am assured that our artist began and finished the head in the presence of his wife and another lady. He had no assistance but from his own memory, which, on such occasions, was remarkably tenacious.” Ireland, in his Hogarth Illustrated, gives us as the simple fact the following:—“Hogarth being told, after his friend’s death, that a portrait was wanted as a frontispiece to his works, sketched this from memory.” According to the inscription on Basire’s plate, it represents Fielding at the age of forty-eight, or in the year of his death. This, however, can only mean that it represents him as Hogarth had last seen him. But long before he died, disease had greatly altered his appearance; and he must have been little more than the shadow of the handsome Harry Fielding, who wrote farces for Mrs. Clive, and heard the chimes at midnight. As he himself says in the Voyage to Lisbon, he had lost his teeth, and the consequent falling-in of the lips is plainly perceptible in the profile. The shape of the Roman nose, which Colonel James in Amelia irreverently styled a “proboscis,” would, however, remain unaltered, and it is still possible to divine a curl, half humorous, half ironic, in the short upper lip. The eye, apparently, was dark and deep-set. Oddly enough, the chin, to the length of which he had himself referred in the Champion, does not appear abnormal. [Footnote: In the bust of Fielding which Miss Margaret Thomas has been commissioned by Mr. R. A. Kinglake to execute for the Somerset Valhalla, the Shire-Hall at Taunton, these points have been carefully considered; and the sculptor has succeeded in producing a work which, while it suggests the mingling of humour and dignity that is Fielding’s chief characteristic, is also generally faithful to Hogarth’s indications. From these, indeed, it is impossible to deviate. Not only is his portrait unique; but it was admitted to be like Fielding by Fielding’s friends. The bust was placed in the Shire Hall, 4th September 1883.]
