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almost daily" at Prior Park, and lived, "while he was writing his novel of Tom Jones," at Twerton in "the first house on the right hand, with a spread eagle over the door."

It is difficult to find any reason for doubting the clergyman's word. The old stone house, easily identified, has been named, as I have said earlier, "Fielding's Lodge." As one enters through the quaint doorway, there is, curiously enough, a "little parlour" to the left with an ancient fireplace, unchanged since Fielding sat and wrote there. There may have been "a little parlour" also in the houses which Fielding occupied in Old Boswell Court and at Twickenham; so it must be left undetermined where he composed the most eloquent passage that ever came from his pen. On the supposition that he wrote the famous invocation with which the thirteenth book opens in immediate sequence to the twelfth book, he must have been then in town conducting "The Jacobite's Journal." But that initial chapter, standing by itself, might have been written earlier or later than the narrative surrounding it. All that can be said with certainty is that the "little parlour" at Twerton fits exactly into the situation as Fielding describes it. To sum up without pressing this detail beyond warrant, the positive assertion of Graves, combined with the chronology of Fielding's other literary activities, clearly indicates that the first books of "Tom Jones" and some of the later chapters were composed at Twerton. Nothing stands in the way of the assumption that Fielding, after he had given up "The True Patriot," spent the summer and autumn of 1746 at Twerton and that he returned for briefer periods the two following years. So London, Twickenham, and Bath must divide the honour of being the birthplace of "Tom Jones." Before the novel had passed through the press, Fielding had permanently settled in Bow Street as a justice of the peace. His house, of which the Duke of

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