£200 per annum, but this, the son remarked, any one might pay who would!' He obtained £1500 by his marriage with Miss Cradock, a lady of great beauty and worth, who resided in Salisbury, and he retired with his wife to the country. His mother had left him a small estate at East Stour, Dorsetshire; but there Fielding's hospitality and extravagance-a large retinue of servants in yellow | liveries, entertainments, hounds and horses-soon devoured his little patrimony and wife's fortune. In the following year (1736) he took the Haymarket Theatre, and engaged a dramatic company. This project failed, and in 1737 he entered himself as a student in the Middle Temple. He was called to the bar in June 1740. His practice, however, was insufficient for the support of his family, and he continued to write pieces for the stage, and pamphlets to suit the topics of the day. In politics he was an anti-Jacobite, and a steady supporter of the Hanoverian succession. In 1742 appeared his novel of Joseph Andrews, which at once stamped him as a master, uniting to genuine English humour the spirit of Cervantes and the mock-heroic of Scarron. There was a wicked wit in the choice of his subject. To ridicule Richardson's Pamela, Fielding made his hero a brother of that renowned and popular lady; he quizzed Gammer Andrews and his wife, the rustic parents of Pamela; and in contrast to the style of Richardson's work, he made his hero and his friend, Parson Adams, models of virtue and excellence, and his leading female characters (Lady Booby and Mrs Slipslop) quite the reverse. Lady Booby is eager to marry her footman, who resists all her blandishments as his sister Pamela had resisted Mr B. Even Pamela is brought down from her high standing of moral perfection, and is represented as Mrs Booby, with the airs of an upstart, whom the parson is compelled to reprove for laughing in church. Richardson's vanity was deeply wounded by this insult, and he never forgave the desecration of his favourite production. The ridicule was certainly unjustifiable; but, as Sir Walter Scott has remarked, 'how can we wish that undone without which Parson Adams would not have existed?' The burlesque portion of the work would not have caused its extensive and abiding popularity. It heightened its humour, and may have contributed at first to the number of its readers; but Joseph Andrews possessed strong and original claims to public favour, and has found countless admirers among persons who know nothing of Pamela. Setting aside some ephemeral essays and light pieces, Fielding, in the following year (1743), brought out three volumes of Miscellanies, which included A Journey from this World to the Next, and The History of Jonathan Wild. A vein of keen satire runs through the latter; but the hero and his companions are such callous rogues, and unsentimental ruffians, that we cannot take pleasure in their dexterity and success. The ordinary of Newgate, who administers consolation to Wild before his execution, is the best character in the novel. The ordinary preferred a bowl of punch to any other liquor, as it is nowhere spoken against in Scripture; and his ghostly admonitions to the malefactor are in harmony with this predilection. In 1749, Fielding was appointed one of the justices of Westminster and Middlesex, for which he was indebted to the services of Lyttleton. He was an active magistrate; but the office of a trading

justice, paid by fees, was as unworthy the genius of Fielding as that of an exciseman was unsuited to Burns. It appears, from a statement made by himself, that this appointment did not bring him in, 'of the dirtiest money upon earth,' £300 a year. In the midst of his official drudgery and too frequent dissipations, our author produced Tom Jones, unquestionably the first of English novels. He received £600 for the copyright, and such was its success that Millar the publisher presented £100 more to the author. In 1751 appeared Amelia, for which he received £1000. Johnson was a great admirer of this novel, and read it through without stopping. Its domestic scenes moved him more deeply than heroic or ambitious adventures; but the conjugal tenderness and affection of Amelia are but ill requited by the conduct of Booth, her husband, who has the vices without the palliation of youth possessed by Tom Jones, independently of his ties as a husband and father. The character of Amelia was drawn for Fielding's wife, even down to the accident which disfigured her beauty; and the frailties of Booth are said to have shadowed forth some of the author's own backslidings and experiences. The lady whose amiable qualities he delighted to recount, and whom he passionately loved, died while they struggled on in their worldly difficulties. He was almost broken-hearted for her loss, and found no relief, it is said, but in weeping, in concert with her servant-maid, 'for the angel they mutually regretted.' This made the maid his habitual confidential associate; and in process of time he began to think he could not give his children a tenderer mother, or secure for himself a more faithful housekeeper and nurse. The maid accordingly became mistress of his household, and her conduct as his wife fully justified his good opinion. If there is little of romance, there is sound sense, affection, and gratitude in this step of Fielding, but it is probable the noble families to whom he was allied might regard it as a stain on his escutcheon. Amelia was the last work of fiction that Fielding gave to the world. His last public act was an undertaking to extirpate several gangs of thieves and highwaymen that then infested London. The government employed him in this somewhat perilous enterprise, placing a sum of £600 at his disposal, and he was completely successful. The vigour and sagacity of his mind still remained, but Fielding was paying, by a premature old age and decrepitude, for the follies and excesses of his youth. A complication of disorders weighed down his latter days, the most formidable of which was dropsy. As a last resource he was advised to try the effect of a milder climate, and departed for Lisbon in the spring of 1754. Nothing can be more touching than the description he has given in his posthumous work, A Voyage to Lisbon, of this parting scene:

