and the Imperial Eagle of Austria." Ornate as is Gibbon's language it yet contains a judgment upon Fielding which has been in gradual process of verification since the words were written. Most of those who have dispassionately considered Fielding's works, and compared them with the works of his contemporaries and successors, will arrive at a conclusion much nearer that expressed by Gibbon than that of the detractor, Horace Walpole. Of course, an argument which we have previously used for another purpose, may possibly be inverted and turned against ourselves. It may be replied that after all criticism is only the opinion of one man, though it is often acted upon by the multitude: and that judgments upon literary works attain an inordinate influence when delivered by individuals of acknowledged reputation. Supposing this were to some extent true, every single reader has the opportunity of righting the matter so far as he is personally concerned. But what we do find valuable about the art of criticism, notwithstanding its numerous and manifest imperfections, is this, that it not unfrequently results in the deposition of much that is unworthy, and in the exaltation of some works which have been threatened with an undeserved obscurity. The critic is really nothing more than a leader of men; he is supposed to have the capacity of leading in the right way, and when it is found that there is no light in him, and he is incapable of perceiving eternal Truth, we should withdraw ourselves from his guidance. We say, then, that while it is necessary for a man's self-culture and intellectual independence that he should not accept off hand the opinions of any critic, however eminent, in the bulk and without scrutiny, yet when judgments come to us stamped with the names of those who have devoted themselves to the art of criticism, they should at any rate receive candid, if searching, investigation. The destruction of the empiricism of the critic need not involve the destruction of the eclecticism of the art. It must come to us as a friendly guide, and

not as a tyrant. Our own opinion of Fielding stands very little short of the most eulogistic which has been expressed concerning him; but we trust we have arrived at it out of no slavish regard for other minds.

A glance at the novelist's life is almost a necessity, for it elucidates many points in connection with his works which would otherwise be obscure. There has probably been no instance where the impress of the author's character has been more perceptible upon his writings than that of Fielding. Some of his novels confessedly contain passages from his own life, with very little variation of detail. It will have been perceived by the quotation from Gibbon that Fielding was of illustrious descent, but the wealth of the family must have flowed into another channel, for he got none or little of it. He was born on the 22nd of April, 1707, at Sharpham Park, near Glastonbury. His father was a distinguished soldier, having served with Marlborough at Blenheim, and at length obtained the rank of Lieutenantgeneral. Besides being grandson of an Earl of Denbigh, this warrior was related to other noble families. The mother of Fielding was a daughter of Judge Gold, one of whose immediate descendants was also a baron of the Exchequer. Posterity may thus rest satisfied with the novelist's birth. Fielding, however, was not the only one of his family who appears to have been talented in literature. One of his sisters wrote a romance entitled "David Simple," and was also the author of numerous letters, which, with the story. earned the encomiums of her brother, We cannot, of course, now say to what extent she may have been indebted o him in regard to these compositions. There is every reason to believe that he was most accessible to advice and sympathy, whilst his affection for his relatives was deep and sincere. This

in addition to a warm affection for children-is one of the redeeming traits in a character that was subsequently marred by many imperfections. Having received the earlier part of his education

at home, from the Rev. Mr. Oliver, his private tutor who is supposed to have been laid under contribution as the original of Parson Trulliber-Fielding was sent to Eton, where he became intimate with Fox, Lord Lyttelton, Pitt, and others, who afterwards acquired celebrity with himself, and at various crises in his history sustained towards him the part of real friendship. Unlike many literary men, whose scholastic career has been rather a fiasco than otherwise, Fielding was most successful in his acquisition of knowledge, and when only sixteen years of age was acknowledged by his masters to possess a very sound acquaintance with all the leading Greek and Latin writers. Traces of this linguistic proficiency are again and again beheld in his novels. From Eton he went to the University of Leyden, where he immediately entered upon still wider and more liberal studies; but at the threshold of his life the demon of misfortune which seems to have dogged his footsteps all through his career found him out. university career closed prematurely, for his father, General Fielding, had married again, and having now two large families to keep out of a small income, discovered that his original intention with regard to his son must be abandoned. This could not have been a pleasant intimation to a youth of twenty, who had just begun to feel the expansion of his faculties, and doubtless to be conscious that his future "might copy his fair past " as regards the accumulation of the stores of knowledge. Whatever laxity of mind overtook him in after life, the earlier years of Fielding show him to have been enamoured of learning, and in no wise averse to its routine. His spirit was keen and eager, and though at twenty years of age he was somewhat given to pleasure, he at the same time was always desirous to excel, and never allowed his recreations and amusements to bar his intellectual progress.

