both rival malice and contemporary coldness. It is a proof of her author’s genius, that she is even more intelligible to our age than she was to her own.
At the end of the second volume of the first edition of her history was a notice announcing the immediate appearance of the above-mentioned Covent-Garden Journal, a bi-weekly paper, in which Fielding, under the style and title of Sir Alexander Drawcansir, assumed the office of Censor of Great Britain. The first number of this new venture was issued on January the 4th, 1752, and the price was threepence. In plan, and general appearance, it resembled the Jacobite’s Journal, consisting mainly of an introductory Essay, paragraphs of current news, often accompanied by pointed editorial comment, miscellaneous articles, and advertisements. One of the features of the earlier numbers was a burlesque, but not very successful, Journal of the present Paper War, which speedily involved the author in actual hostilities with the notorious quack and adventurer Dr. John Hill, who for some time had been publishing certain impudent lucubrations in the London Daily Advertiser under the heading of The Inspector; and also with Smollett, whom he (Fielding) had ridiculed in his second number, perhaps on account of that little paragraph in the first edition of Peregrine Pickle, to which reference was made in an earlier chapter. Smollett, always irritable and combative, retorted by a needlessly coarse and venomous pamphlet, in which, under the name of “Habbakkuk Hilding, Justice, Dealer and Chapman,” Fielding was attacked with indescribable brutality. Another, and seemingly unprovoked, adversary whom the Journal of the War brought upon him was Bonnel Thornton, afterwards
