, which indeed has left
strong traces even on his great novels; and if its mannerism is not
now very attractive, the separate traits in it are often sharp and
well-drawn. The book would not have been complete without a specimen or
two of Fielding's journalism. The Champion, his first attempt of this
kind, has not been drawn upon in consequence of the extreme difficulty
of fixing with absolute certainty on Fielding's part in it. I do not
know whether political prejudice interferes, more than I have usually
found it interfere, with my judgment of the two Hanoverian-partisan
papers of the '45 time. But they certainly seem to me to fail in
redeeming their dose of rancor and misrepresentation by any sufficient
evidence of genius such as, to my taste, saves not only the party
journalism in verse and prose of Swift and Canning and Praed on one
side, but that of Wolcot and Moore and Sydney Smith on the other. Even
the often-quoted journal of events in London under the Chevalier is
overwrought and tedious. The best thing in the True Patriot seems to me
to be Parson Adams' letter describing his adventure with a young "bowe"
of his day; and this I select, together with one or two numbers of the
Covent Garden Journal. I have not found in this latter anything more
characteristic than Murphy's selection, though Mr. Dobson, with his
unfailing kindness, lent me an original and unusually complete set of
the Journal itself.

It is to the same kindness that I owe the opportunity of presenting the
reader with something indisputably Fielding's and very characteristic
of him, which Murphy did not print, and which has not, so far as I know,
ever appeared either in a collection or a selection of Fielding's work.
After the success of David Simple, Fielding gave his sister, for whom he
had already written a preface to that novel, another preface for a set
of Familiar Letters between the characters of David Simple and others.
This preface Murphy reprinted; but he either did not notice, or did
not choose to attend to, a note towards the end of the book attributing
certain of the letters to the author of the preface, the attribution
being accompanied by an agreeably warm and sisterly denunciation of
those who ascribed to Fielding matter unworthy of him. From these the
letter which I have chosen, describing a row on the Thames, seems to
me not only characteristic, but, like all this miscellaneous work,
interesting no less for its weakness than for i