About 1736, Fielding seems to have formed the resolution of settling in life. He espoused a young lady of Salisbury, named Craddock; beautiful, amiable, and possessed of 1500l. About the same time, by the death, it has been supposed, of his mother, he succeeded to a small estate of about 200l. per annum, situated at Stower, in Derbyshire, affording him, in those days, the means of decent competence. To this place he retired from London, but unfortunately carried with him the same improvident disposition to enjoy the present, at the expense of the future, which seems to have marked his whole life.. He established an equipage, with showy liveries; and his biographers lay some stress on the circumstance, that the colour being a bright yellow, required to be frequently renewed; an important particular which, in humble imitation of our accurate predecessors, we deem it unpardonable to suppress. Horses, hounds, and the exercise of an unbounded hospitality, soon aided the yellow livery-men in devouring the substance of their improvident master; and three years found Fielding without land, home, or revenue, a student in the Temple, where he applied himself closely to the law, and after the usual term was called to the bar. It is probable he brought nothing from Derbyshire, save that experience of a rural life and

its pleasures, which afterwards enabled him to delineate the inimitable Squire Western.

Fielding had now a profession, and as he had strongly applied his powerful mind to the principles of the law, it might have been expected that success would have followed in proportion. But those professional persons, who can advance or retard the practice of a young lawyer, mistrusted probably the application of a wit and a man of pleasure to the business they might otherwise have confided to him; and it is said that Fielding's own conduct was such as to justify their want of confidence. Disease, the consequence of a free life, came to the aid of dissipation of mind, and interrupted the course of Fielding's practice by severe fits of the gout, which gradually impaired his robust constitution. We find him, therefore, having again recourse to the stage, where he attempted to produce a continuation of his own piece, The Virgin Unmasked: but as one of the characters was supposed to be written in ridicule of a man of quality, the chamberlain refused his license. Pamphlets of political controversy, fugitive tracts, and essays, were the next means he had recourse to for subsistence; and as his ready pen produced them upon every emergency, he contrived by the profits to support himself and his family, to which he was fondly attached.

Amid this anxious career of precarious expedient and constant labour, he had the misfortune to lose his wife; and his grief at this domestic calamity was so extreme, that his friends became alarmed for the consequences to his reason. The violence of the emotion, however, was transient, though his regret was lasting; and the necessity of subsistence compelled him again to resume his literary labours. At length, in the year 1741 or 1742, circumstances induced him to engage in a mode of composition, which he retrieved from the disgrace in which he found it, and rendered a classical department of British literature.

The novel of Pamela, published in 1740, had carried the fame of Richardson to the highest pitch; and Fielding, whether he was tired of hearing it over-praised (for a book, several passages of which would now be thought highly indelicate, was in those days even recommended from the pulpit), or whether, as a writer for daily subsistence, he caught at whatever interested the public for the time, or whether, in fine, he was seduced by that wicked spirit of wit, which cannot forbear turning into ridicule the idol of the day, resolved to caricature the style, principles, and personages of this favourite performance. As Gay's desire to satirize Philips gave rise to the Shepherd's Week, so Fielding's purpose to ridicule Pamela produced the History of Jo

seph Andrews; and, in both cases, but especially in the latter, a work was executed infinitely better than could have been expected to arise out of such a motive, and the reader received a degree of pleasure far superior to what the author himself appears to have proposed. There is, indeed, a fine vein of irony in Fielding's novel, as will appear from comparing it with the pages of Pamela. But Pamela, to which that irony was applied, is now in a manner forgotten, and Joseph Andrews continues to be read, for the admirable pictures of manners which it presents; and, above all, for the inimitable character of Mr. Abraham Adams, which alone is sufficient to stamp the superiority of Fielding over all writers of his class. His learning, his simplicity, his evangelical purity of mind, and benevolence of disposition, are so admirably mingled with pedantry, absence of mind, and with the habit of athletic and gymnastic exercise, then acquired at the universities by students of all descriptions, that he may be safely termed one of the richest productions of the Muse of fiction. Like Don Quixote, Parson Adams is beaten a little too much, and too often; but the cudgel lights upon his shoulders, as on those of the honoured Knight of La Mancha, without the slightest stain to his reputation, and he is bastinadoed without being degraded. The style of this piece is said, in the preface,

ron.

to have been an imitation of Cervantes; but both in Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones, the author appears also to have had in view the Roman Comique of the once celebrated ScarFrom this author he has copied the mock-heroic style, which tells ludicrous events in the language of the classical epic; a vein of pleasantry which is soon wrought out, and which Fielding has employed so often as to expose him to the charge of pedantry.

Joseph Andrews was eminently successful; and the aggrieved Richardson, who was fond of praise even to adulation, was proportionally offended, while his group of admirers, male and female, took care to echo back his sentiments, and to heap Fielding with reproach. Their animosity survived his life, and we find the most ungenerous reproaches thrown upon his memory, in the course of Richardson's correspondence. Richardson was well acquainted with Fielding's sisters, and complained to them—not of Fielding's usage of himself, that he was too wise, or too proud to mention, but-of his unfortunate predilection to what was mean and low in character and description. The following expressions are remarkable, as well for the extreme modesty of the writer, who thus rears himself into the paramount judge of Fielding's qualities, and for the delicacy which could intrude such observations on the ear of his rival's