His

Undismayed, however, by this rebuff of fortune, Fielding returned to London with comparatively little depression of

spirits, and even this entirely cleared off as soon as he began to mingle in the society of the metropolis. It was here, as we shall presently see, that greater dangers afterwards attended him, which he was less able to withstand than the assaults of adversity. Fielding was especially distinguished for all those gifts which make a man the darling of the circle in which he moves: and accordingly we learn that in a very few months after his settlement in London he was an established favourite of its great literary and dramatic lions, Lyttelton and Garrick amongst the number. Under the auspices of the latter he speedily commenced writing for the stage, and at the age of twenty, as Mr. Roscoe tells us in his excellent life of the novelist, produced his first comedy of "Love in several Masques." We shall postpone what comments we have to make upon this and Fielding's other works till the close of our remarks on his personal history. Necessity compelled him to turn to the writing of comedies, for though he was supposed to be enjoying an allowance of some 2007. per annum, he made a joke about this income to the effect that it was a sum which really anybody might pay who would. At this juncture some of our most brilliant wits were writing for the stage, so that the young author might be pardoned for the degree of nervousness he felt on entering upon the same career. Indeed, although his genius was not naturally that of the dramatist, the probability is that what aptitude he really possessed for it was somewhat cramped by the circumstances in which he was placed, and the diffidence with which he undertook a profession that at the time enjoyed two of its keenest and wittiest ornaments. It appears, nevertheless, that the comedy already mentioned, and his second one of "The Temple Beau," were well received, though his success was by no means proportioned to his increasing embarrassments. That his efforts at comedy were well_appreciated is testified to by Lord Lyttelton's assertion, when some one was alluding to the wits of the age, that

"Harry Fielding had more wit and humour than all the persons they had been speaking of put together." This language seems to have been concurred in by others who were continually looking out for some new thing in that age of wit and humour. Fielding must have worked with great rapidity, for during the nine seasons in which he wrote for the stage, and before he attained his thirtieth year, he had written no fewer than eighteen pieces, reckoning both plays and farces.

It was in the midst of his unsatisfactory career in connection with the stage -unsatisfactory because of its restlessness and its recklessness-that an event occurred which promised to change the whole tenor of his life for ever; and had Fielding been as strong in his will as he was in the perception of what is right, we should now probably have been able to write him in different characters. In his twenty-seventh year he fell in love with a young lady named Cradock, residing at Salisbury. She was possessed of both beauty and accomplishments, but her fortune was small. Fielding, however, never hesitated in the pursuit of an object wherein his heart was deeply enlisted, and accordingly he married Miss Cradock with her small fortune of fifteen hundred pounds. The old, old passion had thus again its good old way. Shortly after his marriage his mother died, and Fielding became possessed of a little estate in Dorsetshire, worth some two hundred a year. Hither he bore his bride, and made many resolves to lead the life of a model country gentleman. But with all his affection for his wife-and it was genuine and sincere—he was led by the example of others into great extravagance. Setting up his coach, and living as though he could make one pound do duty for a hundred, it can evoke no surprise that at the end of three years he discovered all his patrimony to be gone, and found himself faced by the terrible spectre of absolute poverty which he himself had raised. It is held by many that genius should never be tried by the ordinary standpoints of thrift and virtue. This is