'Wednesday, June 26, 1754-On this day the most melancholy sun I had ever beheld arose, and found me awake at my house at Fordhook. By the light of this sun I was, in my own opinion, last to behold and take leave of some of those creatures on whom I doted with a mother-like fondness, guided by nature and passion, and uncured and unhardened by all the doctrine of that philosophical school where I had learned to bear pains and to despise death.

'In this situation, as I could not conquer nature, I submitted entirely to her, and she made as great a fool of me as she had ever done of any woman whatsoever under pretence of giving me leave to enjoy, she drew me into suffer, the company of my little ones during eight hours; and I doubt whether in that time I did not undergo more than in all my distemper.

'At twelve precisely my coach was at the door, which was no sooner told me, than I kissed my children round, and went into it with some little resolution. My wife, who behaved more like a heroine and philosopher, though at the same time the tenderest mother in the world, and my eldest daughter, followed me; some friends went with us, and others here took their leave; and I heard my behaviour applauded, with many murmurs and praises to which I well knew I had no title; as all other such philosophers may, if they have any modesty, confess on the like occasions."

The great novelist reached Lisbon, and resided in that genial climate for about two months. His health, however, gradually declined, and he died on the 8th of October 1754. It is pleasing to record that his family, about which he evinced so much tender solicitude in his last days, were sheltered from want by his brother and a private friend, Ralph Allen, Esq. whose character for worth and benevolence he had drawn in Allworthy, in Tom Jones.

Let humble Allen, with an awkward shame,
Do good by stealth, and blush to find it fame.

РОРЕ.

The English factory at Lisbon erected a monument over his remains. A new tomb was erected to him in 1830.

The irregularities of Fielding's life-however dearly he may have paid for fame-contributed to his riches as an author. He had surveyed human nature in various aspects, and experienced its storms and sunshine. His kinswoman, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, assigns to him an enviable vivacity of temperament, though it is at the expense of his morality. His happy constitution,' she says, 'even when he had, with great pains, half demolished it, made him forget every evil when he was before a venison-pasty, or over a flask of champagne; and I am persuaded he has known more happy moments than any prince upon earth. His natural spirits gave him rapture with his cookmaid, and cheerfulness when he was starving in a garret.' Fielding's experience as a Middlesex justice was unfavourable to his personal respectability; but it must also have brought him into contact with scenes and characters well fitted for his graphic delineations. On the other hand, his birth and education as a gentleman, and his brief trial of the life of a rural squire, immersed in sports and pleasure, furnished materials for a Squire Western, an Allworthy, and other country characters, down to black George the gamekeeper; while, as a man of wit and fashion on the town, and a gay dramatist, he must have known various prototypes of Lord Fellamar and his other city portraits. The profligacy of Lady Bellaston, and the meanness of Tom Jones in accepting support from such a source, are, we hope, circumstances which have rarely occurred even in the fashionable life of that period. The tone of morality is never very high in Fielding, but the case we have cited is his lowest descent.

