authors among the models he admired. Another paper in the Covent-Garden Journal is especially interesting because it affords a clue to a project of Fielding’s which unfortunately remained a project. This was a Translation of the works of Lucian, to be undertaken in conjunction with his old colleague, the Rev. William Young. Proposals were advertised, and the enterprise was duly heralded by a “puff preliminary,” in which Fielding, while abstaining from anything directly concerning his own abilities, observes, “I will only venture to say, that no Man seems so likely to translate an Author well, as he who hath formed his Stile upon that very Author”—a sentence which, taken in connection with the references to Lucian in Tom Thumb, the Champion and elsewhere, must be accepted as distinctly autobiographic. The last number of the Covent-Garden Journal (No. 72) was issued in November 1752. By this time Sir Alexander seems to have thoroughly wearied of his task. With more gravity than usual he takes leave of letters, begging the Public that they will not henceforth father on him the dulness and scurrility of his worthy contemporaries; “since I solemnly declare that unless in revising my former Works, I have at present no Intention to hold any further Correspondence with the gayer Muses.”
The labour of conducting the Covent-Garden Journal must have been the more severe in that, during the whole period of its existence, the editor was vigorously carrying out his duties as a magistrate. The prison and political scenes in Amelia, which contemporary critics regarded as redundant, and which even to us are more curious than essential, testify at once to his growing