a position to which we can give no kind of countenance; but what we may look at with regard to Fielding, as some mitigation for his conduct at this period, are those social qualities for which he was so famous. Though they ultimately proved his pecuniary ruin, they were marked by a generosity which cannot but breed in us a pity for the man himself. The delights of society were more than he could bear; he entered into them with a zest which completely overmastered his aplomb, and for the time being made him their slave. So far this was unquestionably bad; but his case must not be confounded with that of the essentially vicious, with the man who never had Fielding's lofty appreciation for the good, and never even felt the most spasmodic striving after an ideal. To the one we can extend our unfeigned sympathy, to the other only our unmitigated abhorrence. As the sequel to the difficulties which overtook Fielding, he was compelled to resume the study of the law, which he had at one time hoped to abandon for ever. Entering himself at the age of thirty as a student of the Inner Temple, he at once began to work with a will, in order to recover himself from his embarrassments. His devotion to his studies was most praiseworthy, and, as he had great natural shrewdness, there is every reason to believe that in the legal profession he would have been most successful. But one cause or another continually interrupted him, and whatever he undertook through life seems to have met with a premature ending. For his failure, however, ultimately to earn distinction at the bar, he was himself in the first instance responsible. He was not

only called, but assiduously went the Western circuit for two or three years, though briefs appear to have been very scanty with him. Suddenly, and in consequence of an intimation that he proposed issuing a work upon law, his practice increased immensely, but only, we are told, to decline again as rapidly. Meanwhile physical retribution began to overtake him for the convivial years he had spent in London society; he

was seized with gout, in addition to which, his constitution was much weakened and enfeebled; though in justice it must be said that late hours of study, with literary work executed under great pressure, acted as additional causes in the general break-up of his system. The upshot of it all was that after ceasing the active exercise of his profession, and writing two large volumes (a "Digest of the Statutes at Large"), which remained for many years unpublished, he finally quitted the bar, and returned to literary pursuits. As might be expected from the nature of his talents, he contributed for a time most successfully to periodical literature. But a period of great distress quickly came upon him. With failing health, which interfered somewhat with the operations of his brilliant intellect, his mind was still further racked with the consciousness that his wife and family were entirely dependent upon his exertions. Heroic he undoubtedly was under difficulties, but there are some odds against which men cannot possibly contend. Note, nevertheless, how the true spirit of the man shone through all the darkness which surrounded him at this trying moment. His biographers, one and all, bear testimony to the native strength of his mind. We are assured that "when under the most discouraging circumstances the loss of comparative fortune, of health, of the fruits of years of successful toil; his body lacerated by the acutest pains, and with a family looking up to him for immediate support-he was still capable, with a degree of fortitude almost unexampled, to produce, as it were, extempore, a play, a farce, a pamphlet, or a newspaper. Nay, like Cervantes, whom he most resembled both in wit and genius, he could jest upon his misfortunes, and make his own sufferings a source of entertainment to the rest of the world." He did, in fact, at this precise period, and in the darkest hour of his misery, indite a rhyming letter to Sir Robert Walpole, with himself and his position for its subject; which is full of the most humorous allusions. One cannot help thinking, while reading this incident, of