Though written amidst discouraging circumstances and irksome duties, Tom Jones bears no marks of haste. The author committed some errors as to time and place, but his fable is constructed with historical exactness and precision, and is a finished model of the comic romance. Byron has styled Fielding 'the prose Homer of human nature.' 'Since the days of Homer,' says Dr Beattie, 'the world has not seen a more artful epic fable. The characters and adventures are wonderfully diversified; yet the circumstances are all so natural, and rise so easily from one another, and co-operate with so much regularity in bringing on, even while they seem to retard the catastrophe, that the curiosity of the reader is always kept awake, and, instead of flagging, grows more and more impatient as the story advances, till at last it becomes downright anxiety. And when we get to the end, and look back on the whole contriv ance, we are amazed to find that of so many incidents there should be so few superfluous; that in such a variety of fiction there should be so great a probability, and that so complex a tale should be so perspicuously conducted, and with perfect unity of design.' The only digression from the main story which is felt to be tedious is the episode of the Man of the Hill. In Don Quixote and Gil Blas we are reconciled to such interpolations by the air of romance which pervades the whole, and which seems indigenous to the soil of Spain. In Cervantes, too, these digressions are sometimes highly poetical and striking tales. But in the plain lifelike scenes of Tom Jones-English life in the eighteenth century, in the county of Somersetsuch a tedious 'hermit of the vale' is felt to be an unnatural incumbrance. Fielding had little of the poetical or imaginative faculty. His study lay in real life and everyday scenes, which he depicted with a truth and freshness, a buoyancy and vigour, and such an exuberance of practical knowledge, easy satire, and lively fancy, that in his own department he stands unrivalled. Others have had bolder invention, a higher cast of thought, more poetical imagery, and profounder passion (for Fielding has little pathos or sentiment); but in the perfect nature of his characters, especially in low life, and in the perfect skill with which he combined and wrought up his comic powers, seasoning the whole with wit and wisdom, the ripened fruit of genius and wide experience, this great English author is still unapproached.

A passage from Fielding or Smollett can convey no more idea of the work from which it is taken, or the manner of the author, than a single stone or brick would of the architecture of a house. We are tempted, however, to extract the account of Partridge's impressions on first visiting a playhouse, when he witnessed the representation of Hamlet. The faithful attendant of Tom Jones was half-barber and half-schoolmaster, shrewd, yet simple as a child.

Partridge at the Theatre.

Jones, Mrs Miller, her youngest daughter, and Partridge, In the first row, then, of the first gallery, did Mr take their places. Partridge immediately declared it was the finest place he had ever been in. When the first music was played, he said: 'It was a wonder how so many fiddlers could play at one time without putting one another out.' While the fellow was lighting the upper candles, he cried out to Mrs Miller: 'Look, look,

Thus ended the adventure at the playhouse, where Partridge had afforded great mirth, not only to Jones and Mrs Miller, but to all who sat within hearing, who were more attentive to what he said than to anything that passed on the stage. He durst not go to bed all that night for fear of the ghost; and for many nights after, sweated two or three hours before he went to sleep with the same apprehensions, and waked several times in great horrors, crying out: 'Lord have mercy upon us! there it is.'

Philosophy and Christianity.

Being now provided with all the necessaries of life, I betook myself once again to study, and that with a more ordinate application than I had ever done formerly. The books which now employed my time solely were those, as well ancient as modern, which treat of true philosophy, a word which is by many thought to be the subject only of farce and ridicule. I now read over the works of Aristotle and Plato, with the rest of those inestimable treasures which ancient Greece hath bequeathed to the world.

To this I added another study, compared to which all the philosophy taught by the wisest heathens is little better than a dream, and is indeed as full of vanity as the silliest jester ever pleased to represent it. This is that divine wisdom which is alone to be found in the Holy Scriptures: for those impart to us the knowledge and assurance of things much more worthy our attention, than all which this world can offer to our acceptance; of things which heaven itself hath condescended to reveal to us, and to the smallest knowledge of which the highest human wit unassisted could never ascend. I began now to think all the time I had spent with the best heathen writers was little more than labour lost; for however pleasant and delightful their lessons may be, or however adequate to the right regulation of our conduct with respect to this world only, yet, when compared with the glory revealed in Scripture, their highest documents will appear as trifling, and of as little consequence as the rules by which children regulate their childish little games and pastime. True it is, that philosophy makes us wiser, but Christianity makes us better men. Philosophy elevates and steels the mind, Christianity softens and sweetens it. The former makes us the objects of human admiration, the latter of divine love. That insures us a temporal, but this an eternal happiness.

I had spent about four years in the most delightful manner to myself, totally given up to contemplation, and entirely unembarrassed with the affairs of the world, when I lost the best of fathers, and one whom I so entirely loved, that my grief at his loss exceeds all description. I now abandoned my books, and gave myself up for a whole month to the efforts of melancholy and despair. Time, however, the best physician of the mind, at length brought me relief. I then betook my self again to my former studies, which I may say perfected my cure for philosophy and religion may be called the exercises of the mind, and when this is disordered, they are as wholesome as exercise can be to a distempered body. They do indeed produce similar effects with exercise: for they strengthen and confirm the mind; till man becomes, in the noble strain of Horace,

Fortis, et in seipso totus teres atque rotundus,
Externi ne quid valeat per læve morari:
In quem manca ruit semper Fortuna.

