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1.]
EARLY YEARS.
7

ferred to the care of another guardian, Mr. Rhodes of Modbury, in South Devon, to whose son, a young gentleman of Oxford, she was promptly married. Burke (Landed Gentry, 1858) dates the marriage in 1726, a date which is practically confirmed by the baptism of a child at Modbury in April of the following year. Burke further describes the husband as Mr. Ambrose Rhodes of Buckland House, Buckland-Tout-Saints. His son, Mr. Rhodes of Bellair, near Exeter, was gentleman of the Privy Chamber to George III.; and one of his descendants possessed a picture which passed for the portrait of Sophia Western. The tradition of the Tucker family pointed to Miss Andrew as the original of Fielding’s heroine; but though such a supposition is intelligible, it is untenable, since he says distinctly (Book XIII. chap. i. of Tom Jones) that his model was his first wife, whose likeness he moreover draws very specifically in another place, by declaring that she resembled Margaret Cecil, Lady Ranelagh, and, more nearly, “the famous Dutchess of Mazarine.”[1]

With this early escapade is perhaps to be connected what seems to have been one of Fielding’s earliest literary efforts. This is a modernisation in burlesque octosyllabic verse of part of Juvenal’s sixth satire. In the “Preface” to the later published Miscellanies, it is said to have been “originally sketched out before he was Twenty,” and to have constituted “all the Revenge taken by an injured Lover.” But it must have been largely revised subsequent to that date, for it contains references to Mrs. Clive, Mrs. Woffington, Cibber the younger, and even to Richardson’s Pamela. It has no special merit, although some of the

  1. See Appendix No. I.: Fielding and Sarah Andrew.