to the same place was conveyed, "under a strong guard,' a man who kept an alehouse in the Beaufort Buildings, charged with commanding, aiding, and abetting men at a neighbouring wharf to steal great quantities of coals, knowing them to be stolen. To Newgate went Mary Anthony and Mary Batty for assaulting Elizabeth Coxen on the highway, and taking her straw hat and a lace handkerchief; Catherine Butler for assaulting and wounding one of her own sex in head and throat with a case-knife; John Cropley for falsifying accounts; Thomas Pady on suspicion of breaking into a dwelling-house and taking coin; Joseph Mottley alias Dowdle for rescuing from custody a man who had just picked a gentleman's pocket of a handkerchief; and James Jewell, a sailor, for stealing from a jeweller in New Street, Covent Garden, a gold ring, though he left behind a brass one in its place.

Amid these sordid surroundings, Fielding had settled with his family by the first week of December, 1748. The court room was on the ground floor, where his clerk, Fielding says, sat "almost sixteen hours in the twenty-four, in the most unwholesome as well as nauseous air in the universe." Nor was there long escape from that fetid atmosphere for the justice himself. He might retire to his private apartments, but even when there he was subject to call at any time for counsel or to order a commitment. Since the birth of his son William, his family had been increased by a daughter Mary Amelia, baptized on January 6, 1749;* and there was living with him his unmarried half-brother John, born in 1721† of General Fielding's second marriage, whom he greatly loved for his character and the misfortune of having been totally blind since the age of nineteen. The two brothers were inseparable. A week before the publica

* Registers of St. Paul's, Covent Garden, Jan. 6, 1748, O. S.

+ Burke's Peerage," 1916. John Fielding alludes to the accident which caused his blindness, in the preface to "The Universal Mentor,'' 1763.

tion of "Tom Jones," they opened, in conjunction with other partners, a "Universal Register Office, opposite Cecil-Street, in the Strand." The design of the office, according to a plan drawn up by Henry, was "to bring the world, as it were, together into one place, . . . the buyer and the seller, borrower and lender, landlord and tenant, the tutor and the pupil, the master, the scholar and usher, the rector and curate. . . John became the manager. The ambitious undertaking, which had been suggested to "Messires Fielding and Company" by a passage in Montaigne, throve especially as an agency for houses and servants. More commodious quarters becoming necessary, the office was moved to the corner of Castle Street, opposite the New Exchange in the Strand, and a branch was established in Bishopsgate Street. On Henry's recommendation, John was soon to be appointed an assisting justice in the Bow Street court. By 1751, the blind brother who, it has been said, came to know all the notable criminals of London by their voices, had received his commission;t and from the beginning, it is evident, John's knowledge of the underworld, derived from his business, was of great assistance. Fielding was also very fortunate in having a most faithful and efficient clerk in that man who never complained of the long days at his desk-one Joshua Brogden, who had served in the same capacity under Sir Thomas de Veil. He is the man who witnessed the assignment of "Tom Jones" to Andrew Millar. Of his constables, Fielding could always rely upon Saunders Welch of Holborn, "one of the best officers," he said, "who was ever concerned in the execution of justice." Thus equipped with assistants, and fortified by a small income from an employment bureau in

*See "A Plan of the Universal-Register-Office,'' 1752, and subsequent editions. The body of the pamphlet, running on hath, is clearly the work of Henry, while a preliminary address "To the Reader,'' running on has, bears the signature "John Fielding."

+ Miss Godden, "Henry Fielding," p. 232.

which he owned twenty shares, the author of "Tom Jones" undertook the task of rendering life and property safe within the county of Middlesex.

