have a dependence of another kind; "a statement which, no doubt, came home to his hearers. But, however witty or forcible in argument, Chesterfield cannot be credited with an unbiassed love of liberty. He was taking a fair opportunity for a telling blow at Walpole, as Walpole, nominally defending morality, was really trying to restrain the growing force of public opinion which, so far as it was not uttered through the government papers, was being arrayed against him with growing unanimity. Walpole, however, had on his side the natural prejudices of Barnard and his like; and even Chesterfield had to disavow any sympathy with Fielding. He referred to Pasquin as proving that there had in fact been "a remarkable licentiousness in the stage." The author, he said, had "thought fit to represent the three great professions, religion, law, physic, as inconsistent with common sense." That was not quite Fielding's meaning, who only meant to say that there were quacks in those professions, and takes much trouble to make his meaning clear in regard to the clergy. But people do not look too closely upon these occasions; and the whole proceeding illustrates the offence which had been given to the decent orderly citizen world as well as to persons in authority by Fielding's rough satire.

The bill was rapidly passed, being brought into the House of Commons on the 20th of May, and returned from the House of Lords, without amendments, on June 8th, 1737. It received the royal assent on the 21st; and poor Fielding's occupation was gone. It appeared, indeed, before very long that it was impossible to put down the nuisance in this fashion. Foote succeeded in evading the Act, and his caricatures of the objects of popular ridicule were amongst the most popular performances in London within a few years. But for the time, Fielding had to look elsewhere for the means of support. He gave up writing for the stage altogether, although, as we have seen, one of his pieces was produced at Garrick's request at a later period; and set to work to take up his career at the point where he had diverged from it some eight or nine years before. On November 1st, 1737, he was admitted as a student at the Middle Temple. He began his studies at the age of thirty, with a wife and family, and probably

VOL. I.

g

with health already suffering from hereditary gout, not improved by his general course of life. According to Murphy, he applied himself to his studies with remarkable intensity. His occasional dissipations never suppressed his thirst for knowledge; and he would retire from a tavern late at night, sit down in his chambers and "make extracts from the most abstruse authors for several hours before he went to bed." He acquired, we are assured, considerable legal knowledge, and was even eminent in some branches, "more especially in crown law," two MS. volumes, in folio, remaining in the hands of his brother to attest his diligence. All that we can say with confidence, is that Fielding threw himself energetically into his new pursuit, and did his utmost to retrieve the consequences of previous recklessness and ill fortune. He was called to the bar in 1740, and joined the western circuit. It does not appear whether he ever held any briefs. Here and there in his writings there are legal anecdotes and allusions which may be set down to his circuit experience. The best instance is a story told by Partridge of the notorious Judge Page. A wretched man, tried for horse-stealing, could only defend himself by saying that he "had found the horse." "Ay,' answered the judge; 'thou art a lucky fellow; I have travelled the circuit these forty years and never found a horse in my life; but I'll tell thee what, friend, thou wast more lucky than thou didst know of, for thou didst not only find a horse, but a halter too, I promise thee.' To be sure I shall never forget the words. Upon which everybody fell a laughing, as how could they help it? Nay, and twenty other jests he made which I can't remember now. There was something about his skill in horseflesh which made all the folks laugh. To be certain, the judge must have been a very brave man, as well as a man of much learning. It is indeed charming sport to hear trials upon life and death. One thing, I own, I thought it a little hard that the prisoner's counsel was not suffered to speak for him, though he desired only to be heard one very short word; but my lord would not hearken to him though he suffered the counsellor to talk against him for above half-an-hour. I thought it hard, I own, that there should be so many of them —my lord, and the court, and the jury, and the counsellor,

and the witnesses, all upon one poor man, and he too, in chains."

