by reckless indulgence in pleasure, it is but the barest justice to him to admit that at this period he devoted most serious thoughts to the evils around him, and to devising appropriate remedies. He was not simply a man of kindly nature, troubled by the sight of misery and anxious to shake the indifference of his countrymen; but a serious reformer, who had considered the whole bearings of the subject as well as he could, and proposed measures-which were indeed very far from being entirely sound in principle-but which showed at least a very just appreciation of the true nature of a monstrous evil. During the eighteenth century, the old social system was becoming inadequate to meet the new wants of a rapidly-increasing population, congregating in the great centres of commerce and manufacture. How to meet the new requirements by improved systems of dealing with the poor was, if people could have seen it, one of the most vitally important questions of the time. Fielding saw the evil at least as clearly as any of his contemporaries; and did his very utmost, as he says, to rouse the rulers from their lethargy. Unfortunately the Bedfords and Newcastles and Bubb Dodingtons were much more interested in corrupting each other than in removing the corruptions under which the lower classes suffered; and poor Fielding was regarded as a contemptible scribbler, who had his deserts when some of the dirtiest crumbs had been thrown to him from the public table. The view taken of him is unpleasantly indicated in a familiar passage from Walpole's letters. A couple of fine gentlemen, Rigby and Bathurst, went one night to take a servant accused of a crime before Fielding. He, poor man, sent them word that he was at supper, and that they might come next morning. They did not understand that freedom and ran up, when they found him banqueting with a blind man and three Irishmen, on some cold mutton and a bone of ham, both in one dish, and the dirtiest cloth I ever saw. He never stirred, or asked them to sit. Rigby, who had seen him come so often to beg a guinea of Sir Charles Williams and Bathurst-at whose father's he had lived for victuals-understood that dignity as little, and pulled themselves chairs, on which he civilised." The blind man, as Fielding's biographer suggests, was probably his half-brother, Sir John, who succeeded him as magistrate. These distinguished persons evidently regarded Fielding as a kind of upper servant, who ought to have been flattered at their condescension. In such cases one is tempted to feel a sort of posthumous indignation; and to wish that Rigby-that typical example of the meanest variety of eighteenth century politician-could have known how completely inverted would be the relations between him and Fielding in the eyes of posterity. But it is wiser to feel as Fielding himself would probably have felt, that after all, it mattered very little. The sight of a mean-souled dandy insulting a great man in rags is certainly painful; but the great man should be above caring for such things, and so may we on his behalf. "Fret not thyself because of the ungodly," is surely a very wise sentiment; nay, I am inclined to be rather pleased that the ungodly too should have their little enjoyments. Fielding's greatness was not of the kind which a Rigby could appreciate; and the impertinence was really to his table-cloth, and not to his great soul, which was beyond poor Rigby's ken. I have the same tolerance even for Paul Whitehead, whose anecdote about Addison and Philips I have already quoted. It occurs in a note to a passage in an epistle to Dr. Thompson, where he says that he will not "Haunt the levee of a purse-proud peer, This admirable creature, in fact, managed by sycophancy to various great men and complicity in the orgies of Medmenham Abbey, to wriggle himself into a better thing; the place, namely, of "deputy-treasurer of the chamber," worth £800, which was obtained for him by his patron, Sir F. Dashwood, one of the monks of that edifying institution. He gave this little kick at Fielding the year after the novelist's death; and no doubt felt himself to be a really superior being. One little fact may be mentioned here which has a certain interest. Fielding joined his brother in a rather curious speculation. In 1749 a prospectus appeared of the Universal Registry Office, which had been just opened by "John Fielding and Co." The prospectus which may not improbably have been the work of Henry Fielding, lays down some general principles about human nature, and then quotes a project suggested by "the ingenious Montaigne," in his thirty-fourth Essay, which it is proposed to carry into execution. The "Universal Register Office" was to be a kind of general agency; the prospectus dwells in particular upon the great advantages which it offered to persons wishing to let or hire houses, and it would appear that the useful member of society called a house-agent was not yet in existence. Besides this, it was to introduce borrowers to lenders, masters to servants, and so forth; and certainly it seems to have been calculated to discharge functions which have since been found very necessary. How far it succeeded or not, I do not know; but there are some curious little puffs of it in the first edition of Amelia. These, with certain other passages, a puff, for example, of Fielding's friend, Dr. Thompson, were omitted in the collected edition of his works published by Murphy, and, I fancy, from all later editions. Murphy says that Amelia is reprinted "from a copy corrected by the author's own hand. The exceptionable passages which inadvertency had thrown out are here omitted." These "exceptionable" passages are chiefly the aforesaid puffs, which scarcely show "inadvertency." I propose to give them in notes to the present edition. Whatever the