couplets have the true Swiftian turn. If Murphy’s statement be correct, that the author “went from Eton to Leyden,” it must have been planned at the latter place, where, he tells us in the preface to Don Quixote in England, he also began that comedy. Notwithstanding these literary distractions, he is nevertheless reported to have studied the civilians “with a remarkable application for about two years.” At the expiration of this time, remittances from home failing, he was obliged to forego the lectures of the “learned Vitriarius” (then Professor of Civil Law at Leyden University), and return to London, which he did at the beginning of 1728 or the end of 1727.
The fact was that his father, never a rich man, had married again. His second wife was a widow named Eleanor Rasa; and by this time he was fast acquiring a second family. Under the pressure of his growing cares, he found himself, however willing, as unable to maintain his eldest son in London as he had previously been to discharge his expenses at Leyden. Nominally, he made him an allowance of two hundred a year; but this, as Fielding himself explained, “any body might pay that would.” The consequence was, that not long after the arrival of the latter in the Metropolis he had given up all idea of pursuing the law, to which his mother’s legal connections had perhaps first attracted him, and had determined to adopt the more seductive occupation of living by his wits. At this date he was in the prime of youth. From the portrait by Hogarth representing him at a time when he was broken in health and had lost his teeth, it is difficult to reconstruct his likeness at twenty. But we may fairly assume the “high-
