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My purpose here is to claim for the Fielding canon four new, and rather surprising, pieces from the earliest period of his authorship. In subject and manner, all four are characteristic of Fielding. What may be unexpected about them—considering his overtures to Walpole and the Court in roughly the same period—is that they appeared in Opposition journals and are openly satirical of the Prime Minister, though in varying degrees of severity. The two earliest items—a ballad entitled "The Norfolk Lanthorn" and an epistolary essay on "the Benefit of Laughing"—were published during the summer of 1728 in, respectively, The Craftsman (20 July) and Mist's Weekly Journal (3 August). The latter two—in the form of letters from the sharp-sighted physiognomist "Thomas Squint" and from the Norfolk squire "Harry Hunter," who expounds upon the analogy between hunters and politicians—appeared in the summer and autumn of 1730 in, respectively, Fog's Weekly Journal (25 July) and The Craftsman (10 October).

Since Fielding did not publish these pieces under his own name or otherwise acknowledge that he wrote them, and since—with perhaps the tantalizing exception of "The Norfolk Lanthorn"—his contemporaries are silent on the matter, the case for his authorship must rest almost entirely on internal evidence. In a moment, therefore, we will examine these works in some detail, noting in each the characteristic features of Fielding's style and thought. First, however, it will be helpful to review the biographical circumstances in which Fielding wrote them—at a time in his career when we might have expected to find him praising Caesar not blaming him.

When Fielding, well before his twenty-first birthday, tried to establish himself as a poet and playwright in London, he understood that his best hopes for prospering lay with Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, his second cousin and a close friend of Sir Robert Walpole. To her in 1727

he submitted the manuscript of his first play, Love in Several Masques, for criticism; and in November of that year—the commencement of his career as an author happily coinciding with George II's accession to the throne—he published together under his own name a pair of poems celebrating the new king's coronation and birthday.[1] Owing no doubt to the sponsorship of Lady Mary, to whom the play is dedicated, Love in Several Masques was produced, we may further note, in February 1728 at Drury Lane, the Theatre Royal, whose steady affiliation with the Court Interest made it a standing target for Opposition writers.

In March of that year Fielding interrupted his literary career in order to begin his studies at the University of Leyden in Holland. He did not remain abroad many months, however, as is clear from his poem, "A Description of U[pto]n G[rey]" written some time "in the Year 1728," presumably during the summer vacation. It was possibly in the same season a year later, when he returned to England after completing his studies, that he visited Lady Mary at Twickenham and sketched out those mock-epic cantos that so faithfully reflect her own political and literary prejudices—cordially praising Walpole and the Royal Family, and roundly satirizing both the Scriblerus circle of Pope, Swift, Gay, and Bolingbroke, and the editors of The Craftsman and Fog's Weekly Journal. These cantos, as Isobel Grundy observes, surely "represent a bid for [Lady Mary's] patronage and perhaps, through her, for that of Walpole."[2]

But these hopes, for the time being at least, came to nothing. No doubt unimpressed by the distinctly modest success of Love in Several Masques, the managers at Drury Lane rejected Fielding's next offerings. To find a stage for his second play, The Temple Beau (January 1730), he was forced to go to the new City theatre in Goodman's Fields, and from there to throw in his lot with the still less prestigious company of rogue comedians at the little Theatre in the Haymarket. Here it was that he succeeded brilliantly by giving the Town what he was convinced it preferred to regular comedy—farce and burlesque: The Author's Farce in March and Tom Thumb in April.

Though some critics have discerned in these plays signs of Fielding's disenchantment with Walpole, Professor Goldgar is certainly correct in regarding them as essentially unpolitical. In The Author's Farce, though Fielding mocks such ministerial creatures as Cibber and Henley and Theobald, his overt political strokes are few and they are directed

equally at the Opposition and the Court. As for Tom Thumb, not only was the usually alert Earl of Egmont unable to detect any ridicule of Walpole in the play; the Great Man himself so much enjoyed the burlesque that he attended three performances.[3] In its expanded form, as The Tragedy of Tragedies, the play indeed was considered so inoffensive politically that it was revived at Drury Lane after Fielding had returned to that company in 1732. Whether or not the minister's contributing to the successful original run of Tom Thumb can in itself fairly be construed as his patronage of Fielding, as the Opposition journalists believed, we may surely infer from Fielding's verse epistle to Walpole, "Written in the Year 1730," that he was courting his favor at about this time: in that poem, addressing Walpole, he refers to himself as "Your Bard" and angles, however facetiously, for some government "Sinecure."[4] His friendship with James Ralph, Lewis Theobald, and Thomas Cooke—all of whom were associated with the Court Party— stems, moreover, from this same period.[5]

