doubtless also at this date practising sedulously upon that “miserable cracked common flute,” with which tradition avers he was wont to torment his school-fellows. Gray and Horace Walpole belong to a later period.
During his stay at Eton, Fielding had been rapidly developing from a boy into a young man. When he left school it is impossible to say; but he was probably seventeen or eighteen years of age, and it is at this stage of his career that must be fixed an occurrence which one of his biographers places much farther on. This is his earliest recorded love-affair. At Lyme Regis there resided a young lady, who, in addition to great personal charms, had the advantage of being the only daughter and heiress of one Solomon Andrew, deceased, a merchant of considerable local reputation. Lawrence says that she was Fielding’s cousin. This may be so; but the statement is unsupported by any authority. It is certain, however, that her father was dead, and that she was living “in maiden meditation” at Lyme with one of her guardians, Mr. Andrew Tucker. In his chance visits to that place, young Fielding appears to have become desperately enamoured of her, and to have sadly fluttered the Dorset dovecotes by his pertinacious and undesirable attentions. At one time he seems to have actually meditated the abduction of his “flame,” for an entry in the town archives, discovered by Mr. George Roberts, sometime Mayor of Lyme, who tells the story, declares that Andrew Tucker, Esq., went in fear of his life “owing to the behaviour of Henry Fielding and his attendant, or man.” Such a state of things (especially when guardians have sons of their own) is clearly not to be endured; and Miss Andrew was prudently trans-
