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