Jones-that exquisite picture of humor and mannerswill outlive the Palace of the Escurial and the imperial eagle of Austria."

It was at home or near by that Henry Fielding found his first schooling; at the hand-a tradition runs — of that master who served as the original for his picture of Parson Trulliber: if this indeed be so, never were school-master severities so permanently punished. After this came Eton, where he was fellow of Lord Lyttleton, who befriended him later, and of William Pitt (the elder), and of Fox the rattle-brain father of Charles James. Then came two or more years of stay at the University of Leyden, from which he laid his course straight for the dramatic world of London; for his father, General Fielding, had a good many spendthrift habits, with which he had inoculated the son. There was need for that son to work his own way; and the way he favored was by the green-room, where the sparkle of such lively elderly ladies as Mrs. Oldcastle and Mrs. Bracegirdle had not yet wholly gone out.

He wrote play upon play with nervous English, and pretty surprises in them; but not notable for

any results, whether of money-making or of moral-mending. He also had his experiences as stage manager; and between two of his plays (1735 or thereabout) married a pretty girl down in Salisbury; and with her dot, and a small country place inherited from his mother, set up as country gentleman, on the north border of Dorsetshire, determined to cut a new and larger figure in life-free from the mephitic airs of Drury Lane. There were stories- very likely apocryphal - that he ordered extravagant liveries; it is more certain that he gave himself freely, for a time, to hounds, horses, and friends. Of course such a country symposium devoured both his own and his wife's capital; and we find him very shortly back in London, buckling down to law study; very probably showing there or thereabout the "inked ruffles and the wet towel round his head," which appear in the charming retrospective glasses of Thackeray.*

But times are hard with him a; those fast years of green-room life have told upon him; the "wet

*History of Pendennis, Household Ed., Boston: Chap. xxix.

towels" round the head are in demand; some of his later plays are condemned by the Lord Chancellor ;* in 1742, however, he makes that lunge at the sentimentalism of Richardson which, in the shape of Joseph Andrews, gives him a trumpeting success. It encourages him to print two or three volumes of miscellanies. But shadows follow him; a year later, his wife dies in his arms; Lady Wortley Montagu (who was a cousin) tells us this; and tells us how other cousins were scandalized because, a few years afterward, the novelist, with an effusive generosity that was characteristic of him, married his maid, who had lamented her mistress so sincerely, and was tenderly attached to his children. At about the same period he accepted office as Justice of the Peace-thereby still further disgruntling his aristocratic Denbigh cousins. But the quick-coming volumes of Tom Jones and their wonderful acclaim cleared the space around him; he had room to breathe and

*It was in virtue of some altercations growing out of Fielding's plays that British censorship was established in 1737, and (perhaps) Fielding thereby diverted to the study of Law.

to play the magistrate; it is Henry Fielding, Esq., now, of Bow Street, Covent Garden. Amelia followed, for which he received £1,000; and we hear of a new home out in the pleasant country, by Ealing, north of Brentford, and the Kew Gardens.

Finally on a June day of 1754 we see him leaving this home; "at twelve precisely," he says in his last Journal, "my coach was at the door, which I was no sooner told than I kissed my children all around, and went into it with some little resolution." There needed resolution; for he was an utterly broken-down man, the pace of his wild, young days telling now fearfully, and he bound away for a voyage to the sunny climate of Portugal-to try if this would stay the end.

But it does not; in October of the same year he died in Lisbon; and there his body rests in the pretty Cemetery of the Cypresses, where all visitors who love the triumphs of English letters go to see his tomb, among the myrtles and the geraniums. If he had only lived to pluck away some of those grosser stains which defile the pages where the characters of an Allworthy and of a Parson Adams will shine forever!

Poet of the Seasons.

It was just about the opening of the second quarter of the eighteenth century—when Fielding was fresh from Eton, fifteen years before Pamela had appeared and while George II. was in waiting for the slipping off of Father George at Osnaburg-that a stout Scotch poet found his way to London to try a new style of verses with the public which was still worshipping at the shrine of Mr. Pope. This was the poet of The Seasons,* whose boyhood had been passed and enriched in that bight of the beautiful Tweed valley which lies between Coldstream and the tall mass of Kelso's ruin, with Melrose and Smailhome Tower and Ettrickdale not far away, and the Lammermuir hills glowering in the north. He had studied theology in Edinboro', till some iris-hued version of a psalm (which he had wrought) brought the warning from some grim orthodox friend- that

James Thomson, b. 1700; d. 1748. Various editions of his poems; a very elegant one, illustrated by the Etching Club, published 1842–52.