urnalism and his duties as a justice of the
peace occupied him till 1754, when ill-health forced him abroad to
Lisbon, where he died and was buried. Fielding is a master of a fluent,
virile, and attractive style; his stories move with an easy and natural
vigour, and are brimful of humour and kindly satire, while his characters
in their lifelike humanness, with all their foibles and frailties, are a
marked contrast to the buckram and conventional figures of his
contemporary Richardson; something of the laxity of his times, however,
finds its way into his pages, and renders them not always palatable
reading to present-day readers (1707-1754).

FIESCHI, COUNT, a Genoese of illustrious family who conspired
against Andrea Doria, but whose plot was frustrated on the eve of its
fulfilment by his falling into the sea and being drowned as he stept
full-armed from one of his ships into another (1523-1547).

FIESCHI, JOSEPH MARCO, a Corsican conspirator; served under Murat
and in Russia in 1812; obtained a government post in 1830, and in
consequence of his discharge from this five years later he, by means of
an infernal machine, made an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate Louis
Philippe, for which, along with his accomplices, he was tried and
executed (1790-1836).

FIESOLE, a small town, 3 m. from Florence, where the wealthy
Florentines have villas, and near which Fra Angelico lived as a monk.

FIFE (190), a maritime county in the E. of Scotland, which juts out
into the German Ocean and is washed by the Firths of Tay and Forth on its
N. and S. shores respectively, thus forming a small peninsula; has for
the most part a broken and hilly surface, extensively cultivated however,
while the "How of Fife," watered by the Eden, is a fertile valley, richly
wooded; and valuable coal deposits are worked in the S. and W.; its long
coast-line is studded with picturesque towns, many of them of ancient
date, a circumstance which led James VI. to describe the county as "a
beggar's mantle fringed with gold"; it is associated with much that is
memorable in Scottish history.

FIFTH-MONARCHY MEN, a set of fanatics of extreme levelling
tendencies, who, towards the close of the Protectorate, maintained that
Jesus Christ was about to reappear on the earth to establish a fifth
monarchy that would swallow up and forcibly suppress all that was left of
the four preceding--the Assyrian, the Persian, the Macedonian, and the
Roman; their standa