (?) was no doubt open to him; and it is plain, from indications in his minor poems, that he occasionally escaped into the country. But in London he lived for the most part, and probably not very worshipfully. What, even now, would be the life of a young man of Fielding's age, fond of pleasure, careless of the future, very liberally equipped with high spirits, and straightway exposed to the perilous seductions of the stage? Fielding had the defects of his qualities, and was no better than the rest of those about him. He was manly, and frank, and generous; but these characteristics could scarcely protect him from the terrors of the tip-staff

n the whole Street of Arlington."

ai

that dines

eet esteem'd

Hours must

who ne'er d

n

oth in my F

is but tw

can exclude

quiet on

timate to presume that there is no great exaggeration in the portra

esterday appe

ize, and plaister

stant gaudy Tr

e Bard was eve

om his Humour fl

essity;-for

elvet which he

without money, and money without scribbling." "When he had contracted to bring on a play, or a farce," says Murphy, "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." It is not easy to co

s every Season; yet as such Pieces are always wrote with uncommon Rapidity, and during such fatal Intervals only as the Stocks have been on the Fall, this Legacy will be of use to him to revise and correct his Works. Furth

July 1734, and seems to have hitherto escaped inquiry, refers to none other than the "very neg