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letters which, with the Memoir by Gillies, fill seven volumes (1771-72). There are also Lives by Philip (1838), Andrews (1864), Hursta (1860), and Tyerman (1876).

James Hervey (1714-58), rector of WestonFavell near Northampton, was educated at Oxford and influenced by the Methodist movement. His Meditations among the Tombs, Reflections on a Flower-garden, &c. had an extraordinary sale, and the author is said to have received £700 for the copyright of the first part of his work—a sum he distributed in charity. The Meditations (1745-47; 25th ed. 1791) appealed in prose to the same tastes as Young's Night Thoughts in poetry. Hervey was also author of Theron and Aspasio, or a Series of Letters and Dialogues on the most important Subjects, a marvellously popular work, though there is little real thought or originality, and the substance of the book is largely composed, like the Meditations, of sentimentalism and truisms. He really appreciated the beauties of nature, and his evangelical theology met the temper of the time. His Calvinism exposed him to an assault from John Wesley, who criticised his style as severely as his matter; and Hervey replied in Eleven Letters. He wrote against Bolingbroke; and after his death collections of his letters and sermons were printed, and these, with his works, are comprised in six volumes octavo. When Johnson, on one occasion, ridiculed Hervey's Meditations, Boswell could not join in this treatment of the admired volume. 'I am not an impartial judge,' he says, 'for Hervey's Meditations engaged my affections in my early years.' This apology might have been pleaded by many readers, for the Meditations are written in a flowery, ornate style, which used to captivate the young and persons of immature taste. The inflated description and overstrained pathos with which the work abounds render it distasteful to critical readers; but there is no doubt that Hervey's works have served to soothe many an invalid and mourner.

Joseph Spence (1699-1768), anecdotist, born at Kingsclere, Hants, from Winchester passed to New College, Oxford, and became a Fellow in 1722 and professor of Poetry in 1727. Later he was rector of Birchanger and Great Harwood, professor of Modern History (1737), and a prebendary of Durham (1754). He secured Pope's friendship by his Essay on Pope's Odyssey (1727), and began to record Pope's conversation and anecdotes of other friends and notabilities. In 1736 he edited Sackville's Gorboduc, and in 1747 published his Polymetis. He was drowned at Byfleet in Surrey. The standard edition of the Anecdotes is by Singer (1820; 2nd ed. 1858), with Memoir.

Charles Coffey, 'a native of Ireland' who died in 1745, produced nine or ten stage-pieces described as farces, operas, ballad operas, ballad farces, and farcical operas, of which the best known was The Devil to Pay, or the Wives Meta

morphosed (1731), on a plot said to have been suggested by Sidney's Arcadia.

Abraham Tucker (1705–74), born in London, educated at Merton College, Oxford, and entered of the Inner Temple, was wealthy and unambitious. In 1727 he bought an estate near Dorking, where, instead of pursuing the pleasures of the chase, he devoted himself to philosophical studies, and under the fictitious name of Edward Search, wrote The Light of Nature Pursued (7 vols. 1768-78), which Paley said contained more original thinking and observation than any other work of the kind. His book is not a systematic work, but, as he himself says, ‘a tissue of loose essays;' a melange of disquisitions on psychology, metaphysics, theology, and especially morals. In some parts he follows Locke; he adopts Hartley's view of the significance of association; and, in ethics, anticipates largely the mild utilitarianism of Paley, the pursuit of our own satisfaction being by the will of God calculated also to subserve the well-being of the race. In one short sentence he described his favourite studies: The science of abstruse learning, when completely attained, is like Achilles's spear, that healed the wounds it had made before. It casts no additional light upon the paths of life, but disperses the clouds with which it had overspread them; it advances not the traveller one step on his journey, but conducts him back again to the spot from whence he had wandered.'

Tucker's grandson, Sir H. P. S. Mildmay, published in 1805 a new edition of The Light of Nature, with a Life of Tucker; in 1807 Hazlitt issued (anonymously) an abridgment of the bulky work.

