POSTSCRIPT.
A few particulars respecting Fielding’s family and posthumous works can scarcely be omitted from the present memoir. It has been stated that by his first wife he had one daughter, the Harriet or Harriot who accompanied him to Lisbon, and survived him, although Mr. Keightley says, but without giving his authority, she did not survive him long. Of his family by Mary Daniel, the eldest son, William, to whose birth reference has already been made, was bred to the law, became a barrister of the Middle Temple eminent as a special pleader, and ultimately a Westminster magistrate. He died in October 1820, at the age of seventy-three. He seems to have shared his father’s conversational qualities,[1] and, like him, to have been a strenuous advocate of the poor and unfortunate. Southey, writing from Keswick in 1830 to Sir Egerton Brydges, speaks of a meeting he had in St. James’s Park, about 1817, with one of the novelist’s sons. “He was then,” says Southey, “a fine old man, though visibly shaken by time: he received me in a manner which had much of old courtesy about it, and I looked upon him with great interest for his father’s sake.” The date, and the fact that William
- ↑ Vide Lockhart’s Life of Scott, chap. 1.
