In one of Horace Walpole's letters to George Montagu, already quoted, there is a description of Fielding's Bow Street establishment, which has attracted more attention than it deserves. The letter is dated May the 18th, 1749, and the passage (in Cunningham's edition) runs as follows:—
"He [Rigby] and Peter Bathurst [Footnote: Probably a son of Peter Bathurst (d. 1748), brother of Pope's friend, Allen, Lord Bathurst. Rigby was the Richard Rigby whose despicable character is familiar in Eighteenth-Century Memoirs. "He died (says Cunningham) involved in debt, with his accounts as Paymaster of the Forces hopelessly unsettled.">[ t'other night carried a servant of the latter's, who had attempted to shoot him, before Fielding; who, to all his other vocations, has, by the grace of Mr. Lyttelton, added that of Middlesex justice. He sent them word he was at supper, that they must come next morning. They did not understand that freedom, and ran up, where they found him banqueting with a blind man, a whore, and three Irishmen, on some cold mutton and a bone of ham, both in one dish, and the dirtiest cloth. He never stirred nor asked them to sit. Rigby, who had seen him so often come to beg a guinea of Sir C. Williams, and Bathurst, at whose father's he had lived for victuals, understood that dignity as little, and pulled themselves chairs; on which he civilised."
Scott calls this "a humiliating anecdote;" and both Mr. Lawrence and Mr. Keightley have exhausted rhetoric in the effort to explain it away. As told, it is certainly uncomplimentary; but considerable deductions must be made, both for the attitude of the narrator and the occasion of the narrative. Walpole's championship of his friends was notorious; and his absolute injustice, when his partisan spirit was uppermost, is everywhere patent to the readers of his Letters. In the present case he was not of the encroaching party; and he speaks from hearsay solely. But his friends had, in his opinion, been outraged by a man, who, according to his ideas of fitness, should have come to them cap in hand; and as a natural consequence, the story, no doubt exaggerated when it reached him, loses nothing under his transforming and malicious pen. Stripped of its decorative flippancy, however, there remains but little that can really be regarded as "humiliating." Scott himself suggests, what is most unquestionably the case, that the blind man was the novelist's half-brother, afterwards Sir John Fielding; and it is extremely unlikely that the lady so discourteously characterised could have been any other than his wife, who, Lady Stuart tells us, "had few personal charms." There remain the "three Irishmen," who may, or may not, have been perfectly presentable members of society. At all events, their mere nationality, so rapidly decided upon, cannot be regarded as a stigma. That the company and entertainment were scarcely calculated to suit the superfine standard of Mr. Bathurst and Mr. Rigby may perhaps be conceded. Fielding was by no means a rich man, and in his chequered career had possibly grown indifferent to minor decencies. Moreover, we are told by Murphy that, as a Westminster justice, he "kept his table open to those who had been his friends when young, and had impaired their own fortunes." Thus, it must always have been a more or less ragged regiment who met about that kindly Bow Street board; but that the fact reflects upon either the host or guests cannot be admitted for a moment. If the anecdote is discreditable to anyone it is to that facile retailer of ana, and incorrigible society-gossip, Mr. Horace Walpole.
But while these unflattering tales were told of his private life, Fielding was fast becoming eminent in his public capacity. On the 12th of May 1749 he was unanimously chosen chairman of Quarter Sessions at Hicks's Hall (as the Clerkenwell Sessions House was then called); and on the 29th of June following he delivered a charge to the Westminster Grand Jury which is usually printed with his works, and which is still regarded by lawyers as a model exposition. It is at first a little unexpected to read his impressive and earnest denunciations of masquerades and theatres (in which latter, by the way, one Samuel Foote had very recently been following the example of the author of Pasquin); but Fielding the magistrate and Fielding the playwright were two different persons; and a long interval of changeful experience lay between them. In another part of his charge, which deals with the offence of libelling, it is possible that his very vigorous appeal was not the less forcible by reason of the personal attacks to which he had referred in the Preface to David Simple, the Jacobite's Journal, and elsewhere. His only other literary efforts during this year appear to have been a little pamphlet entitled A True State of the Case of Bosavern Penlez; and a formal congratulatory letter to Lyttelton upon his second marriage, in which, while speaking gratefully of his own obligations to his friend, he endeavours to enlist his sympathies for Moore the fabulist who was also "about to marry." The pamphlet had reference to an occurrence which took place in July. Three sailors of the "Grafton" man-of-war had been robbed in a house of ill fame in the Strand. Failing to obtain redress, they attacked the house with their comrades, and wrecked it, causing a "dangerous riot," to which Fielding makes incidental reference in one of his letters to the Duke of Bedford, and which was witnessed by John Byrom, the poet and stenographer, in whose Remains it is described. Bosavern Penlez or Pen Lez, who had joined the crowd, and in whose possession some of the stolen property was found, was tried and hanged in September. His sentence, which was considered extremely severe, excited much controversy, and the object of Fielding's pamphlet was to vindicate the justice and necessity of his conviction.