Now and then we may get a glimpse of his household and court; even see how he was living and how he conducted business. First of all, there is that oft-quoted passage in one of Horace Walpole's letters, wherein the wit relates what he has heard of Fielding's ménage, to illustrate the text that life when deprived of its masque is quite different from what it appears when dressed for the ball. Writing from his house in Arlington Street, on May 18, 1749, Walpole sends to his friend George Montagu all the news and scandal that can be crowded into a most amusing letter. The famous passage on Fielding runs:

"Take sentiments out of their pantoufles, and reduce them to the infirmities of mortality, what a falling off there is! I could not help laughing in myself t'other day, as I went through Holborn in a very hot day, at the dignity of human nature; all those foul old-clothes women panting without handkerchiefs, and mopping themselves all the way down within their loose jumps. Rigby gave me as strong a picture of nature: he and Peter Bathurst t'other night carried a servant of the latter's, who had attempted to shoot him, before Fielding; who, to all his other vocations, has, by the grace of Mr. Lyttelton, added that of Middlesex justice. He sent them word he was at supper, that they must come next morning. They did not understand that freedom, and ran up, where they found him banqueting with a blind man, three Irishmen, and a whore, on some cold mutton and a bone of ham, both in one dish, and the cursedest dirtiest cloth! He never stirred nor asked them to sit. Rigby, who had seen him so often come to beg a guinea of Sir C. Williams, and Bathurst, at whose father's he had lived for victuals, understood that * The number given in his will.

dignity as little, and pulled themselves chairs, on which he civilized."'*

This racy anecdote, which Scott thought most "humiliating," should not be taken literally; large allowance must be made for a twofold distortion, first by Rigby the political parasite, who resented Fielding's coolness, and then by Walpole, whose malicious phrasing and aristocratic sense of superiority to the vulgar herd supplied the seasoning. Walpole is the only authority for the tradition that Fielding sponged upon Sir Charles Hanbury Williams, or that he dined too often with Earl Bathurst, at whose table had sat Pope and Swift, Congreve and Prior. Withdraw the wit and the animus from Rigby's story, and there still remains a vivid scene of Fielding with his family and guests after the day's work was supposed to be over. The "blind man" was, of course, John Fielding; and the "whore" none other than Mrs. Henry Fielding, a woman from the common walks of life, and, I daresay, not very careful about the appearance of herself or her table. Who the Irishmen were, we do not know; but Fielding mentions in various places Irish acquaintances, whose fresh wit he evidently relished. It was a plain man's board around which Fielding, his wife and brother, and three casual guests drew for conversation over cold mutton and a bone of ham. Whatever resentment the justice felt at the intrusion of Rigby and Peter Bathurst, he strove to conceal it as soon as he knew who they were; and if he followed his rule of action, he immediately committed the culprit to Newgate on the oaths of the two gentlemen.

Whenever the public service demanded it, Fielding kept his court open all night, though by law and custom all persons arrested at night were to be held by the constable until morning. Having received, for instance, information one evening that a large number of people were at a *"Letters of Horace Walpole," edited by Toynbee, II, 383-384.

gambling-house in the Strand, too many for the constables to handle, he sent for a party of soldiers from the TiltYard to aid them in the arrests. It took the justice till two o'clock in the morning to dispatch the forty-five gamblers that were brought in; of whom six were admitted to bail and the rest were sent to the gatehouse. In lighter vein, we read: "The high constable of Westminster went about 12 o'clock to a private masquerade near Exeter Change, where several idle persons of both sexes were assembled, most of whom were apprehended and carried before Justice Fielding, who sat up all night to examine them; and several of them being found to be persons of distinction under 20, the justice not thinking proper to expose them, after a severe reprimand dismissed them all." Again, complaint being made on an evening that a set of apprentices had taken a large room at the Black Horse in the Strand, where they were performing, contrary to law, Otway's "Orphan," he issued a warrant to Mr. Welch the high constable, "who apprehended the actors, and conducted them thro' the streets in their tragedy dresses, before the justice, who out of compassion to their youth only bound them over to their good behaviour."

However severe Fielding might be with hardened criminals, he was invariably considerate in dealing with juvenile offenders like the masqueraders and amateur players, and with the aged and infirm who found their way into his court not so much because of wilful crime as indigence and distress. When three poor men, said the newspapers, were brought before him on a morning charged with begging, "they appeared to be in so dreadful a condition with sickness as well as poverty, that the Justice, having first relieved, dismissed them." Sometimes his good nature became, like Squire Allworthy's, pleasantly humorous. When, for example, Rich revived at Covent-Garden Theobald's pantomime called "Harlequin Sorcerer," with newly