David Hartley (1705–57) was born at Luddenden, Halifax, a clergyman's son, and at twentytwo was a Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge. He studied for the Church, but, dissenting from some points in the Thirty-nine Articles, turned to medicine. In his mature years he impugned the eternity of hell-punishment; in all other points he remained a devout member of the Church of England. As a medical practitioner he attained eminence at Newark, Bury St Edmunds, London, and Bath. In his Observations on Man (1749) are expounded two famous hypotheses-one 'The Doctrine of Vibrations,' or a theory of nervous action analogous to the propagation of sound (whence he was charged-unjustly, he maintained —with materialism); the other the doctrine that the Association of Ideas explains almost all mental phenomena. His theory of vibrations, suggested by a speculation in Newton's Principia, led, though inadequate and inaccurate in itself, to more careful study of the interaction of brain and mind; the association theory, found by Hartley in an undeveloped form in a paper on morals by a littleknown clergyman called Gay, has been conspicuous ever since in English psychology. Hartley and James Mill were discussed in a monograph by Mr G. S. Bower (1881).

Henry Fielding.

Although modern genealogy declines to connect the lineage of Henry Fielding (1707-54) with the Hapsburgs, the passage which Gibbon, in a fragment of his Autobiography, gives to the author of Tom Jones still remains a splendid compliment. Fielding's father, General Edmund Fielding, was the third son of a son of the Earl of Desmond, whose elder brother was second Earl of Denbigh. His mother was the daughter of Sir Henry Gould, Knight, of Sharpham Park near Glastonbury in Somerset, and a Judge of the King's Bench. At Sharpham Park, on the 22nd of April 1707, the future novelist was born. His childhood was spent at East Stour in Dorsetshire, where other children, three girls (for one of them, Sarah, the novelist, see page 417) and a boy, were added to the family. When, in April 1718, Mrs Fielding died, her eldest son was about eleven. His education had been confined to the tuition of a Mr Oliver of Motcombe, whose Falstaffian proportions and pig-loving propensities we are asked to recognise in the Parson Trulliber of Joseph Andrews. From Mr Oliver, Henry Fielding passed to Eton, probably as an oppidan. Among his schoolfellows were George (afterwards Lord) Lyttelton, Charles Hanbury Williams, and Thomas Winnington. According to his first biographer, Arthur Murphy, he left Eton 'uncommonly versed in the Greek authors, and an early master of the Latin classics.' After, and perhaps on account of, a youthful love-affair with a Lyme Regis heiress, Miss Sarah Andrew, he was despatched to Leyden to study civil law under the 'learned Vitriarius,' and his name is recorded in the books of the university as late as March 1728.

By this date his father, never a rich man, had married again, and the allowance of two hundred a year he professed to make his eldest son was not paid. Early in 1728 Henry Fielding was in London, a tall youth of one-and-twenty, with a handsome face, a magnificent constitution, and an unlimited appetite for those pleasures of the town which (as Gibbon says) are 'within the reach of every man who is regardless of his health, his money, and his company.' It was lack of pence which turned young Fielding speedily to stage production. Already at Leyden, with that bias towards Cervantes which was to be his lifelong characteristic, he had sketched a play called Don Quixote in England; and it must have been at Leyden that he prepared his first acted comedy, Love in Several Masques. This was produced at Drury Lane in February 1728, immediately after Cibber's Provoked Husband. It obtained some success, mainly owing to the acting of Anne Oldfield, and perhaps also to the friendly aid of the author's relative, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, to whom it was dedicated. For the next few years Fielding continued to produce farces and plays with careless rapidity, sometimes under his own name, sometimes under a pseudonym. None of

these has survived as a masterpiece. In comedy he worked an exhausted vein, the 'wit-traps' of Wycherley and Congreve, without rivalling their brilliancy, though certainly not falling below their indelicacy. His best efforts lay in social satire or mock-heroic, and the most notable examples of these are The Author's Farce (1730) and Tom Thumb (1730)-afterwards revised and annotated as The Tragedy of Tragedies-a burlesque in the genre of Buckingham's Rehearsal containing much clever raillery of contemporary tragedies. He also succeeded with two adaptations of Molière, The

