falls abjectly on his knees when threatened with the dreadful name of Law, is a character which, in its surly good-humour and sensitive dignity, might easily, under more favourable circumstances, have grown into an individuality, if not equal to that of Squire Western, at least on a level with Partridge or Colonel Bath. There are numbers of minute touches—as, for example, his mistaking “a lion” for “Elias” when he reads prayers to the ship’s company; and his quaint asseverations when exercised by the inconstancy of the wind—which show how closely Fielding studied his deaf companion. But it would occupy too large a space to examine the Journal more in detail. It is sufficient to say that after some further delays from wind and tide, the travellers sailed up the Tagus. Here, having undergone the usual quarantine and custom-house obstruction, they landed, and Fielding’s penultimate words record a good supper at Lisbon, “for which we were as well charged, as if the bill had been made on the Bath Road, between Newbury and London.” The book ends with a line from the poet whom, in the Proposal for the Poor, he had called his master:—
“—hic finis chartaeque viaeque.”
Two months afterwards he died at Lisbon, on the 8th of October, in the forty-eighth year of his age.
He was buried on the hillside in the centre of the beautiful English cemetery, which faces the great Basilica of the Heart of Jesus, otherwise known as the Church of the Estrella. Here, in a leafy spot where the nightingales fill the still air with song, and watched by those secular cypresses from which the place takes its Portuguese name of Os Cyprestes, lies all that was mortal of
