altogether sufficed to fill up the gaps. His family, said to have
descended from a member of the great house of Hapsburg who came to
England in the reign of Henry II., distinguished itself in the Wars of
the Roses, and in the seventeenth century was advanced to the peerages
of Denbigh in England and (later) of Desmond in Ireland. The novelist
was the grandson of John Fielding, Canon of Salisbury, the fifth son of
the first Earl of Desmond of this creation. The canon's third son,
Edmond, entered the army, served under Marlborough, and married Sarah
Gold or Gould, daughter of a judge of the King's Bench. Their eldest son
was Henry, who was born on April 22, 1707, and had an uncertain number
of brothers and sisters of the whole blood. After his first wife's
death, General Fielding (for he attained that rank) married again. The
most remarkable offspring of the first marriage, next to Henry, was his
sister Sarah, also a novelist, who wrote David Simple; of the second,
John, afterwards Sir John Fielding, who, though blind, succeeded his
half-brother as a Bow Street magistrate, and in that office combined an
equally honourable record with a longer tenure.

Fielding was born at Sharpham Park in Somersetshire, the seat of his
maternal grandfather; but most of his early youth was spent at East
Stour in Dorsetshire, to which his father removed after the judge's
death. He is said to have received his first education under a parson of
the neighbourhood named Oliver, in whom a very uncomplimentary tradition
sees the original of Parson Trulliber. He was then certainly sent to
Eton, where he did not waste his time as regards learning, and made
several valuable friends. But the dates of his entering and leaving
school are alike unknown; and his subsequent sojourn at Leyden for two
years--though there is no reason to doubt it--depends even less upon
any positive documentary evidence. This famous University still had a
great repute as a training school in law, for which profession he was