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Mock-Doctor (1732) and The Miser (1733), which latter version obtained the approval of Voltaire. But, as Lady Mary said, he himself would have thrown his work into the fire 'if meat could have been got without money, and money without scribbling.' He never took the stage seriously. Whether he possessed the dramatic faculty or not, his plays are deservedly forgotten; and the 'prolifick Mr Fielding, as the Prompter called him, made no enduring contribution to dramatic literature.

In the preface to one of the last and hastiest of these performances, The Universal Gallant; or, the Different Husbands, produced at Drury Lane in February 1735, he seems to hint at a family. However this may be, there is at this point a

manifest interval in his labours as a playwright, which his biographers have occupied with his marriage. His wife was one of three sisters of Salisbury, and her name was Charlotte Cradock. From her husband's description of her in Tom Jones and Amelia, she must have been as amiable as she was beautiful, and she, moreover, brought him £1500 of that pelf which alone preserved him from producing hurried plays. It is also alleged that concurrently he inherited something from his mother; but this is questionable, as in 1735 his mother had long been dead. In any case, he migrated for the time to East Stour, where his childhood had been spent. Legend has freely gathered around this retreat upon the country, and he has been described as leading the life of a lavish fox-hunting squire, with hounds, liveries, and all the regulation honours. But it is demonstrable that in a twelvemonth he was back again in London, managing the little French theatre in the Haymarket, and running there a Lucianic satire on the times called Pasquin. This was a considerable success, and it was followed in 1737 by a similar effort, The Historical Register for the Year 1736. The Historical Register was inferior to Pasquin, but its strokes at Walpole are believed to have aided in precipitating the severe Licensing Act of 1737, which, among other vexatious restrictions, made the consent of the Lord Chamberlain an indispensable preliminary to the production of any play. Its passing was fatal to Fielding's 'scandal shop,' as the Haymarket had come to be popularly called, and it effectually terminated his efforts to 'ridicule Vice and Imposture' through the medium of the stage. His own admission, in later life, that he left off playwriting when he ought to have begun, may be taken to indicate that he himself fully appreciated the haphazard and premature character of his achievement in this kind. Yet it may be reasonably doubted whether, even with wider experience and larger leisure, he would ever have excelled in pure comedy. His satiric and ironic gifts were better employed in the vocation he eventually adopted.

In 1737 he was in his thirty-first year, and on the Ist of November he was admitted a student of the Middle Temple, being still described as of East Stour. For the next three years, or until he was called to the Bar in June 1740, we know but little of his life. His biographers speak of political tracts; and he certainly worked with James Ralph-the Ralph who 'howls to Cynthia' in the Dunciad-upon two volumes of the 'Spectator' essays known as the Champion (1739-40). Then, in November of the latter year, appeared Richardson's Pamela. The origin of this book has been sufficiently discussed in speaking of its author; it remains to trace its connection with the work of Fielding, to whose manly, if somewhat coarsegrained, common-sense, nourished in the school of Molière and Cervantes, its opportunist morality

