pretence of respecting “the Manes of the dead,” the writer seems to have found it pleasanter to fill his space with vagrant discussions on the “Middle Comedy of the Greeks” and the machinery of the Rape of the Lock, than to make the requisite biographical inquiries. This is the more to be deplored, because, in 1762, Fielding’s widow, brother, and sister, as well as his friend Lyttelton, were still alive, and trustworthy information should have been procurable.
II. Watson’s Life of Henry Fielding, Esq. This is usually to be found prefixed to a selection of Fielding’s works issued at Edinburgh. It also appeared as a volume in 1807, although there is no copy of it in this form at the British Museum. It carries Murphy a little farther, and corrects him in some instances. But its author had clearly never even seen the Miscellanies of 1743, with their valuable Preface, for he speaks of them as one volume, and in apparent ignorance of their contents.
III. Sir Walter Scott’s biographical sketch for Ballantyne’s Novelist’s Library. This was published in 1821; and is now included in the writer’s Miscellaneous Prose Works. Sir Walter made no pretence to original research, and even spoke slightingly of this particular work; but it has all the charm of his practised and genial pen.
IV. Roscoe’s Memoir, compiled for the one-volume edition of Fielding, published by Washbourne and others in 1840.
V. Thackeray’s well-known lecture, in the English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century, 1853.
VI. The Life of Henry Fielding; with Notices of his Writings, his Times, and his Contemporaries. By Frederick Lawrence. 1855. This is an exceedingly painstaking book; and constitutes the first serious attempt at a biography. Its chief defect—as pointed out at the time of its appearance—is an ill-judged emulation of
