ke that of the good Parson
Adams, comes from life, not books.

The worldly wisdom for which Fielding is so conspicuous had indeed been
gathered in doubtful places, and shows traces of its origin. He had been
forced, as he said, to choose between the positions of a hackney
coachman and of a hackney writer. 'His genius,' said Lady M. W. Montagu,
who records the saying, 'deserves a better fate.' Whether it would have
been equally fertile, if favoured by more propitious surroundings, is
one of those fruitless questions which belong to the boundless history
of the might-have-beens. But one fact requires to be emphasised.
Fielding's critics and biographers have dwelt far too exclusively upon
the uglier side of his Bohemian life. They have presented him as
yielding to all the temptations which can mislead keen powers of
enjoyment, when the purse is one day at the lowest ebb and the next
overflowing with the profits of some lucky hit at the theatre. Those
unfortunate yellow liveries which contributed to dissipate his little
fortune have scandalised posterity as they scandalised his country
neighbours.[11] But it is essential to remember that the history of the
Fielding of later years, of the Fielding to whom we owe the novels, is
the record of a manful and persistent struggle to escape from the mire
of Grub Street. During that period he was studying the law with the
energy of a young student; redeeming the office of magistrate from the
discredit into which it had fallen in the hands of fee-hunting
predecessors; considering seriously, and making practical proposals to
remedy, the evils which then made the lowest social strata a hell upon
earth; sacrificing his last chances of health and life to put down with
a strong hand the robbers who infested the streets of London; and
clinging with affection to his wife and children. He never got fairly
clear of that lamentable slough of despond into which his follies had
plunged him. His moral tone lost what delicacy it had once possessed; he
had not the strength which enabled Johnson to gain elevation even from
the temptations which then beset the unlucky 'author by profession.'
Some literary hacks of the day escaped only by selling themselves, body
and soul; others sank into misery and vice, like poor Boyce, a fragment
of whose poem has been preserved by Fielding, and who appears in
literary history scribbling for pay in a sack arranged to represent a
shirt. Fielding never let go his hol