Fielding | Page 5

to have become desperately enamoured of her, and to have
sadly fluttered the Dorset dovecotes by his pertinacious and undesirable
attentions. At one time he seems to have actually meditated the
abduction of his "flame," for an entry in the town archives, discovered
by Mr. George Roberts, sometime Mayor of Lyme, who tells the story,
declares that Andrew Tucker, Esq., went in fear of his life "owing to
the behaviour of Henry Fielding and his attendant, or man." Such a

state of things (especially when guardians have sons of their own) is
clearly not to be endured; and Miss Andrew was prudently transferred
to the care of another guardian, Mr. Rhodes of Modbury, in South
Devon, to whose son, a young gentleman of Oxford, she was promptly
married. Burke (Landed Gentry, 1858) dates the marriage in 1726, a
date which is practically confirmed by the baptism of a child at
Modbury in April of the following year. Burke further describes the
husband as Mr. Ambrose Rhodes of Buckland House,
Buckland-Tout-Saints. His son, Mr. Rhodes of Bellair, near Exeter, was
gentleman of the Privy Chamber to George III.; and one of his
descendants possessed a picture which passed for the portrait of Sophia
Western. The tradition of the Tucker family pointed to Miss Andrew as
the original of Fielding's heroine; but though such a supposition is
intelligible, it is untenable, since he says distinctly (Book XIII. chap. i.
of Tom Jones) that his model was his first wife, whose likeness he
moreover draws very specifically in another place, by declaring that she
resembled Margaret Cecil, Lady Ranelagh, and, more nearly, "the
famous Dutchess of Mazarine." [Footnote: See Appendix No. I.:
Fielding and Sarah Andrew.]
With this early escapade is perhaps to be connected what seems to have
been one of Fielding's earliest literary efforts. This is a modernisation
in burlesque octosyllabic verse of part of Juvenal's sixth satire. In the
"Preface" to the later published Miscellanies, it is said to have been
"originally sketched out before he was Twenty," and to have
constituted "all the Revenge taken by an injured Lover." But it must
have been largely revised subsequent to that date, for it contains
references to Mrs. Clive, Mrs. Woffington, Cibber the younger, and
even to Richardson's Pamela. It has no special merit, although some of
the couplets have the true Swiftian turn. If Murphy's statement be
correct, that the author "went from Eton to Leyden," it must have been
planned at the latter place, where, he tells us in the preface to Don
Quixote in England, he also began that comedy. Notwithstanding these
literary distractions, he is nevertheless reported to have studied the
civilians "with a remarkable application for about two years." At the
expiration of this time, remittances from home failing, he was obliged
to forego the lectures of the "learned Vitriarius" (then Professor of Civil

Law at Leyden University), and return to London, which he did at the
beginning of 1728 or the end of 1727.
The fact was that his father, never a rich man, had married again. His
second wife was a widow named Eleanor Rasa; and by this time he was
fast acquiring a second family. Under the pressure of his growing cares,
he found himself, however willing, as unable to maintain his eldest son
in London as he had previously been to discharge his expenses at
Leyden. Nominally, he made him an allowance of two hundred a year;
but this, as Fielding himself explained, "any body might pay that
would." The consequence was, that not long after the arrival of the
latter in the Metropolis he had given up all idea of pursuing the law, to
which his mother's legal connections had perhaps first attracted him,
and had determined to adopt the more seductive occupation of living by
his wits. At this date he was in the prime of youth. From the portrait by
Hogarth representing him at a time when he was broken in health and
had lost his teeth, it is difficult to reconstruct his likeness at twenty. But
we may fairly assume the "high-arched Roman nose" with which his
enemies reproached him, the dark eyes, the prominent chin, and the
humorous expression; and it is clear that he must have been tall and
vigorous, for he was over six feet when he died, and had been
remarkably strong and active. Add to this that he inherited a splendid
constitution, with an unlimited capacity for enjoyment, and we have a
fair idea of Henry Fielding at that moment of his career, when with
passions "tremblingly alive all o'er"--as Murphy says--he stood,
"This way and that dividing the swift mind,"
between the professions of hackney-writer and hackney-coachman. His
natural bias was towards literature, and his opportunities, if not his
inclinations, directed him to dramatic