personally, and to acknowledge your last kind Favour to me, I have the Presumption to solicit your Grace again. The Business of a Justice of Peace for Westminster is very inconsiderable without the Addition of that for the County of Middlesex. And without this Addition I cannot completely serve the Government in that office. But this unfortunately requires a Qualification which I want. Now there is a House belonging to your Grace, which stands in Bedford St., of 701. a year value. This hath been long untenanted, and will I am informed, require about 3001. to put in Repair. If your Grace would have the Goodness to let me have a Lease of this House, with some other Tenement worth 301. a year, for 21 years, it would be a complete Qualification. I will give the full Worth for this lease, according to the valuation which any Person your Grace shall be pleased to appoint sets upon it. The only favour I beg of your Grace is, that I be permitted to pay the Money in two years, at four equal half-yearly Payments. As I shall repair the House as soon as possible, it will be in Reality an Improvement of that small Part of your Grace's estate, and will be certain to make my Fortune. "Mr. Butcher* will acquaint your Grace more fully than perhaps I have been able to do; and if Your Grace thinks proper to refer it to him, I and mine will be eternally bound to pray for your Grace tho I sincerely hope you will not lose a Farthing by doing so vast a service to, My Lord your Grace's Most obliged most obedt humble servant The Duke of Bedford was more generous than Fielding anticipated. Instead of troubling him with a house that *Mr. Butcher was the Duke's agent. + First published in "Correspondence of John Fourth Duke of Bedford," 1842, I, 589-590. Printed from the autograph at Woburn Abbey by Miss Godden in "Henry Fielding," p. 196. would have required an expenditure of £300 for repairs, he gave him a lease for twenty-one years of various small properties having a clear rental value of £100 per annum, and described as "several leasehold messuages or tenements lying or being in the several parishes of St Paul Covent Garden, St Martin in the Ffields, St Giles in the Ffields, and St George Bloomsbury, co: Middlesex, now in the occupation of his tenants." Pursuant to this ingenious arrangement, Fielding qualified, on January 11, 1749, as a Justice of the Peace for the County of Middlesex, and immediately took the oaths of the office "at the General Quarter Sessions of the Peace at Hicks Hall, St. John Street."'* Subsequently he met the current religious tests necessary to a servant in his Majesty's Government. On Sunday, March 26, he received the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper at St. Paul's, Covent Garden, according to the usages of the Church of England; and on April 5, after again receiving the Holy Communion, he put his signature to declarations against the doctrine of transubstantiation, and the power of the Holy See, abjured King James and his descendants, and promised allegiance and faithful service to King George. These oaths and declarations were properly attested by Charles Tough, the minister of his parish and by other credible witnesses. Thereupon Fielding, supported by the Duke of Bedford, entered upon the vast labour of ridding Middlesex of thieves, highwaymen, and robbers in order that life and property might be safe. That is a remarkable story never yet half told; but it must be held in abeyance, for "Tom Jones" had just appeared. *Record Office. Middlesex Guildhall. "Oaths taken by Justices of the Peace, 1746-50,'' p. 187. Owing to some inaccuracy in the first declaration or to some alteration in the leases, Fielding took a similar oath, leaving out the Bloomsbury leases, on July 13, 1749 (ibid., p. 191). The details connected with Fielding's appointment were first discovered and assembled by Miss Godden in her "Henry Fielding," pp. 173, 175, 194-198. CHAPTER XVII THE PUBLICATION OF TOM JONES It has been often lamented that Fielding, when he discovered his talent in "Joseph Andrews," did not proceed forthwith to write a novel free from all dependency upon Richardson, in fulfilment of the vision he then had of a great comic epic in prose, which should be for modern England what the comic counterpart of the Iliad had been for ancient Greece. Such, it is clear from the dedication of "Tom Jones" to Lyttelton, was the desire of his friend and patron, who believed him possessed of the extraordinary endowments requisite for the undertaking. Though Fielding regarded Lyttelton's desire as hardly less than a command, neither time nor circumstance then seemed favourable. The fact is, Fielding's mind soon became engrossed with the law; and so fierce and scurrilous were the attacks upon him by Grub Street for what he had written and for what he had not written, that he resolved to publish nothing more for the amusement of the public. His "Miscellanies," as I have related, was to be his last book in general literature. The next year, in the summer of 1744, he did indeed write a preface to "David Simple" to please and aid his sister; but it was made the occasion for a solemn declaration that he had given up the struggle for literary fame, upon which he had come to look with contempt. Unexpectedly, however, the insurrection of 1745 drew him into patriotic journalism, where his ability to deal with exactly contemporary life and affairs shone with very great brilliancy. The time had arrived for "Tom Jones" if that "newspaper of many volumes," as he called it, were ever to be written. Fielding's circumstances were then made easier by the steady income week by week from the sale of his journals, of one of which the Government apparently took, as was then said, two thousand copies; and he may have received gifts of money from Lyttelton towards the support of himself and family. Without Lyttelton's assistance, he declared in the preface to "Tom Jones," the novel "had never been completed." It was to this friend, he added in explanation, that he really owed his existence "during great part of the time" he was engaged upon its composition, covering "some years" of his life. Along with Lyttelton Fielding alluded to Ralph Allen, who together were in Fielding's estimation "two of the best and worthiest men in the world," who were "strongly and zealously my friends." Their generosity, he means to say, gave him the time-it can hardly be called leisure-to write "Tom Jones," the labour, in his own phrase, of "some thousands of hours." The thousands of hours that Fielding, already becoming infirm with the gout, was able to devote to "Tom Jones" were clearly distributed over the three years, 1746-1748. Of these years, the period when he was least interrupted by hack-work fell between the discontinuance of "The True Patriot” in June, 1746, and the establishment of "The Jacobite's Journal" in December, 1747. The novel, I take it, was begun as early as the summer of 1746, and continued at a steady though not uniform rate through 1747 and 1748, despite the extra labours of "The Jacobite's Journal," down to a few months before its publication in February, 1749. Though not an historical novel, "Tom Jones" has, in harmony with the ancient epics, a slight historical background in the insurrection just preceding its composition. To be precise, its main action-the jour |