[Firm in himself who on himself relies;
Polished and round who runs his proper course,
And breaks misfortune with superior force.

FRANCIS.]

A sister of the eminent novelist, SARAH FIELDING (1714-1768), was also distinguished in literature. She was the author of the novel of

David Simple, a work not unworthy the sister of Henry Fielding; also another tale, The Cry; and she translated from the Greek the Memorabilia of Xenophon. Some other works of less importance proceeded from the pen of this accomplished

woman.

TOBIAS GEORGE SMOLLETT.

Six years after the publication of Joseph Andrews, and before Tom Jones had been produced, a third novelist had taken the field, different in many respects from either Richardson or Fielding, but, like them, devoted to that class of fictitious composition founded on truth and nature. We have previously noticed the circumstances of Smollett's life. A young unfriended Scotsman, he went to London eager for distincIn this his failure tion as a dramatic writer. was more signal than the want of success which had attended Fielding's theatrical productions Smollett, however, was of a dauntless intrepid spirit, and when he again resumed his pen, his efforts were crowned with the most gratifying success. He had adopted Le Sage as his model, but his characters, his scenes, his opinions, and prejudices were all decidedly British. The novels of Smollett were produced in the following order: 1748, Roderick Random; 1751, Peregrine Pickle; 1754, Ferdinand Count Fathom; 1762, Sir Launcelot Greaves; 1771, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker. From the date of his first to that of his latest production, Smollett had improved in taste and judgment; but his powers of invention, his native humour, and his knowledge of life and character, are as conspicuous in Roderick Random as in any of his works. His Tom Bowling is his most perfect sea-character, though in Peregrine Pickle he has preserved the same general features, with additional colouring, and a greater variety of ludicrous incidents. The adventures of Roderick are such as might naturally have occurred to any young Scotsman of the day in quest of fortune. Scene follows scene with astonishing rapidity: at one time his hero basks in prosperity, in another he is plunged in utter destitution. He is led into different countries, whose national peculiarities are described, and into society of various descrip tions, with wits, sharpers, courtiers, courtesans, and men of all grades. In this tour of the world and of human life, the reader is amazed at the careless profusion, the inexhaustible humour, of an author who pours out his materials with such prodigality and facility. The patient skill and taste of Fielding are nowhere found in Smollett; there is no elaboration of character; no careful preparation of incidents; no unity of design. Roderick Random is hurried on without any fixed or definite purpose; he is the child of impulse; and though there is a dash of generosity and good-humour his character, he is equally conspicuous for reckless libertinism and mischief-more prone to selfishness and revenge than to friendship or grati tude. There is an inherent and radical meanness in his conduct toward his humble friend Strap, with whom he begins life, and to whom he is so much indebted both in purse and person. Tom Jones is always kind and liberal to his attendant Partridge, but Strap is bullied and fleeced by Roderick Random; disowned or despised as suits the interest or passion of the moment; and at

in

last, contrary to all notions of Scotch spirit and morality, his faithful services and unswerving attachment are rewarded by his receiving and accepting the hand of a prostitute, and an eleemosynary provision less than the sacrifices he had made, or what a careful Scot might attain to by honest independent exertion. The imperfect moral sense thus manifested by Smollett is also evinced by the coarse and licentious passages which disfigure the novel. Making all allowance for the manners of the times, this grossness is indefensible; and we must regret that our author had not a higher and more chivalrous estimate of the female character. In this he was inferior to Richardson, who studied and reverenced the purity of the female heart, and to Fielding, whose tastes and early position in society preserved him from some of the grosser faults of his rival novelist. The charm of Roderick Random, then, consists not in plot or well-sustained characters-admirable as is the sketch of Tom Bowling-but in its broad humour and comic incidents, which, even when most farcical, seldom appear improbable, and are never tiresome.