seemed particularly nauseous. Probably to amuse himself at first, and also to work off an obscure but long-standing grudge against the author of another success of 1740, the Apology of the actor Colley Cibber, Fielding presently set about a burlesque of Pamela, intended to combine the manners of Cibber and Richardson. By a happy stroke of the pen, he turned the "Squire B.' of Pamela into "Squire Booby,' and, inventing a brother for Richardson's heroine, exhibited him exposed to the solicitations of the 'Squire's aunt by marriage, a dissolute woman of quality. The scenes resulting from this beginning are the least pleasing of Joseph Andrews. But at the end of the second chapter the author introduced Parson Adams, and, quickly warming to his task, soon discarded his original plan. After Chapter x. the book became practically what it professes to be in its full title-namely, The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews, and his Friend Mr Abraham Adams: Written in Imitation of the Manner of Cervantes. That is to say, it became the first example of a till-then-unattempted type of English Novel. For not only by its 'Character of perfect Simplicity,' the absent-minded, fingersnapping, Æschylus-loving' clergyman, did it add a new portrait to the perpetual National Portrait Gallery of English Literature, but it inaugurated a new method in fiction which its author styled the comic Epic-Poem in Prose.' In a lengthy Preface, which was probably an afterthought, or perhaps, to speak more accurately, a premoni tion of something different from his first idea which had gradually dawned upon him during the progress of the volumes, Fielding develops his theory. His aim, he says in effect, was to produce something which should differ from serious romance, not only by its substitution of light and ridiculous' incidents for 'grave and solemn' ones, but by its admission among its dramatis persona of characters of inferior rank, and by its employment of ludicrous and even burlesque diction in place of elevated language. These characteristics, partly present in Joseph Andrews, were to receive fuller exemplification in his next novel, Tom Jones (see also above at page 7).

Meanwhile, the reception accorded to Joseph Andrews, although encouraging, was not sufficient to make the author's fortune, or even to supplement materially the meagre income he derived from his profession. He brought out a farce, Miss Lucy in Town, in which he had a collaborator; he projected with the Rev. William Young, the reputed original of Parson Adams, a translation of Aristophanes, which got no farther than one play; he issued, by subscription, three volumes of Miscellanies, which, among other things, included a youthful comedy, The Wedding Day. This Garrick produced in 1743, with Mrs Woffington for heroine. But the most important items in the Miscellanies, after deduction of a good deal of occasional verse and prose, were a Lucianic frag

ment entitled 'A Journey from this World to the Next,' and (occupying the entire third volume) the remarkable exercise in sustained irony known as The History of the Life of the late Mr Jonathan Wild the Great, the ostensible hero of which was a notorious thief-taker who had swung at Tyburn some eighteen years before. The avowed object of this book, which, from internal evidence, apparently preceded Joseph Andrews in point of composition, is to demonstrate that Greatness unaccompanied by Goodness differs little from rascality; and that the 'true Sublime' in Human Nature consists in the combination of the two. This thesis is worked out with a relentless persistency which, to not a few readers, is so rarely relieved by softer touches as to be almost unendurable. But as an intellectual conception and a study in satire, Jonathan Wild must always be regarded as a masterpiece.

After the Miscellanies, Fielding produced no work of any importance until the appearance of Tom Jones. The story of his life at this date is obscure; but although the 'garrets' and 'spunginghouses' of Lady Louisa Stuart are not improbably the mere exaggerations of an aristocratic pen, there can be little doubt that, as she says, he was 'almost always miserably poor, and seldom in a state of quiet and safety.' His means were uncertain, his splendid constitution was impaired, and he was a martyr to gout. To add to his distresses, and perhaps by reason of them, his beautiful wife died, leaving him plunged in despair. 'So vehement was his grief,' says Murphy, 'that his friends began to think him in danger of losing his reason.' This must have been at the close of 1743. In 1744 he prefaced the second edition of his sister Sarah's novel of David Simple; and the year after began a weekly Whig paper, the True Patriot, which was followed in 1747 by another, the Jacobite's Journal, enterprises which earned for him, either rightly or wrongly, as regards the adjective, the stigma of 'pension'd scribbler.' In November 1747 he married again, his second wife being his first wife's maid, Mary Daniel. She had been devoted to her mistress; she was equally devoted to her husband, to whose children as well as her own she made an excellent mother. A year later, by the interest of his old schoolfellow Lyttelton, to whom he was already much indebted (Preface to Tom Jones), Fielding was appointed a Justice of the Peace for Middlesex and Westminster, and took up his abode in Bow Street, Covent Garden. A month or two later still, on the 28th of February 1749, was published the famous novel of Tom Jones.

