of Leonora’s lover Horatio,—who was “a young Gentleman of a good Family, bred to the Law,” and recently called to the Bar, whose “Face and Person were such as the Generality allowed handsome: but he had a Dignity in his Air very rarely to be seen,” and who “had Wit and Humour, with an Inclination to Satire, which he indulged rather too much”—read almost like a complimentary description of Fielding himself.
Like Hogarth, in that famous drinking scene to which reference has already been made, Fielding was careful to disclaim any personal portraiture in Joseph Andrews. In the opening chapter of Book iii. he declares “once for all that he describes not Men, but Manners; not an Individual, but a Species,” although he admits that his characters are “taken from Life.” In his “Preface,” he reiterates this profession, adding that in copying from nature, he has “used the utmost Care to obscure the Persons by such different Circumstances, Degrees, and Colours, that it will be impossible to guess at them with any degree of certainty.” Nevertheless—as in Hogarth’s case—neither his protests nor his skill have prevented some of those identifications which are so seductive to the curious; and it is generally believed,—indeed, it was expressly stated by Richardson and others,—that the prototype of Parson Adams was a friend of Fielding, the Reverend William Young. Like Adams, he was a scholar and devoted to AEschylus; he resembled him, too, in his trick of snapping his fingers, and his habitual absence of mind. Of this latter peculiarity it is related that on one occasion, when a chaplain in Marlborough’s wars, he strolled abstractedly into the enemy’s lines with his beloved AEschylus