Peregrine Pickle is formed of the same materials, cast in a larger mould. The hero is equally unscrupulous with Roderick Random-perhaps more deliberately profligate—as in the attempted seduction of Amanda, and in his treatment of Emiliabut the comic powers of the author are more widely and variously displayed. They seem like clouds

For ever flushing round a summer sky. All is change, brilliancy, heaped-up plenty, and unlimited power-the rich coin and mintage of genius. The want of decent drapery is unfortunately too apparent. Smollett never had much regard for the proprieties of life-those 'minor morals,' as Goldsmith has happily termed thembut where shall we find a more attractive gallery of portraits, or a series of more laughable incidents? Prominent in the group is the one-eyed naval veteran, Commodore Trunnion, a humorist in Smollett's happiest manner. His keeping garrison in his house as on board ship, making his servants sleep in hammocks and turn out to watch, is a characteristic though overcharged trait of the old naval commander. The circumstances of his marriage, when he proceeded to church on a hunter, which he steered according to the compass, instead of keeping the road, and his detention while he tacked about rather than go right in the wind's eye,' are equally ludicrous. Lieutenant Hatchway, and Pipes the boatswain, are foils to the eccentric commodore; but the taciturnity of Pipes, and his ingenuity in the affair of the loveletter, are good distinctive features of his own. The humours of the poet, painter, and physician, when Pickle pursues his mischievous frolics and gallantries in France, are also admirable specimens of laughable caricature. In London the adventures are not so amusing. Peregrine richly merited his confinement in the Fleet by his brutal conduct; while Cadwallader, the misanthrope, is more tedious than Fielding's Man of the Hill. The Memoirs of a Lady of Qualitythough a true tale, for inserting which Smollett was bribed by a sum of money-are disgraceful without being interesting. On the whole, the vices and virtues of Smollett's style are equally

seen in Peregrine Pickle, and seen in full perspective.

The

Ferdinand Count Fathom is more of a romance with little of national character or manners. portraiture of a complete villain, proceeding step by step to rob his benefactors and pillage mankind, cannot be considered instructive or entertaining. The first atrocities of Ferdinand, and his intrigue with his female associate Teresa, are coarse and disgusting. When he extends his operations, and flies at higher game, the chase becomes more animated. His adventures at gambling-tables and hotels, and his exploits as a physician, afford scope for the author's satirical genius. But the most powerful passages in the novel are those which recount Ferdinand's seduction of Celinda, the story of Monimia, and the description of the tempest in the forest, from which he took shelter in a robber's hut. In this lonely dwelling, the gang being absent, Fathom was relieved by a withered beldame, who conveyed him to a rude apartment to sleep in. Here he found the dead body of a man still warm, who had been lately stabbed and concealed beneath some straw, and the account of his sensations during the night, the horrid device by which he saved his life (lifting up the dead body, and putting it in his own place in the bed), and his escape, guided by the old hag, whom he compelled to accompany him through the forest, are related with the intensity and power of a tragic poet. There is a vein of poetical imagination, also, in the means by which Fathom accomplishes the ruin of Celinda, working on her superstitious fears and timidity bý placing an Eolian harp, then almost an unknown instrument, in the casement of a window adjoining her bedroom. The strings,' says Smollett, with poetical inflation, 'no sooner felt the impression of the balmy zephyr, than they began to pour forth a stream of melody, more ravishingly delightful than the song of Philomel, the warbling brook, and all the concert of the wood.' The remorse of Celinda is depicted with equal tenderness. The seeds of virtue,' remarks the novelist, 'are seldom destroyed at once. Even amidst the rank productions of vice, they re-germinate to a sort of imperfect vegetation, like some scattered hyacinths shooting up among the weeds of a ruined garden, that testify the former culture and amenity of the soil.' In descriptions of this kind, Smollett evinces a grace and pathos which Fielding did not possess. We trace the mind of the poet in such conceptions, and in the language in which they are expressed. Few readers of Peregrine Pickle can forget the allusion, so beautiful and pathetic, to the Scottish Jacobites at Boulogne, 'exiled from their native homes in consequence of their adherence to an unfortunate and ruined cause,' who went daily to the sea-side in order to indulge their longing eyes with a prospect of the white cliffs of Albion, which they could never more approach.

Sir Launcelot Greaves is a sort of travesty of Don Quixote, in which the absurdity of the idea is relieved by the humour of some of the characters and conversations. Butler's Presbyterian knight going 'a-colonelling,' as a redresser of wrongs in merry England, is ridiculous enough; but the chivalry of Sir Launcelot and his attendant, Captain Crowe, outrages all sense and probability. Seeing that his strength lay in humorous exaggeration, Smollett sought for scenes of broad