CHAPTER VII. THE JOURNAL OF A VOYAGE TO LISBON.
In March 1753, when Fielding published his pamphlet on Elizabeth Canning, his life was plainly drawing to a close. His energies indeed were unabated, as may be gathered from a brief record in the Gentleman’s for that month, describing his judicial raid, at four in the morning, upon a gaming-room, where he suspected certain highwaymen to be assembled. But his body was enfeebled by disease, and he knew he could not look for length of days. He had lived not long, but much; he had seen in little space, as the motto to Tom Jones announced, “the manners of many men;” and now that, prematurely, the inevitable hour approached, he called Cicero and Horace to his aid, and prepared to meet his fate with philosophic fortitude. Between
“Quem fors dierum cunque dabit, lucro Appone,”
and
“Grata superveniet, quae non sperabitur, hora,”
he tells us in his too-little-consulted Proposal for the Poor, he had schooled himself to regard events with equanimity, striving above all, in what remained to him of
