h diligence and profit for the rest of his life in London and its
immediate neighbourhood. After his literary success, he gathered round
him a circle of ladies and gentlemen interested in literature: but he
never had any first-hand acquaintance with general society of the
"gentle" kind, much less with that of the upper classes. Fielding
(1707-1754), on the contrary, was a member (though only as the son of a
younger son of a younger son) of a family of great antiquity and
distinction, which held an earldom in England and another in Ireland,
and was connected as well as it was derived, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu,
for instance, being the novelist's cousin. He was educated at Eton and
Leyden: but his branch of the family being decidedly impecunious, was
thrown very much on his own resources. These were mainly drawn from
literature, first as a playwright then as a novelist, journalism and
miscellanies coming in. But he was called to the Bar: and though he
probably did not make much money there, he obtained the poorly paid and
hard-worked but rather important position of "Bow Street Magistrate,"
which meant that he was head, directly of the London police such as it
was, and indirectly of that of the whole kingdom. His temper was in some
ways as aristocratic as his birth: but though Horace Walpole's accounts
of his fancy for low company are obviously exaggerated, there is no
doubt that he was a good deal of what has since been called a
"Bohemian." His experience of variety in scene was much wider than
Richardson's, although after he came home from Leyden (where he went to
study law) it was chiefly confined to London and the south of England
(especially Bath, Dorsetshire, where he lived for a time, and the
Western Circuit), till his last voyage, in hopeless quest of health, to
Lisbon, where he died. His knowledge of literature, and even what may be
called his scholarship, were considerable, and did credit to the public
school education of those days.

Smollett (1721-1771) differed from his two predecessors in being a
Scotsman: but in family was very much nearer to Fielding than to
Richardson, being the grandson of a judge who was a Commissioner of the
Union, and a gentleman of birth and property--which last would, had he
lived long enough, have come to Smollett himself. But he suffered in his
youth from some indistinctly known family jars, was apprenticed to a
Glasgow surgeon, and escaping thence to London with a tragedy in his