concerned in the promotion of that curious enterprise, the “Universal-Register-Office,” so often advertised in the Covent-Garden Journal. It appears to have been an Estate Office, Lost Property Office, Servants’ Registry, Curiosity Shop, and multifarious General Agency. As a magistrate, in spite of his blindness, John Fielding was remarkably energetic, and is reported to have known more than 3000 thieves by their voices alone, and could recognise them when brought into Court. A description of London and Westminster is often ascribed to him, but he denied the authorship. He was knighted in 1761, and died at Brompton Place in 1780. Lyttelton, who had become Sir George in 1751, was raised to the peerage as Baron Lyttelton of Frankley three years after Fielding’s death. He died in 1773. In 1760-5 he published his Dialogues of the Dead, profanely characterised by Mr. Walpole as “Dead Dialogues.” No. 28 of these is a colloquy between “Plutarch, Charon, and a Modern Bookseller,” and it contains the following reference to Fielding:—“We have [says Mr. Bookseller] another writer of these imaginary histories, one who has not long since descended to these regions. His name is Fielding; and his works, as I have heard the best judges say, have a true spirit of comedy, and an exact representation of nature, with fine moral touches. He has not indeed given lessons of pure and consummate virtue, but he has exposed vice and meanness with all the powers of ridicule.” It is perhaps excusable that Lawrence, like Roscoe and others, should have attributed this to Lyttelton; but the preface nevertheless assigns it, with two other dialogues, to a “different hand.” They were, in fact, the first essays in authorship of that illustrious blue-stocking, Mrs. Elizabeth Montagu.
