At which moment enters the caustic, generous Witmore, belabouring the
profanity, the scurrility, the immodesty, the stupidity of the age with
one hand, the while he pays his friend's rent with the other; and who,
incidentally, is requested by that irascible genius to kick a worthy
publisher down the stairs, on the latter's refusal to give fifty
shillings "no, nor fifty farthings" for his play. Once mollified by the
settlement of her bill, we have the landlady playing advocate for her
hapless lodger in words that sound very like the apologia of Mr Harry
Fielding himself: "I have always thought, indeed, Mr _Luckless_ had a
great deal of Honesty in his Principles; any Man may be unfortunate: but I
knew when he had Money I should have it...." And the good woman's
reminiscence that while her lodger had money her doors were thundered at
every morning between four and five by coachmen and chairmen; and her wish
that that pleasant humour'd gentleman were "but a little soberer,"
finishes, we take it, the portrait of the Fielding of 1730. "Jack call a
coach; and d'ye hear, get up behind it and attend me," cries the
improvident poet, the moment his generous friend has left him; and so we
are sure did young Mr Fielding put himself and his laced coat into a
coach, and mount his man behind it, whenever the exigencies of duns and
hunger were for a moment abated. And with as gallant a humour as that of
his own Luckless did he walk afoot, when those "nine ragged jades the
muses" failed to bring him a competency.

Such failure on the part of the Muses was due to no want of wooing on his
part. During the six years between Fielding's first appearance as dramatic
author in 1728, and his marriage in 1734, there stand no fewer than
thirteen plays to his name. Of these none have won any lasting reputation;
and to this period of the great novelist's life may doubtless be applied
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's description, when lamenting that her kinsman
should have been "forced by necessity to publish without correction, and