apparently with some envy, tells us that he could "feel rapture with his
cook-maid." "Which many has," as Mr Ridley remarks, from Xanthias
Phoceus downwards; but when we remember the historic fact that he
married this maid (not a "cook-maid" at all), and that though he always
speaks of her with warm affection and hearty respect, such "raptures" as
we have of his clearly refer to a very different woman, who was both a
lady and a beautiful one, we begin a little to shake our heads. Horace
Walpole at second-hand draws us a Fielding, pigging with low companions
in a house kept like a hedge tavern; Fielding himself, within a year or
two, shows us more than half-undesignedly in the _Voyage to Lisbon_ that
he was very careful about the appointments and decency of his table,
that he stood rather upon ceremony in regard to his own treatment of his
family, and the treatment of them and himself by others, and that he was
altogether a person orderly, correct, and even a little finikin. Nor is
there the slightest reasonable reason to regard this as a piece of
hypocrisy, a vice as alien from the Fielding of fancy as from the
Fielding of fact, and one the particular manifestation of which, in this
particular place, would have been equally unlikely and unintelligible.

It may be asked whether I propose to substitute for the traditional
Fielding a quite different person, of regular habits and methodical
economy. Certainly not. The traditional estimate of great men is rarely
wrong altogether, but it constantly has a habit of exaggerating and
dramatising their characteristics. For some things in Fielding's career
we have positive evidence of document, and evidence hardly less certain
of probability. Although I believe the best judges are now of opinion
that his impecuniosity has been overcharged, he certainly had
experiences which did not often fall to the lot of even a cadet of good
family in the eighteenth century. There can be no reasonable doubt that
he was a man who had a leaning towards pretty girls and bottles of good