The passage is admirably characteristic of Fielding's humour, and of the generous common sense which he always brings to bear upon the abuses of the day. But we know nothing of any actual performances at the bar. The gout, we are told, soon made it impossible for Fielding to attend to his profession; and naturally he did not succeed in a profession which requires an exclusive devotion. The problem naturally arises, how Fielding managed to support himself during this period. We cannot say precisely. He may have saved some scraps from the fortune which went to ruin at East Stour; possibly the profits of his two seasons at the Haymarket may have floated him for a time; and it seems that at one period he must have received direct assistance from the generosity of friends. In the dedication of Tom Jones, he declares that he partly owed his existence to Lyttelton during great part of the time employed in its composition; and we know that he owed much to the excellent Allen, the friend of Warburton and Pope, and the original of Allworthy. Whatever gleams of success he may have had at the bar must have been faint and transitory. He, like so many other barristers of later days, tried to make an income by his pen, though he had given up writing for the stage, possibly upon the ground that activity in that direction would be too manifestly incompatible with devotion to the law. A couple of incidental notices in his own writings give some indications of his position. In the preface to his Miscellanies, published in 1743, he takes the opportunity to deny very emphatically that he has been concerned in any anonymous libels. He declares" in the most solemn manner," that since June, 1741, he has not written a syllable in the Champion (of which I shall speak directly), or any other public paper. He tells us that in the previous winter he had been laid up with the gout, with his favourite child dying in one bed, and his wife," in a condition very little better," on another. He had been annoyed by the imputation of certain anonymous writings, in which he had had no concern. He not only declares that he has written nothing of the kind, but protests that he will never again publish anything without putting his name to it. A year

afterwards he returns to the same subject in the preface to his sister's novel of David Simple, and repudiates with indignation many of the anonymous productions which have been laid to his charge, especially a certain poem called the Causidicade (a form of title which had been made popular by the Dunciad) in which a violent attack had been made upon the leaders of his profession. The report that he was the real author of his sister's novel has been injurious to him, as he says, though he had written much of inferior merit; it Implied that he had broken his promise of publishing nothing anonymous, and it might injure him in a profession "to which I have applied with so arduous and intent a diligence, that I have had no leisure, if I had had inclination to compose anything of this kind." He proceeds to renounce all desire for literary glory; the world is not more unwilling to bestow the laurel than he would now be "to receive any such garland or fool's cap." There is not a true Briton in the kingdom who hates his wife more heartily than he (Fielding) detests the Muses. Oddly enough, he follows up this declaration by the statement that he shall no longer hold himself bound by a promise which has failed to protect him from unjust suspicions. He has, he says, no present intention of anonymous writing, but he does not consider himself bound to abstain if the occasion offers.

This seems to imply some misgiving as to his means of support. Fielding, during the whole of his career as law-student and barrister, was dallying with literary employment; he was half afraid of the attorneys, who would suspect him of neglecting his estimable profession, and yet achieving so much success as must have suggested to him that literature was after all his true vocation. At times, he probably tried to shake the dust of Grub Street off his feet, and then, the pressure of immediate necessity forced him once more to take up the pen.

It is noteworthy that, in spite of this pressure, Fielding's writings show less traces of haste than we might have expected. His novels are not, like his plays, hasty performances, which have palled upon him before completion. They have been carefully elaborated, and are written with a view to permanent reputation rather than immediate profit. In those days novel

writing had not become an established means of making a living; and Fielding's chief hopes, it would seem, must always have been fixed upon something in the way of his profession. During his preparation for the bar, he had made some attempts in a kind of writing which was then amongst the most convenient modes of turning literary talent to account. The periodical essay made so popular by the Spectator flourished more or less till the end of the eighteenth century. In 1739 he started the Champion in combination with his friend Ralph; he wrote the chief papers in it till the summer of 1740, and seems to have been an occasional contributor until June, 1741. Two volumes of his essays, written from November 15, 1739, till June 19, 1740, were collected in 1741. Johnson and Goldsmith made more or less successful experiments in the same direction in the Rambler (1750-52) and the Bee and the Citizen of the World (1759-60), and the World, edited by Moore, a friend of Fielding's, was from 1753 to 1756 "the bow of Ulysses, in which it was the fashion for men of rank and genius to try their strength." Countless other periodicals of the same kind have long since passed to oblivion; but the taste for lay sermons of this description, now represented by social articles in our weekly journals, seems to be inherent in the British public. Fielding's performances can scarcely be reckoned as on the same level with Johnson's or even Goldsmith's, to say nothing of Steele and Addison. They have never been reprinted in his works; although some of them show very distinctly the hand of the author of Tom Jones. They are lost, however, in a mass of inferior work. Fielding's collaborator, Ralph, is known from two remarkable books. He came to England from Philadelphia in 1725 in company with Benjamin Franklin; and the autobiography of that famous philosopher gives details of their early association which are not specially creditable to either of the two. Ralph appears again as a literary adventurer in the diary of Bubb Dodington. Not the least characteristic passages of that queer performance are those in which Dodington praises the honesty of Ralph, whom he also describes as the "ablest pen in England;" and informs us in the same breath how the honest man put up his pen for sale, and was finally bought by