The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, is Fielding's masterpiece. The old tradition that he wrote it as a Bow Street magistrate is exploded, and the 'Thousands of Hours' he spent in its composition had probably been dispersed over most of the interval which had elapsed between the publication of the Miscellanies and the date of its issue.

Some of it had no doubt been penned at the Lyttelton seat of Hagley; some at Prior Park, the home, near Bath, of Ralph Allen, the benevolent Allworthy of the book. In Tom Jones, Fielding set himself deliberately to perfect the 'comic EpicPoem in Prose' as he had conceived it during the progress of Joseph Andrews. Besides making it three times as long, he paid much closer attention to the evolution of the plot, which still, with some reservations as to hurry at the close, remains a model in its way. In place of a general critical 'Introduction,' he inserted at the beginning of each book one of those delightful 'prolegomenous' Essays, in which, ever and anon, as George Eliot says, 'he seems to bring his arm-chair to the proscenium and chat with us in all the lusty ease of his fine English'— that English by which, in the words of another admirer, one seems to be carried along, like a swimmer in a strong, clear stream, trusting one's self to every whirl and eddy, with a feeling of safety, of comfort, or delightful ease in the motion of the elastic water.' The book, indeed, has no one character which can quite compete with Parson Abraham Adams. But it has a dozen which are admirably wrought. Squire Western first; Partridge the barber; the philosopher Square; Thwackum, his rival; Miss Western, Miss Bridget Allworthy, Lady Bellaston, Mrs Honour, the lady's-maid-all these are living and moving human beings. It is true that the morality of certain incidents-the scene at Upton, the Bellaston episode which roused the ire of Colonel Newcome-has not passed unchallenged. Probably Mr Lowell's contention that these passages -an inconsiderable portion, after all, in a lengthy novel-shock rather than corrupt will eventually obtain; and it is a defence which cannot always be advanced in favour of some of the performances of Fielding's modern descendants. Pour qui sait lire, Tom Jones must remain, for experience of life, observation of character, invention, humour, irony, and inexhaustible humanity, one of the finest specimens of the English novel of manners. Its author himself never excelled it, nor could he; for, as a French critic observes, it is the summary and abstract of an entire existence.

In 1749 Fielding had but five years to live. He was still poor, and his income of £300 as a Westminster Justice was some of the dirtiest money upon earth.' He seems, nevertheless, to have been zealous and efficient in his office; and one at least of his pamphlets, the Enquiry into the Increase of Robbers (1751), is to this day recognised as authoritative by political economists. But the work which most concerns literature is his third novel, Amelia, also published in 1751. In its central character, as in the Sophia Western of Tom Jones, he delineates his beautiful first wife, whose goodness and forbearance were still a cherished recollection. Written in the intervals of a wearisome and exact

ing profession, Amelia has little of the leisurely qualities of Tom Jones, nor has it the same fundamental richness of material. Moreover, it is preoccupied to an exceptional extent with the social problems, prison discipline and what not, which were daily obtruding themselves on the writer's attention. These drawbacks admitted, it has other qualities which have led some to prefer it to the earlier book. Amelia herself, whom even that sturdy Richardsonian, Dr Johnson, declared to be 'the most pleasing heroine of all the romances,' is a delightful type of generous, unselfish womanhood; and many of the subordinate charactersDr Harrison, Colonel Bath, Mrs Bennet-are only second, if second, to the Tom Jones gallery. After Amelia, Fielding's chief efforts of moment were the Covent Garden Journal (1752); another pamphlet, the Proposal for the Poor (1753); and a pamphlet on Elizabeth Canning. At the end of June 1754, worn out with the labours of his office, and utterly broken in constitution, he started for Lisbon, like Peterborough and Doddridge before him, in the forlorn hope of finding health. He reached his destination on the 14th of August. Two months later, on the 8th of October 1754, he died, and was buried in the English cemetery on the Estrella. Luget Britannia gremio non dari Fovere natum is inscribed upon his tomb. The story of his tedious and painfully prolonged journey to the Portuguese capital is related in a touching posthumous tract published by Andrew Millar in February 1755, together with a fragment of a Comment on the Essays of Bolingbroke, which Mallet had issued in March of the previous year. Long after Fielding's death, in 1778, was produced at Drury Lane a play called The Fathers; or, The Goodnatured Man. It was printed, and ran for a few nights, but has never been revived.

