third, in which, upon the special intervention of Jove himself, the prize of beauty is decreed by Venus to the Salisbury sisters, may be of an earlier date than any. The year 1730 was the year of his third piece, the Author’s Farce, and he must therefore have been paying his addresses to Miss Cradock not very long after his arrival in London. This is a fact to be borne in mind. So early an attachment to a good and beautiful girl, living no farther off than Salisbury, where his own father probably resided, is scarcely consistent with the reckless dissipation which has been laid to his charge, although, on his own showing, he was by no means faultless. But it is a part of natures like his to exaggerate their errors in the moment of repentance; and it may well be that Henry Fielding, too, was not so black as he painted himself. Of his love-verses he says—“this Branch of Writing is what I very little pretend to;” and it would be misleading to rate them highly, for, unlike his literary descendant, Mr. Thackeray, he never attained to any special quality of note. But some of his octosyllabics, if they cannot be called equal to Prior’s, fall little below Swift’s. “I hate”—cries he in one of the pieces,
“I hate the Town, and all its Ways; Ridotto’s, Opera’s, and Plays; The Ball, the King, the Mall, the Court; Wherever the Beau-Monde resort.... All Coffee-Houses, and their Praters; All Courts of Justice, and Debaters; All Taverns, and the Sots within ’em; All Bubbles, and the Rogues that skin ’em,”
—and so forth, the natural anti-climax being that he loves nothing but his “Charmer” at Salisbury. In another,
