d of the firm land, though he must
have felt through life like one whose feet are always plunging into a
hopeless quagmire. To describe him as a mere reckless Bohemian, is to
overlook the main facts of his story. He was manly to the last, not in
the sense in which man means animal; but with the manliness of one who
struggles bravely to redeem early errors, and who knows the value of
independence, purity, and domestic affection. The scanty anecdotes which
do duty for his biography reveal little of his true life. We know,
indeed, from a spiteful and obviously exaggerated story of Horace
Walpole's, that he once had a very poor supper in doubtful company; and
from another anecdote, of slightly apocryphal flavour, that he once gave
to 'friendship' the money which ought to have been given to the
collector of rates. But really to know the man, we must go to his books.

What did Fielding learn of the world which had treated him so roughly?
That the world must be composed of fools because it did not bow before
his genius, or of knaves because it did not reward his honesty? Men of
equal ability have drawn both those and the contradictory conclusions
from experience. Human nature, as philosophers assure us, varies little
from age to age; but the pictures drawn by the best observers vary so
strangely as to convince us that a portrait depends as much upon the
artist as upon the sitter. One can see nothing but the baser, and
another nothing but the nobler, passions. To one the world is like a
masque representing the triumph of vice; and another placidly assures us
that virtue is always rewarded by peace of mind, and that even the
temporary prosperity of the wicked is an illusion. On one canvas we see
a few great heroes stand out from a multitude of pygmies; on its rival,
giants and dwarfs appear to have pretty much the same stature. The world
is a scene of unrestrained passions impelling their puppets into
collision or alliance without intelligible design; or a scene of
domestic order, where an occasional catastrophe interferes as little
with ordinary lives as a comet with the solar system. Blind fate governs
one world of the imagination, and beneficent Providence another. The
theories embodied in poetry vary as widely as the philosophies on which
they are founded; and to philosophise is to declare the fundamental
assumptions of half the wise men of the world to be transparent
fallacies.

We need not here attempt to reconcile these