with the _Wedding Day_ that one of the best-known anecdotes of the
author is related.

Garrick had begged him to retrench a certain objectionable passage. This
Fielding, either from indolence or unwillingness, declined to do,
asserting that if it was not good, the audience might find it out. The
passage was promptly hissed, and Garrick returned to the green-room,
where the author was solacing himself with a bottle of champagne. "What
is the matter, Garrick?" said he to the flustered actor; "what are they
hissing now?" He was informed with some heat that they had been hissing
the very scene he had been asked to withdraw, "and," added Garrick,
"they have so frightened me, that I shall not be able to collect myself
again the whole night"--"Oh!" answered the author, with an oath, "they
HAVE found it out, have they?" This rejoinder is usually quoted as an
instance of Fielding's contempt for the intelligence of his audience;
but nine men in ten, it may be observed, would have said something of
the same sort.

The only other thing which need be referred to in connection with this
comedy--the last of his own dramatic works which Fielding ever witnessed
upon the stage--is Macklin's doggerel Prologue. Mr. Lawrence attributes
this to Fielding; but he seems to have overlooked the fact that in the
_Miscellanies_ it is headed, "_Writ_ and Spoken by Mr. Macklin," which
gives it more interest as the work of an outsider than if it had been a
mere laugh by the author at himself. Garrick is represented as too busy
to speak the prologue; and Fielding, who has been "drinking to raise his
Spirits," has begged Macklin with his "long, dismal, Mercy-begging
Face," to go on and apologise. Macklin then pretends to recognise him
among the audience, and pokes fun at his anxieties, telling him that he
had better have stuck to "honest _Abram Adams_," who, "in spight of