Indeed, as Goldgar has shown (pp. 105-10), the first real indication of anything like an anti-Walpole bias in Fielding's known writings is not to be found until the Haymarket production of Rape upon Rape (later called The Coffee-House Politician) in June 1730: this play, thematically the most earnest of Fielding's regular comedies to date, satirizes lewdness and corruption in the magistracy—a subject reflecting on the recent scandal involving the infamous Col. Charteris and the man who was said to have "screened" him from justice, Sir Robert Walpole. But even here Fielding's satire, though pointed enough in its castigation of vice in high places, hits Walpole only obliquely. Judging strictly from what we have known of his published work, it would seem in fact that Fielding scrupulously avoided sensitive political subjects until, almost a year later, he produced The Welsh Opera (soon retitled The Grub-Street Opera) in April 1731 at the Haymarket Theatre. This play, which ridicules not only Walpole and party politics, but the Royal Family! was almost certainly quashed by the government; and it no

doubt contributed to the demise of the Haymarket company, whom the authorities prosecuted later that year for producing the thinly disguised anti-Walpole drama, The Fall of Mortimer.

It is curious, to say the least, that while the ministry was hounding the Haymarket players out of existence, the author of The Grub-Street Opera escaped unscathed. Indeed, after publicly dissociating himself from the publication of the play,[6] he would reappear six months later as nothing less than the principal dramatist of the Establishment's own theatre, Drury Lane. It may be that his second versified appeal for Walpole's patronage (dated 1731) was written in the latter part of that year. In any event, so thick was Fielding with the Court Party at this time that he could be counted on to supply the epilogue to The Modish Couple (produced at Drury Lane in January 1732)—a feeble comedy damned by the Opposition both at the theatre and in the press because, though supposedly written by the courtier Capt. Charles Bodens, the real authors were known to be Lord Hervey and the Prince of Wales. And when Fielding's own comedy, The Modern Husband, appeared the following month it was published with a Dedication to the Prime Minister himself, a circumstance which for some time thereafter subjected Fielding to the relentless abuse of The Grub-Street Journal.

With but two exceptions, then—the productions of Rape upon Rape in June 1730 and of The Welsh Opera in April 1731—Fielding's known writings of this early period are either entirely unconcerned with political matters or indiscriminate in directing incidental shafts at either party—or, as in the instances of the poems addressed to Walpole in 1730 and 1731, and the Dedication to The Modern Husband in 1732, they are openly complimentary of the minister. At first glance it would seem improbable therefore that Fielding could be the author of the four satires which are the subject of this essay. The fact is, however, that Fielding, who was very free with his money and had to earn with his pen what he could get of it, took a pragmatic view of his talent. We may recall, for instance, his well-known declaration in The Jacobite's Journal (26 March 1748) that "a Writer, whose only Livelihood is his Pen," must, like "every other Advocate," be allowed the right to sell his services to those who will pay for them:

Twenty years earlier, as a wild young man whose only saleable commodity was a talent to amuse, Fielding was doubtless no more inclined to play the idealist in such a mercenary game as politics. One may suppose that his own sentiments on the subject conformed pretty closely to those of his surrogate, "Scriblerus Secundus," author of The Grub-Street Opera, who explains to the Master of the Playhouse how it can be that the Grub-Street brethren should "pull one another to pieces as you do, especially in your political pamphlets":

Given this recognition of the realities of authorship and the patronage system, we should not be surprised to hear Fielding confess in The Champion, a paper friendly to the Opposition, that he had once been "induced to write certain insipid Things" in Walpole's behalf, or that he had taken Walpole's money "to stop the Publication of a Book" which he had written against him (31 July, 4 October 1740). Nor should we be any more surprised to find him, è converso, turning to the Opposition for encouragement if the minister in his beneficence proved dilatory or insufficient.

