When his company of actors was dispersed, Fielding turned to the law as a profession, and in Noyember 1737 became a student of the Middle Temple. According to Murphy, he studied with great assiduity, but little is known of his life at this time. He eked out his legal work with the writing of °a large number of fugitive political tracts,* which were probably anonymous, and have disappeared. Late in 1739 he started a newspaper, the Champion, on the model of the Tatter, and in this journal he wrote much, until June 1740, when he was called to the Bar. He traveled the Western Circuit, and "assiduously attended the Wiltshire sessions.* He seems to have taken his duties as a barrister very seriously, but they did not prevent him from writing, and publishing in February 1742, the novel of 'Joseph Andrews.' This began as a parody of the popular 'Pa mela' of Richardson, but soon passed on into an independent and highly entertaining study of contemporary manners. The fresh and breezy genius of Fielding mocked at the senti mentalities and the wire-drawn psychology of his predecessor, but he soon got beyond the point where it was enough for him to ridicule Richardson. He created two magnificent comic figures of his own, and he enriched English literature forever with Parson Adams and Mrs. Slipslop. It was thus that, at the age of 35, Fielding discovered, as it were by accident, the nature of the genius which he possessed. He did not, however, at once perceive the value of the discovery, but returned to his plays and his pamphlets. It was now that he published two early farces, 'Miss Lucy in Town> (1742), and (The Wedding Day' (1743), as well as a much more important work, his in three volumes. This was a collection of Field ing's shorter writings up to that date, and in cluded his poems, occasional and satirical, his essays, his 'journey from this World to the Next,' some of his farces, and the remarkable ironic novel called (Jonathan Wild.' The 'Journey' is a Luciantc allegory, full of wit and observation, but unfortunately left unfin ished by the languor of the author, who evi dently became weary of his design. 'Jonathan Wild) is a work of far greater importance. It takes for its hero a notorious rogue who was banged at Tyburn in 1725, and there is internal evidence that although not printed until 1743, it was written some years before. It is prob able that it preceded 'Pamela,) and ought to take its place as the earliest of the novels of the new school of romance. It is a powerful and painful book, °a picture of complete vice, unrelieved by anything of human feeling," and more unflinching than anything else which Fielding has left. It is a curious thing that from this date until 1749 we have a period of six years, during which Fielding was at the height of his powers, and was not without a certain measure of celebrity, yet which have left scarcely any mark at all upon his history. How was this great man engaged from his 37th to his 44th year? Strange as it sounds, we cannot tell. Austin Dobson has brought for ward arguments to show that it was a time of poverty, darkened by successive bereavements, particularly that of the loss of his wife, to whom he was most tenderly attached. A re markable preface, prefixed to the second edi tion of his sister's 'David Simple,) appeared in 1744; in this he denies his authorship of the work itself. He describes himself as applied to the legal profession °with so arduous and in telligent a diligence" that he has no time for the practice of literature. He wrote a little, however, for The True Patriot and other journals. In November 1747 Fielding married for the second D time, and took a house at Twickenham; Mary aniel, the second Mrs. Fielding, is said to have been her predecessor's "cook-wench." Fielding had by this time se cured an invaluable friend in George, after ward the first Lord Lyttelton (1709-73), who procured for him, in December 1748, the office of a justice of the peace for Westmin ster. Up to this date he had been a wanderer on the face of England, now at Salisbury, now at Twiston, at Hagley, at Twickenham, but in January 1749 he settled for good in London. John, Duke of Bedford, lent or rented to him a house in Bow Street, under terms which were described as a °princely instance of generosity." But Lyttelton was the closest of all Fielding's influential friends, and there is a remarkable passage in which the novelist states that he partly owed to Lyttelton his existence during a great part of the time spent in the composi tion of 'Tom Jones,' a book which, without Lyttelton's help, "had never been completed." It used to be stated that 'Tom Jones' was written at Bow Street, but this is impossible; it was evidently the work of the desultory months of poverty which preceded Fielding's appointment as a magistrate. The famous novel was published, as (The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling on 28 Feb. 1749, in six volumes, at the price of 16 shillings a set. It had an instant success, so great that, three months later. Fielding had already received 1700 from Millar, the publisher. That this did not much alter the random habits and easy negligence of the author seems to beproved by a picturesque although spiteful description given' by Horace Walpole, in May 1749, of Fielding dining at the house in Bow Street "on some cold mutton and a bone of ham, both in one dish, and on the dirtiest cloth," in the com pany of some very questionable persons. It is well to look at the other side, and to remember, with Murphy, that Fielding "kept his table open to those who had been his friends when young, and had impaired their own fortunes." It is certain, moreover, that he was increasingly re spected by those who could overlook the care lessness of his habits and his easy nonchalance of manners.
In May 1749 he was unanimously elected chairman of Quarter Sessions, and his magis terial charges were received with all the respect which their gravity and courage demanded.
