of haste—a circumstance heightened by the absence of those “prolegomenous” chapters over which the author had lingered so lovingly in Tom Jones. In 1749 he had been dangerously ill, and his health was visibly breaking. The £1000 which Millar is said to have given for Amelia must have been painfully earned.
Early in 1752 his still indomitable energy prompted him to start a third newspaper, the Covent Garden Journal, which ran from the 4th of January to the 25th of November. It is an interesting contemporary record, and throws a good deal of light on his Bow Street duties. But it has no great literary value, and it unhappily involved him in harassing and undignified hostilities with Smollett, Dr John Hill, Bonnell Thornton and other of his contemporaries. To the following year belong pamphlets on “Provision for the Poor,” and the case of the strange impostor, Elizabeth Canning (1734–1773).[1] By 1754 his own case, as regards health, had grown desperate; and he made matters worse by a gallant and successful attempt to break up a “gang of villains and cut-throats,” who had become the terror of the metropolis. This accomplished, he resigned his office to his half-brother John (afterwards Sir John) Fielding. But it was now too late. After fruitless essay both of Dr Ward’s specifics and the tar-water of Bishop Berkeley, it was felt that his sole chance of prolonging life lay in removal to a warmer climate. On the 26th of June 1754 he accordingly left his little country house at Fordhook, Ealing, for Lisbon, in the “Queen of Portugal,” Richard Veal master. The ship, as often, was tediously wind-bound, and the protracted discomforts of the sick man and his family are narrated at length in the touching posthumous tract entitled the Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon, which, with a fragment of a comment on Bolingbroke’s then recently issued essays, was published in February 1755 “for the Benefit of his [Fielding’s] Wife and Children.” Reaching Lisbon at last in August 1754, he died there two months later (8th October), and was buried in the English cemetery, where a monument was erected to him in 1830. Luget Britannia gremio non dari fovere natum is inscribed upon it.
His estate, including the proceeds of a fair library, only covered his just debts (Athenaeum, 25th Nov. 1905); but his family, a daughter by his first, and two boys and a girl by his second wife, were faithfully cared for by his brother John, and by his friend Ralph Allen of Prior Park, Bath, the Squire Allworthy of Tom Jones. His will (undated) was printed in the Athenaeum for the 1st of February 1890. There is but one absolutely authentic portrait of him, a familiar outline by Hogarth, executed from memory for Andrew Millar’s edition of his works in 1762. It is the likeness of a man broken by ill-health, and affords but faint indication of the handsome Harry Fielding who in his salad days “warmed both hands before the fire of life.” Far too much stress, it is now held, has been laid by his first biographers upon the unworshipful side of his early career. That he was always profuse, sanguine and more or less improvident, is as probable as that he was always manly, generous and sympathetic. But it is also plain that, in his later years, he did much, as father, friend and magistrate, to redeem the errors, real and imputed, of a too-youthful youth.
As a playwright and essayist his rank is not elevated. But as a novelist his place is a definite one. If the Spectator is to be credited with foreshadowing the characters of the novel, Defoe with its earliest form, and Richardson with its first experiments in sentimental analysis, it is to Henry Fielding that we owe its first accurate delineation of contemporary manners. Neglecting, or practically neglecting, sentiment as unmanly, and relying chiefly on humour and ridicule, he set out to draw life precisely as he saw it around him, without blanks or dashes. He was, it may be, for a judicial moralist, too indulgent to some of its frailties, but he was merciless to its meaner vices. For reasons which have been already given, his high-water mark is Tom Jones, which has remained, and remains, a model in its way of the kind he inaugurated.
An essay on Fielding’s life and writings is prefixed to Arthur Murphy’s edition of his works (1762), and short biographies have been written by Walter Scott and William Roscoe. There are also lives by Watson (1807), Lawrence (1855), Austin Dobson (“Men of Letters,” 1883, 1907) and G. M. Godden (1909). An annotated edition of the Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon is included in the “World’s Classics” (1907). (A. D.)
FIELDING, WILLIAM STEVENS (1848– ), Canadian
journalist and statesman, was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, on
the 24th of November 1848. From 1864 to 1884 he was one of
the staff of the Morning Chronicle, the chief Liberal paper of the
province, and worked at all departments of newspaper life. In
1882 he entered the local legislature as Liberal member for
Halifax, and from 1884 to 1896 was premier and provincial
secretary of the province, but in the latter year became finance
minister in the Dominion administration of Sir Wilfrid Laurier,
and was elected to the House of Commons for Shelburne and
Queen’s county. He opposed Confederation in 1864–1867, and as
late as 1886 won a provincial election on the promise to advocate
the repeal of the British North America Act. His administration
as finance minister of Canada was important, since in 1897 he
introduced a new tariff, granting to the manufactures of Great
Britain a preference, subsequently increased; and later he
imposed a special surtax on German imports owing to unfriendly
tariff legislation by that country. In 1902 he represented Canada
at the Colonial Conference in London.
FIELD-MOUSE, the popular designation of such mouse-like British rodents as are not true or “house” mice. The term thus includes the long-tailed field mouse, Mus (Micromys) sylvaticus, easily recognized by its white belly, and sometimes called the wood-mouse; and the two species of short-tailed field-mice, Microtus agrestis and Evotomys glareolus, together with their representatives in Skomer island and the Orkneys (see Mouse and Vole).
FIELD OF THE CLOTH OF GOLD, the French Camp du drap d’or, the name given to the place between Guînes and Ardres where Henry VIII. of England met Francis I. of France in June 1520. The most elaborate arrangements were made for the accommodation of the two monarchs and their large retinues; and on Henry’s part especially no efforts were spared to make a great impression in Europe by this meeting. Before the castle of Guînes a temporary palace, covering an area of nearly 12,000 sq. yds., was erected for the reception of the English king. It was decorated in the most sumptuous fashion, and like the
chapel, served by thirty-five priests, was furnished with a
profusion of golden ornaments. Some idea of the size of Henry’s
following may be gathered from the fact that in one month
2200 sheep and other viands in a similar proportion were consumed.
In the fields beyond the castle, tents to the number of
2800 were erected for less distinguished visitors, and the whole
scene was one of the greatest animation. Ladies gorgeously
clad, and knights, showing by their dress and bearing their
anxiety to revive the glories and the follies of the age of chivalry,
jostled mountebanks, mendicants and vendors of all kinds.
Journeying from Calais Henry reached his headquarters at Guînes on the 4th of June 1520, and Francis took up his residence at Ardres. After Cardinal Wolsey, with a splendid train had visited the French king, the two monarchs met at the Val Doré, a spot midway between the two places, on the 7th. The following days were taken up with tournaments, in which both kings took part, banquets and other entertainments, and after Wolsey had said mass the two sovereigns separated on the 24th. This meeting made a great impression on contemporaries, but its political results were very small.
The Ordonnance for the Field is printed by J. S. Brewer in the Calendar of State Papers, Henry VIII. vol. iii. (1867). See also J. S. Brewer, Reign of Henry VIII. (1884).
FIELDS, JAMES THOMAS (1817–1881), American publisher and author, was born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, on the 31st of December 1817. At the age of seventeen he went to Boston as clerk in a bookseller’s shop. Afterwards he wrote for the newspapers, and in 1835 he read an anniversary poem entitled “Commerce” before the Boston Mercantile Library
- ↑ For a full account of this celebrated case see Howell, State Trials (1813), vol. xix.