the much later humourist of our own time, Hood, whose experience was almost its counterpart, with the exception of the difference in the cause of Hood's suffering, a naturally frail constitution being the sole reason of his bodily decay. Fielding was now writing because, as he expressed it, "he had no choice but to be a hackney writer or a hackney coachman." This was the man who had been the pride of London fashionables, who had doubtless kept a hundred tables in a roar, and whose very enjoyment of life for its own sake was so keen as to cause Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (his second cousin) to say in comparing him with Steele, that "he ought to go on living for ever." When writing for the stage, Fielding was frequently obliged to pass off work which did not satisfy his critical judgment. For this he was now and then remonstrated with by Garrick, and he once replied that the public were too stupid to find out where he failed. The consensus of the pit, however, is tolerably keen, and when the audience began on this occasion to hiss the weak part of the comedy Fielding was astonished, exclaiming, "They have found it out, have they? An anecdote characteristic both of the man and his times is told of the novelist which affords a clue to some of his pecuniary difficulties, though it is a credit to his generosity. It appears that some parochial taxes had long remained unpaid by Fielding, a fact which need not greatly surprise us. At length the collector-as tax-collectors always will became rather threatening in his aspect, and Fielding went off to Dr. Johnson, that friend-in-need of the impecunious, to obtain the necessary sum of money by a literary mortgage. He was returning when he met with an old college friend who was in even greater difficulties than himself. He took him to dinner at a neighbouring tavern, and emptied the contents of his pockets into his hands. Being informed on returning home that the collector had twice called on him for the amount, Fielding re

plied, "Friendship has called for the money, and had it; let the collector call again.' Other anecdotes could be cited illustrating the bonhomie and natural benevolence of the novelist's character.

It was during the period in which Fielding was most busily employed upon his literary ventures that he married a second time (having lost a few years before the lady to whom it has been seen he was devotedly attached); and we now find him bending to his work with redoubled energy. But all his assiduity was in vain, and he was compelled to announce with regret that he could no longer continue the publication of "The Covent Garden Journal "-a paper he was then editing. The mental and physical strain had been too severe, and there were now added to his other ailments the alarming symptoms of dropsy. The only hope held out by his physician for the prolongation of his life was that he should go abroad; and this, upon the earnest solicitations of his friends, Fielding consented to do. Portugal having been recommended, he tore himself from his wife and children, and set sail for Lisbon on the 26th of June, 1754.

At this juncture, noting that Fielding makes his references to the matter in the introduction to his "Voyage," we may allude to him in another capacity, one in which the literary man has seldom an opportunity of exhibiting himself. In 1748 he had been appointed Justice of the Peace for Westminster and Middlesex, an office which, as we learn, was then paid by fees, and was very laborious, without being particularly reputable. As affording some idea of the nature of the work which fell to the accomplished Justice, we may recapitulate certain facts narrated by himself. While preparing for a journey to Bath, which it was hoped would result in his restoration to health, there was placed upon his shoulders no enviable piece of work. When nigh fatigued to death by reason of several long examinations relating to five different murders committed by gangs of street robbers, he received a message from the Duke of

Newcastle to wait upon him the next morning upon business of great importance. Though in the utmost distress he attended, and found that what was desired of him was a statement of the best plan he could devise for the suppression of robberies and murders in the streets, offences which had become alarmingly common. Fielding submitted a plan that was highly approved of by the Duke, who promised to lay it before the Privy Council. All the terms of the proposal were complied with, one of the principal being the depositing of 6007. in its author's hands. At this small pecuniary charge he undertook to demolish the gangs complained of, and also to put civil order in such a state of security that it should be thenceforth impossible for these gangs to enrol themselves in bodies and pursue their nefarious occupations. It is interesting to note, as demonstrating Fielding's executive ability in his new post, that in a few weeks the whole gang of cut-throats was entirely dispersed. But the occupation of Justice was anything save a pleasant one, whilst its remuneration was paltry in the extreme. Fielding himself says that by refusing to make the most of his position, by composing instead of inflaming the quarrels of porters and beggars, by not plundering the public or the poor, and by refusing to take a shilling from a man who would most undoubtedly not have had another left, he had reduced "an income of about 500l. a year of the dirtiest money upon earth to little more than 3007.," a considerable portion of which remained with his clerk. It was acknowledged on all hands that Fielding made an excellent justice, and it is moreover affirmed that his charge to the grand jury, delivered at Westminster on the 29th of June, 1749, is to be regarded, for that time, as a very able and valuable state paper. It was most lucid and searching, as were certain legal investigations which he subsequently made. Furthermore, it may be noted that in a "Proposal for the Maintenance of the Poor," of which he was the author, Fielding was the first to make