Towards the close of 1749 Fielding fell seriously ill with fever aggravated by gout. It was indeed at one time reported that mortification had supervened; but under the care of Dr. Thomson, that dubious practitioner whose treatment of Winnington in 1746 had given rise to so much paper war, he recovered; and during 1750 was actively employed in his magisterial duties. At this period lawlessness and violence appear to have prevailed to an unusual extent in the metropolis, and the office of a Bow Street justice was no sinecure. Reform of some kind was felt on all sides to be urgently required; and Fielding threw his two years' experience and his deductions therefrom into the form of a pamphlet entitled An Enquiry into the Causes of the late Increase of Robbers, etc., with some Proposals for remedying this growing Evil. It was dedicated to the then Lord High Chancellor, Philip Yorke, Lord Hardwicke, by whom, as well as by more recent legal authorities, it was highly appreciated. Like the Charge to the Grand Jury, it is a grave argumentative document, dealing seriously with luxury, drunkenness, gaming, and other prevalent vices. Once only, in an ironical passage respecting beaus and fine ladies, does the author remind us of the author of Tom Jones. As a rule, he is weighty, practical, and learned in the law. Against the curse of Gin-drinking, which, owing to the facilities for obtaining that liquor, had increased to an alarming extent among the poorer classes, he is especially urgent and energetic. He points out that it is not only making dreadful havoc in the present, but that it is enfeebling the race of the future, and he concludes—
"Some little Care on this Head is surely necessary: For tho' the Encrease of Thieves, and the Destruction of Morality; though the Loss of our Labourers, our Sailors, and our Soldiers, should not be sufficient Reasons, there is one which seems to be unanswerable, and that is, the Loss of our Gin-drinkers: Since, should the drinking this Poison be continued in its present Height during the next twenty Years, there will, by that Time, be very few of the common People left to drink it."
To the appeal thus made by Fielding in January 1751, Hogarth added his pictorial protest in the following month by his awful plate of Gin Lane, which, if not actually prompted by his friend's words, was certainly inspired by the same crying evil. One good result of these efforts was the "Bill for restricting the Sale of Spirituous Liquors," to which the royal assent was given in June, and Fielding's connection with this enactment is practically acknowledged by Horace Walpole in his Memoires of the Last ten Years of the Reign of George II. The law was not wholly effectual, and was difficult to enforce; but it was not by any means without its good effects. [Footnote: The Rev. R. Hurd, afterwards Bishop of Worcester, an upright and scholarly, but formal and censorious man, whom Johnson called a "word-picker," and franker contemporaries "an old maid in breeches," has left a reference to Fielding at this time which is not flattering. "I dined with him [Ralph Allen] yesterday, where I met Mr. Fielding,—a poor emaciated, worn-out rake, whose gout and infirmities have got the better even of his buffoonery" (Letter to Balguy, dated "Inner Temple, 19th March, 1751.") That Fielding had not long before been dangerously ill, and that he was a martyr to gout, is fact: the rest is probably no more than the echo of a foregone conclusion, based upon report, or dislike to his works. Hurd praised Richardson and proscribed Sterne. He must have been wholly out of sympathy with the author of Tom Jones.]
Between the publication of the Enquiry and that of Amelia there is nothing of importance to chronicle except Fielding's connection with one of the events of 1751, the discovery of the Glastonbury waters. According to the account given in the Gentleman's for July in that year, a certain Matthew Chancellor had been cured of "an asthma and phthisic" of thirty years' standing by drinking from a spring near Chain Gate, Glastonbury, to which he had (so he alleged) been directed in a dream. The spring forthwith became famous; and in May an entry in the Historical Chronicle for Sunday, the 5th, records that above 10,000 persons had visited it, deserting Bristol, Bath, and other popular resorts. Numerous pamphlets were published for and against the new waters; and a letter in their favour, which appeared in the London Daily Advertiser for the 31st August, signed "Z. Z.," is "supposed to be wrote" by "J—e F—g." Fielding was, as may be remembered, a Somersetshire man, Sharpham Park, his birthplace, being about three miles from Glastonbury; and he testifies to the "wonderful Effects of this salubrious Spring" in words which show that he had himself experienced them. "Having seen great Numbers of my Fellow Creatures under two of the most miserable Diseases human Nature can labour under, the Asthma and Evil, return from Glastonbury blessed with the Return of Health, and having myself been relieved from a Disorder which baffled the most skilful Physicians," justice to mankind (he says) obliges him to take notice of the subject. The letter is interesting, more as showing that, at this time, Fielding's health was broken, than as proving the efficacy of the cure; for, whatever temporary relief the waters afforded, it is clear (as Mr. Lawrence pertinently remarks) that he derived no permanent benefit from them. They must, however, have continued to attract visitors, as a pump-room was opened in August 1753; and, although they have now fallen into disuse, they were popular for many years.
But a more important occurrence than the discovery of the Somersetshire spring is a little announcement contained in Sylvanus Urban's list of publications for December 1751, No. 17 of which is "Amelia, in 4 books, 12mo; by Henry Fielding, Esq." The publisher, of course, was Andrew Millar; and the actual day of issue, as appears from the General Advertiser, was December the 19th, although the title-page, by anticipation, bore the date of 1752. There were two mottoes, one of which was the appropriate—
"Felices ter & amplius Quos irrupta tenet Copula;"