HENRY FIELDING.

WHEN Fielding died in 1754, his fame was already established. His figure had long been familiar in the coffee-houses where wits discussed the Dunciad or quoted Chesterfield's last witticism, and in the green-rooms in which his friend Garrick was the presiding genius. He was well known to many of the men whose portraits in Boswell's pages are so vivid that we almost fancy ourselves to be grasping the hands of the originals. His collected works were published in 1762, with a life by Arthur Murphy, who had been personally known to the great novelist, and who had, one must suppose, ample opportunity for ascertaining facts. Fielding, too, left a family; his widow survived till this century, and Lord Campbell, on one of his first circuits, met a son who abounded in anecdotes of his father and his father's contemporaries. The same son who, like his father, became a police-magistrate, was seen by Hazlitt "sunning himself in St. James's Park," and seems, from the description, to have resembled his father both in person and character. Yet Fielding's biographers preserve few tangible facts about his life. We know less of him than of many celebrities of the previous generation.

We can often track Swift or Pope from day to day. We have vivid glimpses of Addison and some members of his little senate; but we have to construct our life of Fielding from uncertain hints, which leave us in the dark as to some of the main facts of his history. Part of the blame, if blame be deserved, must be borne by Murphy. Murphy had a fair share of the vivacity which we generally consider to be the right of his countrymen :

he was not wanting in wit or intelligence, but, unfortunately, he seems to have had a disproportionately small share of Irish good humour. He was touchy and hot-tempered, as may be seen from his letters in the Garrick correspondence; and required as much tickling by a skilful manager as any suspicious politician in the hands of a keen diplomatist. Murphy in society was a bit of a prig, sensitive as to his personal dignity, and therefore apt to array himself in buckram in his writings. He succeeded in making a dull biography with such a subject as the vivacious Garrick, and in turning the lusty, vigorous Fielding into a mere peg for a set of pompous critical remarks. "It is not the intention of the present writer," he says, "to disturb the manes of the dead, as has been practised by certain biographers." He will not enter into unnecessary details of Fielding's distresses, or of the actions which resulted from them; or infer "the character of his heart from the overflowings of sudden and momentary passions"; or "tear off ungenerously the shroud from his remains and pursue him with a cruelty of narrative till the reader's sense is shocked," and so forth. In other words, he will write a life of Fielding without telling us anything that we could not find out for ourselves from Tom Jones. Whether this is a mere excuse for idleness, or a wrong-headed deduction from very respectable motives, the result is the same. No one took the trouble to investigate Fielding's life when the facts were still recent, and, consequently, very little will ever be known of them. Later biographers of course could do little. Scott was forced to eke out his narrative by general reflections; and when a more industrious though not quite satisfactory biographer appeared in the person of Mr. Frederick Lawrence, who published a life in 1855, he could find very little to add to the facts already known.

The loss, perhaps, is not much to be regretted; it is certainly not surprising. During the early part of his career Fielding held a very humble position in the literary hierarchy; and no one was likely to attach much value to his correspondence. We should scarcely know more of Johnson if Johnson had died at the same age as Fielding. It was only in his last few that years he became at all famous; and even then the general recognition

of his merits seems to have been accompanied with a low appreciation of the literary genus which he represented. The novelist had scarcely put in a claim to belong to the highest ranks of authorship, and the social contempt which appears unpleasantly in some of the contemporary references to Fielding's person seems to have extended to his writings. They were not quite work for a gentleman. Though such men as Lord Lyttelton and the worthy Allen seem to have behaved to him with great generosity, they were in the position of patrons bestowing benevolence upon a poor dependant. The famous panegyric in which Gibbon declares that the family of Fielding is more glorious for having given birth to the novelist, than from its connection with the House of Hapsburg, shows that Fielding could be fully appreciated before the century was out. Gibbon was still a lad of seventeen, just recovering from his lapse into Popery, when Fielding died; and this passage (in the opening of the autobiography) would have been regarded as an extravagant paradox by the patrons of literature at the date of the publication of Tom Jones.

Neither need we much regret the oblivion which has covered so much of Fielding's history. Gibbon, in concluding his autobiography, reverts to Tom Jones, "the first of ancient or modern romances," and quotes a passage in which the author looks forward to being read by those who had neither known nor seen him, and whom he would neither know nor see. But Fielding would probably have been little anxious that we should know much of him beyond his books. So true a humourist could not but be more sensible than others to the folly of posthumous vanity. It may be pleasant to think that our work will find readers hereafter, because it proves that the work has genuine vitality. But a humourist can hardly feel much respect for the petty curiosity which prompts the vulgar homage of inquisition into his empty husk. Rather he will be inclined to smile at the thought that such intrusions will be hopelessly baffled, and to wrap himself with a certain sense of comfort in the cloak of darkness, so speedily provided by the benevolent hand of Time. The "wise world" may try to "look into our moan," but will have to draw its wise conclusions out of its own head. Nor