1750 July 9th, Mrs. Catherine Feilding (sic).
1750 Nov. 12th, Mrs. Ursula Fielding.
1750[-1] Feby. 24th, Mrs. Beatrice Fielding.
1753 May 10th, Louisa, d. of Henry Fielding, Esq.
The first three, with Sarah, make up Richardson’s “Four worthy Sisters” (p. 140); and the final entry renders it probable that, in May 1753, Fielding was staying in the house at Hammersmith then occupied by his surviving sister, Sarah.
No well-authenticated likeness of Fielding has yet superseded Hogarth’s outline (pp. 184-5), nor, if Murphy’s statement (Works, 1762, i. p. 47) that “no portrait of him had ever been made” previously, be accurate, can any new likeness be looked for. Nevertheless, both at the Guelph (1891) and Georgian (1906) exhibitions, the Hon. Gerald Ponsonby exhibited a portrait of Fielding; and another is included in the picture attributed to Hogarth (also shown at the latter exhibition, and lately belonging to Sir Charles Tennant), of the “Green Room, Drury Lane.” There is also a bust (posthumous) by W. F. Woodington at Eton. And this reminds me that no more fitting tail-piece to this Appendix can be conceived than the compact and penetrating lines which the late James Russell Lowell composed as an inscription for the bust of Henry Fielding at Taunton:—
“He looked on naked nature unashamed, And saw the Sphinx, now bestial, now divine, In change and re-change; he nor praised nor blamed, But drew her as he saw with fearless line. Did he good service? God must judge, not we. Manly he was, and generous and sincere; English in all, of genius blithely free: Who loves a Man may see his image here.”
A. D.
March 1907.
