HENRY FIELDING AS A LAW REFORMER justice. We shall speak of this work with some detail later on, but in the meanwhile it will be interesting to observe in his earlier writings the manifestations of this ever-increasing desire for law reform. Toward the end of his short life this may be said to have become not only a prepos session, but a profession with him; and it is to be noted that, unlike Dickens, Fielding wrote of present evils, not of those that had become largely historical in his day. In the Coffee-House-Politician, or Justice caught in his own Trap, published in 1730, we have in Justice Squeezum a type of the venal magistrate such as Dante declared once infested the city of Lucca {Inferno, Canto XXI). "All there are barrators No into yes for money there is changed." Fielding would elevate the tone of party politics, moreover, because decent public life is an antecedent of honest administra tion of justice. In his Don Quixote in England, sketched if not fully written in his "salad days," he makes one of the dramatis persona say : "I like an Opposition, because otherwise a man may be obliged to vote against his Party; therefore when we invite a gentle man to stand, we invite him to spend his money for the honour of his Party; and when both Parties have spent as much as they are able, every honest man will vote according to his conscience." During his lehrjahre at the Middle Temple, Fielding, in conjunction with his friend James Ralph, edited the Champion, a series of periodical essays modelled on the Tatler, and, in still further resemblance to it, published on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. The supposititious authors of the essays in the Champion were declared to be members of the "Vinegar family." There was, inter alia, Nehemiah Vinegar, whose domain was history and politics; his brother, Councillor Vinegar, who pre
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sided over law and judicature; his son, Captain Hercules Vinegar, who exploited all questions relating to the army and navy and " fighting part of the Kingdom;" and Dr. John Vinegar, his cousin, who indoctrinated the ignorant concerning mat ters of medicine and natural, philosophy. One of the essays written by Fielding on Charity contains a fine argument against imprisonment for debt, a subject which, doubtless, ever had a keen interest for the extravagant and impecunious author. Another essay from the same pen parodies in an inimitable way the old NormanFrench gibberish of the law, which at that time had not ceased to make a naturally dry study gratuitously repellent. But possibly Fielding's legal knowledge never served him to better purpose than in his pasquinade at Cibber's expense, published in the Champion in 1740. Cibber had shortly before printed his "Apology," in which Fielding had been set down in terms which were not euphemistic to say the least; and, in sooth, our author pretty well deserved all he got, for he had never spared his rival when he could score against him in print. Cibber, who at a later date in literary history could make the author of the Dunciad "writhe with anguish" by his sarcasm, declined to mention Field ing's name on the ground that it " could do him no good and was of no importance," but referred to him as "a broken Wit" who did not scruple to assail "Religion, Laws, Government, Priests, Judges and Ministers," and finally twitted him with being silenced as a scurrilous playwright by the Licensing Acts. Fielding was not slow to furnish a riposte to this allonge, and it took the form of a mock trial of Cibber, arraigning him before the Bar of literary criticism for that " not having the fear of Grammar before his eyes ' ' he had committed a breach of the peace upon his mother-tongue. This burlesque occupies part of several issues of the Champion for 1740, and, besides its keen analysis of