It is likely that Fielding's reputation for tergiversation in political matters was well deserved; he simply did not regard the unsteadiness of hackney writers in this respect as either morally reprehensible or financially

practicable. He was unswerving in his devotion to Whig principles, to be sure; but it never mattered very much to him which Whig was in place so long as he was a friend. In the summer of 1728, as a reckless youth just returned from his travels, what did matter to him, besides the craft of comedy, was the enjoyment of his pleasures and having the money to pay for them.

Dating from this period, the first two pieces to be produced below may serve to clarify at last that curious passage from An Historical View of the Principles, Characters, Persons, &c. of the Political Writers in Great Britain (1740), in which the author declares that, at a time before he "set up for a Play-Writer," Fielding had behaved ungratefully to Walpole. Fielding, the writer insists,

Though coming, obviously, from an unfriendly source, this circumstantial account has the ring of authenticity. Certainly one should not too hastily dismiss as malicious gossip the assertion that Fielding as a youth cooled his heels in a jail: the court records of Lyme Regis and Westminster for the period from September 1725 to November 1726 attest that he spent more than his share of time before magistrates explaining the various brawls and violent altercations his hot temper involved him in, the best-known instance of which was his attempt to abduct the young heiress Sarah Andrew.[8] But even those who are prepared to think there may be more truth than slander in this anecdote from the Historical View have found it puzzling. Which "Country-Town" is meant? Why, if the escapade took place in Fielding's usual rural haunts of Dorset, Hampshire, Wiltshire, should he send for aid to Walpole instead of applying to his friends and relations in the West Country? Which of Fielding's satires can the writer be alluding to, when the only one he is known to have published before setting up in earnest as a playwright in 1730, is The Masquerade (January 1728)—a poem ridiculing not Walpole, but a fashionable diversion of the Town?

The discovery that Fielding was the author of "The Norfolk Lanthorn," in particular, now enables us to offer plausible solutions to each of these puzzles. The author of the ballad (published on 20 July 1728) states that he has "just returned from a Journey into N[orfolk]," where he has seen the curiosities of Walpole's "Palace," Houghton Hall—so, too, may Fielding have done if he had returned from Holland for the summer by way of Harwich, the usual route.[9] Walpole was residing at Houghton for a fortnight or so in early July 1728;[10] and had Lady Mary's mischievous cousin become embroiled in yet another brush with the law while in the vicinity, he may well have appealed to Lady Mary's most powerful friend to bail him out.[11] "The Norfolk Lanthorn," which caused much embarrassment to Walpole and his party, would itself nicely fit the description of the "Satyr" in which Fielding is said to have "libelled" the minister "personally"; indeed, that the author of the ballad had defamed Walpole personally in this way was the very point of "Roger Manley's" attack on the poem in the British Journal of 27 July. Furthermore, since the minister, like the author of the satire, had returned to town shortly before "The Norfolk Lanthorn" was published —he arrived in London on Tuesday morning, 16 July, and set out at once to establish himself at Hampton Court for the summer—he might well have had an occasion at his levee the following week to upbraid Fielding for his ingratitude. And finally, if Fielding's authorship of the essay in Mist's Weekly Journal a fortnight later were suspected, the remaining details of the account also fall into place, since Walpole, even after the "Satyr," is said to have continued befriending Fielding "till he grew quite abandon'd to all Sense of Shame." All this is conjecture of course; but it has the virtue of squaring more nearly than any other explanation with the circumstances cited by the author of the Historical View.