The only trustworthy portrait of Fielding is that prefixed to Murphy's edition of his works (1762). It was drawn from memory by Hogarth, whom he had known, and whom he greatly admired. Of his life, as may have been gathered from the above, but few authentic particulars remain. Not more than three or four of his letters have been preserved; while modern research, by disposing of much merely picturesque tradition, has appreciably reduced the scanty body of material upon which his first biographers based their labours. It is now generally admitted that the reckless Bohemianism attributed to his youth was not continued in middle age, though he was at no time of a temper to grow either rich or careful. But in spite of ill-health and uncertain means, he retained to the end his joy of life; and his hopefulness was as inveterate as his improvidence. loving father and a kind husband; he exerted his last energies in philanthropy and benevolence; he expended his last ink in defence of Christianity; and he went to a foreign grave with the fortitude of a hero and the resignation of a philosopher.

He was a

Hunting Song.

The dusky night rides down the sky,
And ushers in the morn;
The hounds all join in glorious cry,
The huntsman winds his horn:
And a hunting we will go.

The wife around her husband throws
Her arms, and begs his stay;
My dear, it rains, and hails, and snows,
You will not hunt to-day.

But a hunting we will go.

A brushing fox in yonder wood,
Secure to find we seek ;
For why, I carry'd, sound and good,
A cartload there last week.
And a hunting we will go.

Away he goes, he flies the rout,

Their steeds all spur and switch;
Some are thrown in, and some thrown out,
And some thrown in the ditch:

But a hunting we will go.

At length his strength to faintness worn,
Poor Renard ceases flight;

Then hungry, homeward we return,
To feast away the night :

Then a drinking we will go.

(From Don Quixote in England, Act ii.) This goes to the tune 'There was a jovial Beggar.' Verse 3 refers to a practice favoured by Sir Roger de Coverley (Spectator No. 116, July 13, 1711).

Roast Beef.

When mighty roast beef was the Englishman's food,
It ennobled our hearts, and enriched our blood;
Our soldiers were brave, and our courtiers were good.
Oh the roast beef of Old England,
And Old England's roast beef!

Then, Britons, from all nice dainties refrain,
Which effeminate Italy, France, and Spain;
And mighty roast beef shall command on the Main.
Oh the roast beef, &c.

Oh the roast beef, &c.

(From Don Quixote in England, Act 1.) Richard Leveridge took Fielding's first verse, added others, and set the whole to music (Hullah's Song Book, 1866, No. xxxix.)

An Interview between Parson Adams and
Parson Trulliber.

Parson Adams came to the house of Parson Trulliber, whom he found stripped in to his waistcoat, with an apron on, and a pail in his hand, just come from serving his hogs; for Mr Trulliber was a parson on Sundays, but all the other six might more properly be called a farmer. He occupied a small piece of land of his own, besides which he rented a considerable deal more. His wife milked his cows, managed his dairy, and followed the markets with butter and eggs. The hogs fell chiefly to his care, which he carefully waited on at home, and attended to fairs; on which occasion he was liable to many jokes, his own size being, with much ale, rendered little inferior to that of the beasts he sold. He was, indeed, one of the largest men you should see, and could have acted the part of Sir John Falstaff without stuffing. Add to this, that the rotundity of his belly was con

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