famous Mrs. Clive, then Miss Raftor, appeared; the _Modern Husband_,
1732; the _Covent Garden Tragedy_, 1732, a broad and rather riotous
burlesque of Ambrose Philips' _Distrest Mother_; and the _Debauchees;
or, The Jesuit Caught_, 1732--which was based upon the then debated
story of Father Girard and Catherine Cadiere.

Neither of the two last-named pieces is worthy of the author, and their
strongest condemnation in our day is that they were condemned in their
own for their unbridled license, the _Grub Street Journal_ going so far
as to say that they had "met with the universal detestation of the
Town." The _Modern Husband_, which turns on that most loathsome of all
commercial pursuits, the traffic of a husband in his wife's dishonour,
appears, oddly enough, to have been regarded by its author with especial
complacency. Its prologue lays stress upon the moral purpose; it was
dedicated to Sir Robert Walpole; and from a couple of letters printed in
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's _Correspondence_, it is clear that it had
been submitted to her perusal. It had, however, no great success upon
the stage, and the chief thing worth remembering about it is that it
afforded his last character to Wilks, who played the part of Bellamant.
That "slight Pique," of which mention has been made, was no doubt by
this time a thing of the past.

But if most of the works in the foregoing list can hardly be regarded as
creditable to Fielding's artistic or moral sense, one of them at least
deserves to be excepted, and that is the burlesque of _Tom Thumb_. This
was first brought out in 1730 at the little theatre in the Hay-market,
where it met with a favourable reception. In the following year it was
enlarged to three acts (in the first version there had been but two),
and reproduced at the same theatre as the _Tragedy of Tragedies; or, The
Life and Death of Tom Thumb the Great_, "with the Annotations of H.