As we have earlier remarked that among Fielding's known writings Rape upon Rape (June 1730) contains, albeit obliquely, the first definite

traces of satiric innuendo against Walpole and his corrupt agents, it will be less surprising that Fielding should be seen to continue in this vein throughout the summer and autumn of that year, when, in the pieces he contributed to Fog's Weekly Journal and The Craftsman, his satire against the minister is for the first time rather more acrimonious than playful. Both these pieces, moreover, relate in interesting ways to the themes of The Modern Husband, which, though not produced until 1732 at Drury Lane, was written much earlier while Fielding was still affiliated with the Haymarket Theatre—written, indeed, just after he had finished Rape upon Rape.[12] Certain parallels between The Modern Husband and Fielding's journalism of this same period suggest, in fact, that in composing this, his darkest dramatic satire against the lewdness and venality of the Great, Fielding originally intended another, more pointed, indictment of Walpole. With "Thomas Squint's" depiction of the minister as an arrogant "Man-Brute" lording it over a throng of abject flatterers, compare, for example, Capt. Merit's bitterness upon being turned away from Lord Richly's levee: "What an abundance of poor wretches go to the feeding the vanity of that leviathan—one great rogue" (I. viii), the phrasing of which would surely have suggested the Great Man himself.[13] Again, "Squint's" perception of the blustering placeman whom he encounters near St. James's—"tho' he could handsomely bully in the Mall, yet he was a very contented C[uckol]d at home"—anticipates not only the central theme of the play, but the very phrasing of Mr. Modern's expostulations with his wife, whose adultery he has connived at: "I have been contented to wear horns for your pleasure . . . . Sure, the grand seignior has no slave equal to a contented cuckold" (I. iv). Mr. Woodall, furthermore, the country M.P. who attends Lord Richly in the play (I. ix), succinctly embodies the analogy between foxhunters and politicians that Fielding draws at length in "Harry Hunter's" letter to The Craftsman.

As he composed The Modern Husband Fielding seems to have associated such themes and images with the state of moral debility in government which Walpole (for the moment at least) epitomized. It will now seem less surprising, then, that the earliest "puff" of that play appeared in The Craftsman (19 September 1730) less than a month before the same journal published "Harry Hunter's" satire against the

minister and his party. But in the comedy, in contrast to the journalism, Fielding disguised and generalized his satire so successfully that it not only passed the scrutiny of Walpole's friends, Lady Mary[14] and the managers at Drury Lane; it seemed innocuous enough to be presented to Walpole himself with a Dedication in the style of Horace's flattery of Augustus.

In brief, then, these are the circumstances, political and personal, in which Fielding wrote the four satires we are about to consider. Before examining the evidence for attributing these pieces to Fielding, however, we should be aware of certain matters affecting the cogency and organization of the argument. To begin with, it will be apparent that two of the pieces in question—those published in Mist's Weekly Journal and its successor Fog's—do not show what has long been regarded as an essential hallmark of Fielding's style: his preference for the archaic verb forms, hath and doth. There are good reasons for this anomaly—which, indeed, with respect to Fielding's writings of this period, is not an anomaly at all. His published works of 1728-30 predominantly show the modern forms, has and does; and the holograph material that survives from roughly the same period invariably shows the same preference. As the recent discovery of the manuscript of an essay published in Common Sense (13 May 1738) indicates, moreover, compositors of the time were perfectly capable of modernizing his archaisms when he did use them.[15] In the earlier period, however, the evidence might incline us to suspect that a work characterized by these archaisms was not by Fielding, rather than otherwise. But we would then be unable to account for Rape upon Rape (1730) and The Tragedy of Tragedies (1731), which with few exceptions show hath and doth; and there are passages where these same forms occur in both The Author's Farce (1730) and Tom Thumb (1730). In short, in the face of evidence as contradictory and untrustworthy as this, it will be prudent to abandon the hath/doth test altogether when trying to determine Fielding's authorship of a work written, say, before 1737, when he was forced to give up play-writing for the study of law.

A further problem affected the selection and arrangement of the evidence for Fielding's authorship of the four pieces in question. Each of the following four sections provides the full text of the work, together with introductory remarks meant to place it, both thematically

