the
good, and to reject the evil. Conscience gives the rule, and for every
bane will give the antidote.

Of this school and period, Fielding is the greatest figure. One word as to
his career. Passing through all social conditions,--first a country
gentleman, living on or rather squandering his first wife's little fortune
in following the hounds and entertaining the county; then a playwright,
vegetating very seedily on the proceeds of his comedies; justice of the
peace, and encountering, in his vocation, such characters as _Jonathan
Wild_; drunken, licentious, unfaithful to his wife, but always--strange
paradox of poor human nature--generous as the day; mourning with bitter
tears the loss of his first wife, and then marrying her faithful
maid-servant, that they may mourn for her together,--he seems to have been
a rare mechanism without a _governor_. "Poor Harry Fielding!" And yet to
this irregular, sinful character, we owe the inimitable portraitures of
English life as it was, in _Joseph Andrews_, _Tom Jones_, and _Amelia_.

Fielding's habits, acting upon a naturally weak constitution, wore him
out. He left England, and wandered to the English factory at Lisbon, where
he died, in 1754, in the forty-eighth year of his age.

TOBIAS GEORGE SMOLLETT.--Smollett, the third in order and in rank of the
novelists of his age, was born at Cardross, Dumbartonshire, in 1721, of a
good family; but he had small means. After some schooling at Dumbarton and
a university career at Glasgow, he was, from necessity, apprenticed to a
surgeon. But as his grandfather, Sir James Smollett, on whom he depended,
died, he left his master, at the age of eighteen, and, taking in his
pocket a manuscript play he had thus early written,--_The Regicides_,--he
made his way to London, the El Dorado of all youths with literary
aspirations. The play was not accepted; but, through the knowledge
obtained in the surgery, he received an appointment as surgeon's mate, and
went out with Admiral Vernon's fated expedition to Carthagena in that
capacity, and thus acquired a knowledge of the sea and of sailors which he
was to use with great effect in his later writings. For a time he remained
in the West Indies, where he fell in love with Miss Anne Lascelles, whom
he afterwards married. In 1746 he returned to London, and, after an
unsuccessful attempt to practise medicine, he threw himself with great
vigor into the field of literature. He was a man of strange and