Tommy Arne, who was afterwards to write the music of Artaxerxes and Rule Britannia, and many a classic in English song besides; and here, in the noble, if ambiguous, speech of the illustrious Mr. Gray (himself an Etonian, of a somewhat later date), he chased the rolling circle's speed' and 'urged the flying ball' with all the energy that

Buxom health of rosy hue,

Wild wit, invention ever new,

And lively cheer of vigour born,

could give. I know not (nobody does) the date of his reception; but I have had several lads of genius through my hands, and I make bold to say that here came his Choice of Hercules, and that that choice was hardly one which would commend itself to Minerva. There is nothing to guide one, nothing to illuminate, nothing to suggest. But women are women; such boys as the boy Fielding, seld-seen or not, are ever occurring; and Fielding's mind was in the main an experimenting, an observing, a debating mind. Is Molly Seagrim Mr. Jones's first? If she be, then assuredly, I take it, there is not near so much likeness between Jones and Fielding as has hitherto been perceived. In Fielding's life and work, the Accidental Woman takes her place, and gets her due. That is one of the many things which mark him off from other English novelists. Of itself, the point is unimportant. Boyhood counts for little or nothing in the development of sentimental Man, and Youth for very little more. It is only when Manhood lays Mr. Dobson conjectures that he was entered soon after his mother's death.

A boyish

romance.

hold upon a boy that Woman begins to count: till then she is but a sensation and a jest. But to be a Man is to be conscious of a heart; and with, and in, that consciousness your rakish Youngster becomes a decent Male, and (forgetting his experiences) looks round for Somebody with whom to fall in love. That, as I think, was Fielding's case; as it has been the case of many millions of lusty lads besides. To put things plainly, I think that he had learned his grammar thoroughly before he went to Eton; and

am fully prepared to meet him when, on his departure thence, he falls over head and ears in love with Miss Sarah Andrew.

She was a 'fortune and a beauty,' as they said in those days; she lived at Lyme Regis; she was a lonely, lovely orphan; one Andrew Tucker was her guardian. It was so desperate a business while it lasted that, though the lover was but eighteen or so, (but, like the abducting Rochester before him, he cannot but have been an uncommonly handsome and brilliant boy), the Young Lady herself was sent away out of his reach; while the Young Lady's Guardian was moved to protest (in an affidavit) that he went in fear of his life on account of young Mr. Fielding and his man, which latter he feared would beat, maim, or kill him.' Is Is young Mr. Fielding's man a far-away vision of Black George? I love to think so; but evidence, much less proof, is wanting. What is certain is that Miss Andrew, having been deposited for safety with another Guardian, one Rhodes of Modbury, in South Devon, was presently married off out of harm's way to one of Rhodes's sons; had several children; and was

afterwards honoured among the Tuckers and the
Rhodeses as the original of Sophia Western. Of
course, she was nothing of the sort; for, as we all
know, Fielding was at some pains to make it history
that, in essentials and particulars alike, Sophia
Western was none other than his first wife,
Charlotte Cradock. But it is scarce possible to
doubt that Mrs. Rhodes, who, at the time of
affidaviting, was a damsel of fifteen (she died in
1783, being then some three and seventy years old),
shared, if she did not encourage, the delusion; for
it is a fact that Woman, whatever her age, and what-
ever her fashion, dearly loves being written about
in books, and that Ronsard's lovely sonnet-

'Quand vous serez bien vieille, au soir, à la
chandelle '-

enshrines and glorifies an eternal truth. I do not
for a moment think that, however romantical the
Fielding of Lyme Regis, he knew thus much: and
I am equally sure that the lady did not.
But by
the time that Tom Jones appeared, both he and she
were wiser. Both were some thirty years older;
but the woman was by that much the worse for
life, while the man, his eye on immortality,
had so far learned his lesson that Miss Andrew
was at best a pleasant memory, and he was conscious
of nothing vitally glorious in the past except the
girl he had married; loved to distraction; honoured
with motherhood; spree'd with; starved with ;
betrayed (it may be ; I know not); and seen die.

Meanwhile he had done enough. A lad of Its coneighteen, he had been foiled in a fine, scandalous sequences.

attempt at abduction; he had seen a fortune and a beauty violently removed from his neighbourhood, and married out of hand with a view to making him impossible; and he had been bound over to keep the peace by an elderly gentleman, who went in bodily fear of young Mr. Fielding and his follower. He rose to the situation (or Edmund Fielding rose for him); and, instead of going to Oxford or Cambridge, as in the ordinary course of things he would have done, he went to Leyden to read law under 'the learned Vitriarius.' Also, he 'took it out of' Miss Andrew by translating a part of Juvenal's Sixth Satire in English Burlesque Verse,' in the manner of Mr. Butler's Hudibras. It will be owned, I think, that this was not the revenge of a desperate man.1

1 Austin Dobson: Fielding (New York), Appendix I. It was Keightley who unearthed old Tucker's affidavit. It was sworn the 14th of November 1725, before John Bowdidge, Mayor of Lyme Regis ; with the result that Henry Fielding, Gent, and his servant or companion, Joseph Lewis,' were bound over to keep the peace, insomuch as the said Andrew Tucker, Gent, one of the Corporation,' was 'in fear of his life of some bodily hurt to be done or to be procured to be done to him by H. Fielding and his man.' Further: it was a Tucker tradition that Andrew of that ilk considered himself hardly used by Rhodes of Modbury, for the reason that, all the while he was going in fear of his life, etc., he was resolving that Miss Andrew should marry his own son. One Davidson, a Devon antiquary, is responsible (under an 'it is said ') for the statement that Fielding (his companion or servant,' no doubt, aiding and abetting) made a desperate attempt to carry the lady off by force on a Sunday, when she was on her way to Church.' Last of all, as Miss Andrew's mother and the mother of Sarah Gould were in some sort connected, the Chloe and Strephon of this highly romantic business appear to have been a kind of cousins. Why in the Theatre of Henry Fielding is there no comedy called The Rival Guardians?

II

It

NOBODY knows how long Fielding remained under Student at the wing of the learned Vitriarius, nor, when the Leyden. learned Vitriarius was doing something else than lecture, exactly how he employed himself. is said, however, that he worked hard at the 'civilians'; and it is history that he had his eye upon the drama, and brought back with him the first draft of his Don Quixote in England.1 It is plain that, if any Dutch maiden attracted him, the affair was attended by no memories, whether humorous or tragic, nor issued in any more translations from the Roman Satirists; and it is also plain that neither the country nor the people made any sort of impression on him; for I recall but a single reference to either in his afterwork.2 I suppose, with others, that when he did return to England, he returned because he could not count on ready money from his father-(who had married a second time, and was begetting a second family with all the lustiness of a British soldier)—and was unable to pay his lodgings and his fees. At His return rate, return he did; and, being by this time a hand- to London. some, vigorous, inspiring creature, over six feet high, shaped (the inference is) like one of his own heroes, dark-haired and dark-eyed, with a presence, and a temperament, and a tongue, he plunged, and plunged again, and yet again plunged into the roar

any

1 As his formal comedy, Love in Several Masques, was played while he was yet in his twentieth year, it seems highly probable that it also was at least begun at Leyden.

2 I forget for the moment where it occurs. But the inspiration of it is merely the stenches of a Dutch canal,