responsibilities and humiliations of his position, Fielding still found time for literature. Tom Jones, the work of some years, appeared in February 1749, and became at once. popular. Millar gave him £600 for it, and afterwards added £100 in gratitude for its success. At the end of 1751 appeared Amelia, for which Millar paid £1,000. It was, it appears, less successful. The first edition, indeed, was sold off in a day; but Scott tells us that this was owing to a dodge of the canny Scotchman, Millar, who took in the booksellers at his sale by professing to lay it aside as a book certain to be in such demand that it could not be offered on the usual terms. Johnson, who was no admirer of Fielding's, read it through at a sitting. It was, he said, the only book within living memory which had reached a second edition so speedily; but he adds that the sale was spoilt by that "vile broken nose" of Amelia's,-a fact, if it be a fact, which deserves the serious attention of novelists in search of popularity. During 1752, Fielding published a periodical paper, the Covent Garden Journal. It contains some good specimens of Fielding's characteristic irony; but is perhaps more remarkable for the evidence, which I have already noticed, of the occupation of his mind with the social problems of the time. In it, as in Amelia, we can see what were some of the reflections which had occurred to him in his justice's office. Other papers are partly occupied with a rather inglorious warfare into which he had been drawn, by that singular charlatan, Sir John Hill, a noisy, disreputable pretender to science, who tried to force himself into the Royal Society, composed libellous novels, for one of which he was publicly thrashed by an Irish gentleman, sold pills of miraculous power, was a familiar swaggerer at the Bedford coffee-house, and then one of the leaders of a cabal against Fielding's friend, Garrick, and by his multitudinous puffings and swaggerings, succeeded at times in making a very good income. The quarrel was apparently not very savage, and it is certainly not worth inquiring into. One only regrets that Fielding should have wasted energy in petty squabbles of this kind. The quarrel may suggest one remark. Fielding, as an inhabitant of Grub Street, had his full share of the many squabbles characteristic of its fretful and touchy inhabitants. He seems, however, to have received the frequent attacks and insults of his fellows with good temper; he returns a blow now and then, but there is no bitterness in his enmity. His relations to one or two of his better-known contemporaries deserve a moment's notice. I have already mentioned his warfare against the Cibbers, which was carried on at intervals through many years, and which (as I have suggested) probably took its origin from the unjustifiable treatment of the Drury Lane manager. But it wants nothing to explain an antipathy which was but natural between the burly John Bull, and the Frenchified fop; and, indeed, Cibber seemed in every sense to have been expressly created as a butt for contemporary satirists. We may regret that Fielding was not upon pleasant terms with his two great contemporary rivals in his own art. But it does not appear that he was to blame in either case. Smollett attacked him in the first edition of Peregrine Pickle (1751), and is said on contemporary authority to be the author of a pamphlet (1752), in which Fielding is "treated with the utmost wantonness of contempt." It is the kind of production with which Pope and Swift used to assail such enemies as Curll. Smollett's hostility may be easily explained. He was a perfervid Scot, indignant at the cruelties exercised after Culloden, and not likely to be soothed by Fielding's anti-Jacobite denunciations of Scotchmen and bare-breeched Highlanders. He had fallen out, moreover with Garrick and with Lyttelton, both of whom were Fielding's special friends. In the second edition of Peregrine Pickle, he withdrew his personalities with an apology; but it does not appear that he ever came into personal relations with Fielding. Richardson's hostility to Fielding is still more easily explained. The cause is sufficiently indicated in one of Richardson's letters to Lady Bradshaigh, written soon after the appearance of Tom Jones. "The Pamela (which he abused in his Shamela, i.e. Joseph Andrews) taught him how to write to please, though his manners are so different. Before his Joseph Andrews (facts and names taken from that story with a lewd and ungenerous engraftment), the poor man wrote without being read, except when his Pasquins roused party admiration," and so forth. Briefly, Richardson, a good man in spite of his failings, bitterly resented Fielding's parody, and tried to believe that what success his enemy obtained was entirely due to the hints borrowed from himself. The allusions to Fielding in his letters all show the same petty sentiment, natural enough it may be to the quiet respectable little tradesman, cockered and flattered by feminine. adorers, and terribly outraged by the huge guffaw of the great masculine man of the world. But one cannot quite forgive some of the utterances; his anxiety to prove that Fielding is writing himself out, and the triumph with which he announces the supposed failure of Amelia, and the going out of fashion of Tom Jones. The oddest part of it is his communication with Fielding's sister, of whose literary merits Fielding had spoken in the most generous terms. "Well might a critical judge of writing say, as he did to me, that your late brother's knowledge of it (the human heart) was not (fine writer as he was) comparable to yours. His was but as the knowledge of the outside of a clockwork machine, whilst yours was that of all the finer springs and movements of the inside." The same figure, we may remember, |