Middlesex magistrate, when he moved to Bow Street. His house in Bow Street belonged to John, Duke of Bedford; and he continued to live in it until a short time before his death. It was subsequently occupied by his half-brother and successor, Sir John, [Footnote: In the riots of ‘80—as Dickens has not forgotten to note in Barnaby Rudge—the house was destroyed by the mob, who burned Sir John’s goods in the street (Boswell’s Johnson, chap. lxx.)] who, writing to the Duke in March 1770, to thank him for his munificent gift of an additional ten years to the lease, recalls “that princely instance of generosity which his Grace shewed to his late brother, Henry Fielding.”
What this was, is not specified. It may have been the gift of the leases of those tenements which, as explained, were necessary to qualify Fielding to act as a Justice of the Peace for the county of Middlesex; it may even have been the lease of the Bow Street house; or it may have been simply a gift of money. But whatever it was, it was something considerable. In his appeal to the Duke, at the close of the last chapter, Fielding referred to previous obligations, and in his dedication of Tom Jones to Lyttelton, he returns again to his Grace’s beneficence. Another person, of whose kindness grateful but indirect mention is made in the same dedication, is Ralph Allen, who, according to Derrick, the Bath M.C., sent the novelist a present of L200, before he had even made his acquaintance, [Footnote: Derrick’s Letters, 1767, ii. 95.] which, from the reference to Allen in Joseph Andrews, probably began before 1742. Lastly, there is Lyttelton himself, concerning whom, in addition to a sentence which implies that he actually suggested the writing of Tom Jones, we have
