so that he had frequently to retreat on Bath from Bow Street, or his
suburban cottage of Fordhook, Ealing. But he did not relax his literary
work. His pen was active with pamphlets concerning his office; _Amelia_,
his last novel, appeared towards the close of 1751; and next year saw
the beginning of a new paper, the _Covent Garden Journal_, which
appeared twice a week, ran for the greater part of the year, and died in
November. Its great author did not see that month twice again. In the
spring of 1753 he grew worse; and after a year's struggle with ill
health, hard work, and hard weather, lesser measures being pronounced
useless, was persuaded to try the "Portugal Voyage," of which he has
left so charming a record in the _Journey to Lisbon_. He left Fordhook
on June 26, 1754, reached Lisbon in August, and, dying there on the 8th
of October, was buried in the cemetery of the Estrella.

Of not many writers perhaps does a clearer notion, as far as their
personality goes, exist in the general mind that interests itself at all
in literature than of Fielding. Yet more than once a warning has been
sounded, especially by his best and most recent biographer, to the
effect that this idea is founded upon very little warranty of scripture.
The truth is, that as the foregoing record--which, brief as it is, is a
sufficiently faithful summary--will have shown, we know very little
about Fielding. We have hardly any letters of his, and so lack the best
by far and the most revealing of all character-portraits; we have but
one important autobiographic fragment, and though that is of the highest
interest and value, it was written far in the valley of the shadow of
death, it is not in the least retrospective, and it affords but dim and
inferential light on his younger, healthier, and happier days and ways.
He came, moreover, just short of one set of men of letters, of whom we
have a great deal of personal knowledge, and just beyond another. He was
neither of those about Addison, nor of those about Johnson. No intimate