At this distance of time, new facts respecting a man of whom so little
has been recorded require to be announced with considerable caution.
Some definite additions to Fielding lore I have, however, been enabled
to make. Thanks to the late Colonel J. L. Chester, who was engaged, only
a few weeks before his death, in friendly investigations on my behalf, I
am able to give, for the first time, the date and place of Fielding's
second marriage, and the baptismal dates of all the children by that
marriage, except the eldest. I am also able to fix approximately the
true period of his love-affair with Miss Sarah Andrew. From the original
assignment at South Kensington I have ascertained the exact sum paid by
Millar for _Joseph Andrews_; and in chapter v. will be found a series of
extracts from a very interesting correspondence, which does not appear
to have been hitherto published, between Aaron Hill, his daughters, and
Richardson, respecting _Tom Jones_. Although I cannot claim credit for
the discovery, I believe the present is also the first biography of
Fielding which entirely discredits the unlikely story of his having been
a stroller at Bartholomew Fair; and I may also, I think, claim to have
thrown some additional light on Fielding's relations with the Cibbers,
seeing that the last critical essay upon the author of the _Apology_
which I have met with, contains no reference to Fielding at all. For
such minor novelties as the passage from the _Universal Spectator_, and
the account of the projected translation of Lucian, etc., the reader is
referred to the book itself, where these, and other waifs and strays,
are duly indicated. If, in my endeavour to secure what is freshest, I
have at the same time neglected a few stereotyped quotations, which have
hitherto seemed indispensable in writing of Fielding, I trust I may be
forgiven.

Brief as it is, the book has not been without its obligations. To Mr. B.