his future wife for several years previous to 1735. One of them, _Advice
to the Nymphs of New S----m_, celebrates the charms of Celia--the
poetical equivalent for Charlotte--as early as 1730; another, containing
a reference to the player Anthony Boheme, who died in 1731, was probably
written at the same time; while a third, in which, upon the special
intervention of Jove himself, the prize of beauty is decreed by Venus to
the Salisbury sisters, may be of an earlier date than any. The year 1730
was the year of his third piece, the _Author's Farce_, and he must
therefore have been paying his addresses to Miss Cradock not very long
after his arrival in London. This is a fact to be borne in mind. So
early an attachment to a good and beautiful girl, living no farther off
than Salisbury, where his own father probably resided, is scarcely
consistent with the reckless dissipation which has been laid to his
charge, although, on his own showing, he was by no means faultless. But
it is a part of natures like his to exaggerate their errors in the
moment of repentance; and it may well be that Henry Fielding, too, was
not so black as he painted himself. Of his love-verses he says--"this
Branch of Writing is what I very little pretend to;" and it would be
misleading to rate them highly, for, unlike his literary descendant, Mr.
Thackeray, he never attained to any special quality of note. But some of
his octosyllabics, if they cannot be called equal to Prior's, fall
little below Swift's. "I hate"--cries he in one of the pieces,

"I hate the Town, and all its Ways;
Ridotto's, Opera's, and Plays;
The Ball, the King, the Mall, the Court;
Wherever the Beau-Monde resort....
All Coffee-Houses, and their Praters;
All Courts of Justice, and Debaters;
All Taverns, and the Sots within 'em;