the most part overflowing into wit, mirth, and good-humour," young
Fielding added a handsome face, a magnificent physique (he stood over six
feet high), and the fullest vigour of constitution. "No man," wrote his
cousin, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, "enjoyed life more than he did." What
wonder that he was soon "in high request with the men of taste and
literature," or that report affirms him to have been no less welcome in
ranks of society not at all distinguished by a literary flavour.

That a youth so gifted, so "formed and disposed for enjoyment," should
find himself his own master, in London, almost presupposes a too liberal
indulgence in the follies that must have so easily beset him. When the
great and cold Mr Secretary Addison, no less than that "very merry
Spirit," Dick Steele, and the splendid Congreve, drank more than was good
for them, what chance would there be for a brilliant, ardent lad of
twenty, suddenly plunged into the robust society of that age? If
Fielding, like his elders, indisputably loved good wine, let us remember
that none of the heroes of his three great novels, neither that rural
innocent Joseph Andrews, nor the exuberant youth Tom Jones, nor erring,
repentant Captain Booth are immoderate drinkers. The degradation of
drinking is, in Fielding's pages, accorded to brutalised if honest
country squires, and cruel and corrupt magistrates; and there is little
evidence throughout his life to indicate that the great novelist drank
more freely than did the genial heroes of his pen. As regards Murphy's
general assertion that, at this his entrance into life, young Fielding
"launched wildly into a career of dissipation" no other reputable
contemporary evidence is discoverable of the "wildness" popularly
attributed to Fielding. That his youth was headlong and undisciplined is
a plausible surmise; but justice demands that the charge be recognised as
a surmise and nothing more. How keenly, twenty years later, he could
appreciate the handicap that such early indulgences impose on a man's