have given earnest attention to the civil law. Had he remained in this regular course of study, the courts would probably have gained a lawyer, and the world would have lost a man of genius; but the circumstances of General Fielding determined the chance in favour of posterity, though, perhaps, against his son. Remittances failed, and the young student was compelled to return, at the age of twenty, to plunge into the dissipation of London, without a monitor to warn him, or a friend

to support him. General Fielding, indeed, promised his son an allowance of two hundred pounds a year; but this, as Fielding himself used to say, « any one might pay who would.>> It is only necessary to add, that Fielding was tall, handsome, and well-proportioned, had an expressive countenance, and possessed, with an uncommonly strong constitution, a keen relish of pleasure, with the power of enjoying the present moment, and trusting to chance for the future;—and the reader has before him sufficient grounds to estimate the extent of his improvidence and distress. Lady Mary Wortley Montague, his kinswoman and early acquaintance, has traced his temperament and its consequences in a few lines; and no one who can use her words would willingly employ his own.

<< I am sorry for Henry Fielding's death,» says her ladyship, in one of her letters, upon

receiving information of that event, «not only as I shall read no more of his writings, but because I believe he lost more than others, as no man enjoyed life more than he did, though few had less occasion to do so, the highest of his preferment being raking in the lowest sinks. of vice and misery. I should think it a nobler and less nauseous employment to be one of the staff-officers that conduct the nocturnal weddings. His happy constitution (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 cook-maid, and cheerfulness when he was starving in a garret. There was a great similitude between his character and that of Sir Richard Steele. He had the advantage, both in learning, and, in my opinion, genius; they both agreed in wanting money, in spite of all their friends, and would have wanted it, if their hereditary lands had been as extensive as their imagination; yet each of them was so formed for happiness, it is pity he was not immortal. >>

Some resources were necessary for a man of pleasure, and Fielding found them in his pen, having, as he used to say himself, no alternative but to be a hackney writer or a

hackney coachman. He at first employed himself in writing for the theatre, then in high reputation, having recently engaged the talents of Wycherley, of Congreve, Vanburgh, and Farquhar. Fielding's comedies and farces were brought on the stage in hasty succession; and play after play, to the number of eighteen, sunk or swam on the theatrical sea betwixt the years 1727 and 1736. None of these are now known or read, excepting the mocktragedy of Tom Thumb, the translated play of the Miser, and the farces of The Mock Doctor and Intriguing Chambermaid, and yet they are the production of an author unrivalled for his conception and illustration of character in the kindred walk of imaginary narrative.

Fielding, the first of British novelists, for such he may surely be termed, has thus added his name to that of Le Sage and others, who, eminent for fictitious narration, have either altogether failed in their dramatic attempts, or, at least, have fallen får short of that degree of excellence which might have been previously augured of them. It is hard to fix upon any plausible reason for a failure, which has occurred in too many instances to be the operation of mere chance, especially since, a priori, one would think the same talents necessary for both walks of literature. Force of character, strength of expression, felicity of con

trast and situation, a well-constructed plot, in which the developement is at once natural and unexpected, and where the interest is kept uniformly alive, till summed up by the catastrophe,-all these are requisites as essential to the labour of the novelist as to that of the dramatist, and, indeed, appear to comprehend the sum of the qualities necessary to success in both departments. Fielding's biographers have, in this particular instance, explained his lack of theatrical success as arising entirely from the careless haste with which he huddled up his dramatic compositions; it being no uncommon thing with him to finish an act or two in a morning, and to write out whole scenes upon the paper in which his favourite tobacco had been wrapped up. Negligence of this kind will, no doubt, give rise to great inequalities in the productions of an author so careless of his reputation, but will scarcely account for an attribute something like dulness which pervades Fielding's plays, and which is rarely found in those works which a man of genius throws off « at a heat,» to use Dryden's expression, in prodigal selfreliance on his internal resources. Neither are we at all disposed to believe that an author so careless as Fielding took much more pains in labouring his novels than in composing his plays, and we are therefore compelled to seek some other and more general reason for the

inferiority of the latter. This may perhaps be found in the nature of these two studies, which, intimately connected as they seem to be, are yet naturally distinct in some very essential particulars, so much so as to vindicate the general opinion that he who applies himself with eminent success to the one becomes in some degree unqualified for the other, like the artisan who, by a particular turn for excellence in one mechanical department, loses the habit of dexterity necessary for acquitting himself with equal reputation in another; or, as the artist who has dedicated himself to the use of water-colours, is usually less distinguished by his skill in oil-painting.

It is the object of the novel-writer to place before the reader as full and accurate a representation of the events which he relates as can be done by the mere force of an excited imagination, without the assistance of material objects. His sole appeal is made to the world of fancy and of ideas, and in this consists his strength and his weakness, his poverty and his wealth. He cannot, like the painter, present a visible and tangible representation of his towns and his woods, his palaces and his castles; but, by awakening the imagination of a congenial reader, he places before his mind's eye landscapes fairer than those of Claude, and wilder than those of Salvator. He cannot, like the dramatist, present before our living