future life may be gathered from a passage in _Joseph Andrews_ which is
not without the ring of personal feeling. The speaker is a generous and
estimable country gentleman, living in Arcadian retirement with his wife
and children. Descended of a good family and born a gentleman, he narrates
how his education was acquired at a public school, and extended to a
mastery of the Latin, and a tolerable knowledge of the Greek, language.
Becoming his own master at sixteen he soon left school, for, he tells his
listeners, "being a forward Youth, I was extremely impatient to be in the
World: For which I thought my Parts, Knowledge, and Manhood thoroughly
qualified me. And to this early Introduction into Life, without a Guide, I
impute all my future Misfortunes; for besides the obvious Mischiefs which
attend this, there is one which hath not been so generally observed. The
first Impression which Mankind receives of you, will be very difficult to
eradicate. How unhappy, therefore, must it be to fix your Character in
Life, before you can possibly know its Value, or weigh the Consequences of
those Actions which are to establish your future Reputation?" [1] That the
wise and strenuous Fielding of later years, the energetic student at the
Bar, the active and patriotic journalist, the merciless exponent of the
hypocrite, the spendthrift, and the sensualist, the creator of the most
perfect type of womanhood in English fiction (so said Dr Johnson and
Thackeray) should look back sadly on his own years of hot-blooded youth is
entirely natural; but even so this passage and the well-known confession
placed in the mouth of the supposed writer of the _Journey from this World
to the Next_, [2] no more constitute direct evidence than do Murphy's
unattested phrases, or the anonymous scurrilities of eighteenth-century
pamphleteers.

By birth and education Fielding's natural place was in the costly society
of those peers and men of wealth and fashion who courted the brilliant
young wit; but fortune had decreed otherwise, and at this his first