art: would have him work, so that he presently fitted her with a tailor-made part, much as Sardou fits Réjane or Sarah. Fielding, it seems, did neither; though, as I have said, he made all the use he could of the admirable Miss Raftor; and, being an adventurer of resource and parts, played off the idiosyncrasies of Mrs. Charke (Colley's daughter), and Theophilus Cibber (Colley's son), and Quin, and Macklin, and even Colley himself, as well as ever he could. It is pretty certain that he made money by his experiments in drama: for the very simple reason that, if he had not, he could scarce have lived, and must certainly, if one refuse him his Bellastons and his Matthewses-(as, of course, in the interests of Purity and Art and Victorian-England one does)-have taken for a livelihood to hackney-coaching after all. For my own part, I wish he had left a diary of his assault upon the Stage. He must, I think, have loved the life, while it lasted; for he is nowhere very severe on any of the trade. The exception is Colley His quarrel Cibber.2 Fielding soon quarrelled, none knows with Cibber.

1 Who was, it is told, a woman of so strict a virtue that her fair fame was never so much as touched by a breath of anything that was not demonstrably Slander.

Cibber was certainly a man of parts. As an actor of fops and villains, he seems to have had remarkable merit; his perversion of Richard the Third held water for something like a couple of centuries, and was played by Garrick, Kean, Macready, everybody, down to the day when Sir Henry Irving sent it to Limbo for ever; in Vanbrugh's hands his Novelty Fashion became the inimitable Lord Foppington; as Poet-Laureate he was very little worse bestowed, he was not much more ridiculous and ineffectual, than the Austins and the Whiteheads and the Pyes; for such critical portraitures of actors and actresses as are contained in the Apology-(a work which Fielding, in the course of his vengeance, was at

why, with this debonair and graceless elder, to whom he was civil enough in the time of Love in Several Masques; and, for the rest of his days, with that touch of pedantry which distinguished him in more than one relation of life, he never ceased from ruffianing (a slang word; but it exactly expresses what I mean) the unvenerable progenitor of Theophilus and Mrs. Charke. But, this distinguished Antic being excepted, I do not remember that, however passionate and enduring his interest in the Human Comedy, he was ever concerned to any serious purpose with those acts of it which are

some pains to show must of necessity be written in English, inasmuch as it could not possibly be written in anything else) -are so good, so complete, so convincing that we have to wait for Lamb and Hazlitt at their best to get anything to vie with them, and, even so, we cannot choose but feel, in comparing the antient and the moderns, that, if Hazlitt and Lamb be the better literature, 'tis the old Actor has the finer insight, and that his technical inspiration (so to speak) gets nearer, far nearer, the truth than the fine results, however closely observed or well imagined they be, of these others, par nobile fratrum, even though they had Munden and Kean to write about; also, some of Cibber's work for the stage (as The Careless Husband) is still fairly readable. But the Apology apart, his chief title to fame is that neither Pope nor Fielding could away with him, and that he was not to be discomfited by either. Pope, for instance, was an artist in insults; but he was so venomous a little beast, and his venom was so entirely out of his control, that, Cibber offending him, he entirely ruined The Dunciad by substituting Cibber, who was more a dunce than himself, for 'piddling Tibbald.' For that matter, Tibbald was as little a dunce as Cibber, or as Pope; but he was bookish, he was ever a scholar, he played the mischief with Pope's text of Shakespeare; so that there really were reasons why he should have seemed such a dunce to Pope, and to Pope's friends, that the chief place in The Dunciad could be accorded to none but him. Now Theobald had questioned (and worse) Pope's scholarship; but Colley had insisted that an unsound woman was not good diet for a confirmed invalid, a party in stays, however brilliant a writer of couplets that party in stays might be; and this impeach

no

played by the professional comedian in the behindthe-scenes of a real theatre.