How seriously he took the duties of his office is seen in his 'True State of the Case of Bosav ern Penlez) (1749), in which he vindicates the severity of the law against rioters. This was a time of great lawlessness among the London lower classes, and Fielding eminently distin guished himself by his vigilance against violent criminals and by his plans for reform. But his health was already failing; he had lived too hard and too fast, and on Hurd, who met him in 1751, the novelist produced the impression, at 44, of °a poor, emaciated, worn-out rake.* There was, however, no intellectual decline, and, at the close of this same year, there ap peared the very vigorous and pathetic romance, (Amelia.' This novel has had its enthusiastic admirers, but, to the charge that it is less broad and fresh than its immediate predecessor, there is no reply. As Fielding's best biographer has said, "Behind Jones) there was the author's ebullient youth and manhood; behind (Amelia) but a section of his graver middle age.' There is a remarkable sense of decline in the juvenile vigor which was so irrepressible in 'Tom the author of 'Amelia' writes philosophically, and like an elderly man. In the figure of the heroine, however, there was no evidence of declining powers; here is the most exquisite figure of a woman that Fielding ever painted. In 1752, Fielding, although so much occupied, found the energy to start the bi weekly, Covent Garden Journal, which led him into acrimonious controversy with Smollett and others; and to collect the narratives of peculiar cases of the detection of murder which had come under his notice as a magistrate, in 'Examples of the Interposition of Providence.) In 1753 he was deeply interested, like all his contemporaries, in the mysterious case of Eliza beth Canning, who professed to have been kid napped, and he published a pamphlet on the subject. But he was by this time re duced by successive attacks of the gout, and in August of that year was ordered to retire to Bath. His going, however, and the proper treatment of his disease, were delayed by his great wish to break up a congeries of gangs of street robbers, who were committing murders in London so frequently as to alarm the govern ment itself. But when, in December, he had at length completed this public duty, his was "no longer a Bath case? and he was so much weak ened by jaundice, dropsy and asthma, that he looked upon his condition as almost desperate. He struggled through the winter, and in June 1754 started, in search of relief, for Portugal. The tediousness and multiplied discomforts of the transit are described, with a great deal of heroism, in the 'Journal of a Voyage to Lis bon,' which was the latest and one of the best written of Fielding's works. He traveled with all his family, and they arrived in the Tagus in August. No further particulars have been preserved, but that Fielding died at Lisbon, on 8 Oct. 1754, and was buried in the beautiful cemetery of Os Cyprestres, opposite the Church of the Estrella.
With regard to the importance of Fielding's work in the development of English literature there is a complete unanimity of opinion among all competent critics. Indeed, there is scarcely a reputation which is less liable to be challenged than his. Without insisting on the title of °Father of the British Novel,"— which must belong, if it be given to anyone, to Defoe or to Richardson,— we cannot but admit that it was Fielding who first in Europe foresaw the full scope of the °comic epic poem in prose," and that his own efforts in that direction have, at their best, never been excelled. The sym metry of his books, particularly of that match less work of art, 'Tom Jones,' has not been surpassed, and this is the more wonderful be cause, until his day, no one had perceived the fact that a work of prose fiction needs to be symmetrical. He relieved. the excessive strain of feeling, which, in the case of Richardson, had sometimes amounted to a positively dis tressing tension, by introducing breaks of witty observation, ironic illustration, or entertaining episode, but he did this with a care for the balance of parts which makes the study of his technique extremely interesting. Byron called Fielding °the prose Homer of human nature," and in so doing he indicated the extraordinary range of sympathy which marks his delineation. There is nothing unnatural or extravagant about the incidents which he introduces, but they are such as might be expected inevitably to happen to such very natural characters as the novelist depicts.
It has been said that Fielding lacked the imaginative faculty. It would be more correct to say that he distrusted the fantastic and pre-, posterous parts of invention, since, if imagina tion is the power to bring up before one's own mental vision, and to reproduce for others with fidelity a consistent chain of phenomena, then Fielding was fully endowed with that gift. His pictures are remarkable for their brightness, their freshness, the sharpness and illumination of their outline. His invention occupied itself, not with the unusual, but with the obvious scenes of life, which in his day were, nately, still unhackneyed. He wrote slowly and finished late; he did not hasten to exhaust the stores which adventure and experience had given him; he had warmed both hands before the fire of life, and he gave back to the world in his books what he received from it in his own rough-and-tumble youth. From Fielding we must not look for pathos or romantic senti ment,—although even these are not wholly missing,—but we must look for humor, breadth of sympathy, a general buoyancy, a wholesome recognition of the appetites, a philosophic con sideration of the limitations of human frailty, and these we find in his wonderful novels to a degree which we may without fear of exaggera tion confess to be elsewhere unparalleled. See