The crowded Shops, the thronging Vermin skreen, Together cram the Dirty and the Clean, And not one Shoe-Boy in the Street is seen.”
In the modern version of Kane O’Hara, to which songs were added, the Tragedy of Tragedies still keeps, or kept the stage. But its crowning glory is its traditional connection with Swift, who told Mrs. Pilkington that he “had not laugh’d above twice” in his life, once at the tricks of a merry-andrew, and again when (in Fielding’s burlesque) Tom Thumb killed the ghost. This is an incident of the earlier versions, omitted in deference to the critics, for which the reader will seek vainly in the play as now printed; and he will, moreover, discover that Mrs. Pilkington’s memory served her imperfectly, since it is not Tom Thumb who kills the ghost, but the ghost of Tom Thumb which is killed by his jealous rival, Lord Grizzle. A trifling inaccuracy of this sort, however, is rather in favour of the truth of the story than against it, for a pure fiction would in all probability have been more precise. Another point of interest in connection with this burlesque is the frontispiece which Hogarth supplied to the edition of 1731. It has no special value as a design, but it constitutes the earliest reference to that friendship with the painter, of which so many traces are to be found in Fielding’s works.
Hitherto Fielding had succeeded best in burlesque. But, in 1732, the same year in which he produced the Modern Husband, the Debauchees, and the Covent Garden Tragedy, he made an adaptation of Moliere’s Medecin malgre lui, which had already been imitated in English by Mrs. Centlivre and others. This little piece, to which he gave the title of the Mock-Doctor; or, The Dumb Lady cur’d,