Of vastly greater moment than his quarrel with His Cibber was his marriage to Miss Charlotte Cradock, marriage. of Old Sarum, which was solemnised in 1735, if not earlier, and which, it is not unfair to assume, made two young people supremely happy. Miss Charlotte was one of three fair sisters, who, though they had some money, were not of the highest and best in Salisbury, and of whom the chaste and elegant Mr. Richardson could find nothing better to say (such was his frenzy against the author of

ment of his savoir faire and his savoir vivre went so terribly to his head that, where he had before seen only Theobald, the quiet student, he now saw only Cibber, the old Young Man about Town, who knew so very much more about things as they are than (despite his gallant ambitions) an angry, dwarfed, corseted Poet could know, that Tibbald must come down, and Cibber must go up, and The Dunciad must (in effect) be disfeatured and disnatured, all because its author wanted to pose as one who knew the Town, and had been proved an ignoramus by this 'harlotry_player.' But the brilliant, warped, tooventuresome Arch-Libeller never (if I may so express myself) got any change out of Colley Cibber; nor, so far as I can see, did Mr. Harry Fielding, either. The truth is, the old Actor was a better Artist in insolence than either. Each of them wrote his worst about him; and he read what they had written with an eye amused, a smiling lip, and a brow of brass. Then, having read, he went out, and meditated. And Pope's repute as a Man About Town was devastated and abolished the moment he laid his hand upon it; and his description of Fielding as a 'broken wit' seems to have been as a wasp upon that gentleman's nose, and to have obliged him to forget himself whenever there was a chance of getting one in' on the aged, disreputable, clever, self-sufficing creature, who, absurd as he was, yet knew his monde, had a vast deal of tact, had parts as an actor, and some brains as a writer, and might, had he not been the kindly whoreson (there really is no other word for him) he was, have gone out of life exulting in the reflection that he had twitted Pope into making a public fool of himself, and had been for years a thorn in the cushion of Henry Fielding.

Murphy's story.

Joseph Andrews!) than that they were bastards.1 The vainglorious and offended Cit advances not the slightest proof of his assertion, which seems, indeed, contrived and stated for the sole purpose of belittling a hated rival. Bastard or not, however, Miss Charlotte was by common consent a beautiful creature, and a creature not less amiable than beautiful; so that Fielding could very well afford to laugh at the little man in Salisbury Court; and assuredly, if he ever thought of Richardson at all, which I take leave to doubt, being of a laughing humour, he did. Certain it is that he was devoted to his wife, and that when she died (as she did apparently in 1743), his passion was so violent that his friends feared for his reason. In any event hers is a name to be honoured while its memory lasts by every lover of English letters: since in her years of courtship she suggested Sophia Western, and in her years of wedlock sat for Amelia; and in this way is primarily responsible for two of the bravest and sweetest ideals in English Fiction.

Arthur Murphy tells a story-(but it is demonstrably untrue) that Mrs. Fielding had a fortune of £1500; and that her husband spent it in three years by keeping open house at East Stour, whither he retired with his bride, and where he set up a carriage, invested a number of servants in costly yellow liveries, and generally 'went the pace' to such a purpose that he had presently to return to

1 Of course, he new nothing at all about the slanders; or despite his gout, he might, and probably would, have done a little horse-whipping: not on the elderly printer, who was small and of a chubby habit, but on the persons of some of his more outrageous allies.

London, and betake himself once more to the writing of farces.1 The truth, as Mr. Dobson sees it, is that Harry Fielding may very well have retired to East Stour on the failure of The Universal Gallant. This happened in 1735, the accepted year of his marriage which, as I have said, may well have been earlier. As he was back in London in the 'first months of 1736,' running 'the little French theatre in the Haymarket,' and the Great Mogul's Company of Comedians' (so he described them; with the further information that they had dropped from the Clouds'), and producing Pasquin, Murphy's three years' of 'entertainments, hounds, and horses' gets so hard a knock that, if we had not all been brought up (as it were) in the strong persuasion that Fielding was a squandering suck-pint, it would, I believe, have been held long since a common lie. Be this as it

1 Keightley, who describes this part of Murphy's narrative as a mere tissue of error and inconsistency,' points out that the family colours were white and blue while Sir Leslie Stephen very plausibly suggests that the 'yellow liveries' of Murphy's description were a reminiscence (by a thoroughly muddled mind) of that Beau Fielding (d. 1712) who married the Duchess of Cleveland, and also hired a coach, and kept two footmen clothed in yellow.' Mr. Dobson, though he does not go so far as Keightley, and opines that there was too much liquor going at the old farm by the Stour, with the great locust tree at the back,' which Fielding rented, so that the dusky Night,' did all-too often ride down the sky' over the 'prostrate forms of Harry Fielding's guests,' yet adduces certain irrefragable reasons in support of Keightley's case. As Mr. Booth is a character in fiction, his testimony is of a piece with what the Soldier said, in the historical case of Bardell v. Pickwick. If it were not, if it were real autobiography, then were Murphy only less guilty of 'infamonising' a dead man than the Thackeray who owed so much to his delusions, and did so miserably well with them.