and stylistically, in the general context of Fielding's known writings. Since our present purpose is to establish the probability of Fielding's authorship on the basis chiefly of internal evidence, the notes to the texts will be strictly limited to the recording of parallels in Fielding's other works. To this end I have carefully reread all his works published during the fifteen-year period from The Masquerade (1728) to the Miscellanies (1743); in a more selective and cursory way I have reread the works published after that period. It will be apparent that this procedure proved efficacious in identifying numerous parallels between the essay in question and Fielding's known works. Since, however, many of these represent commonplaces of the period, they may seem to some readers to embarrass rather than enhance the case for Fielding's authorship; too many unremarkable parallels tend to confirm the doubts of sceptical readers. Sensing this difficulty, I submitted a draft of this paper to several scholars whose advice I value: in particular, I wish to thank Hugh Amory, James Earle Deese, Irvin Ehrenpreis, Bertrand A. Goldgar, Thomas Lockwood, and Simon Varey—all of whose criticisms I carefully weighed as I tried to give the paper an effective final form. With reference to the quantity of parallels recorded, I have heeded the advice of Professor Deese, a scientist well known for his studies in the psychological bases of language: on the principle that the probability of Fielding's authorship of a given anonymous essay increases in proportion to the number of close correspondences (whether commonplace or otherwise) between that essay and his known writings, I have kept the number of parallels high. To assist the reader in distinguishing between the commonplace and the unusual, however, I have marked with an asterisk those notes which contain striking or distinctive parallels.

In order to simplify the citations and to conserve space, page-references, wherever possible, will be to Fielding's Complete Works, ed. W. E. Henley, 16 vols. (1903). Since, however, that edition includes only a selection of Fielding's journalism, references to The Champion, True Patriot, Jacobite's Journal, and The Covent-Garden Journal will be by date only. Other editions used are the following: The Masquerade (1728) and Epilogue to Fatal Curiosity (1737), in C. E. Jones, ed. The Female Husband and other writings (Liverpool, 1960); burlesque of Dunciad (c. 1729) and "Epistle to Mr. Lyttleton" (1733), ed. I. M. Grundy, PMLA, 87, (1972), 213-245; Author's Farce (1730 version), ed. C. B. Woods (1966); Tom Thumb (1730), ed. L. J. Morrisey (1970); Grub-Street Opera, revised, ed. E. V. Roberts (1969); Shamela (1741), in M. C. Battestin, ed. Joseph Andrews and Shamela (1961).

In the notes to the texts, the following abbreviations are used:

• AF Author's Farce (1730)
• CGJ Covent-Garden Journal (1752)
• CGT Covent-Garden Tragedy (1732)
• Ch Champion (1739-40)
• CJ Charge to the Jury (1745)
• Co "Essay on Conversation" (1743)
• CS Common Sense (1737-8)
• D burlesque of Dunciad (c. 1729)
• DAD "Dialogue between Alexander the Great and Diogenes the Cynic" (1743)
• DQE Don Quixote in England (1734)
• E Eurydice (1737)
• EH Eurydice Hissed (1737)
• EL "Epistle to Mr. Lyttleton" (1733)
• F The Fathers (1778)
• FC Epilogue to Fatal Curiosity (1736)
• FCW "To a Friend on the Choice of a Wife" (1743)
• GSO Grub-Street Opera (1731)
• HR Historical Register for the Year 1736 (1737)
• IC Intriguing Chambermaid (1734)
• JA Joseph Andrews (1742)
• JJ Jacobite's Journal (1747-48)
• JSS "Part of Juvenal's Sixth Satire Modernised in Burlesque Verse" (1743)
• JVL Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon (1755)
• JW Jonathan Wild (1743)
• JWN Journey from This World to the Next (1743)
• KCM "Essay on the Knowledge of the Characters of Men" (1743)
• L The Lottery (1732)
• LSM Love in Several Masques (1728)
• LW The Letter-Writers (1731)
• Ma Masquerade (1728)
• MD Mock-Doctor (1732)
• MH Modern Husband (1732)
• Mi Miser (1733)
• MLT Miss Lucy in Town (1742)
• N "Essay on Nothing" (1743)
• OMTW Old Man Taught Wisdom (1735)
• P Pasquin (1736)
• PRS Some Papers proper to be read before the Royal Society (1743)
• RALF "Of the Remedy of Affliction for the Loss of Our Friends" (1743)
• RR Rape upon Rape (1730)
• S Shamela (1741)
• TB Temple Beau (1730)
• TDD Tumble-Down Dick (1736)
• TG Of True Greatness (1741)
• TJ Tom Jones (1749)
• TP True Patriot (1745-46)
• TrT Tragedy of Tragedies (1731)
• TT Tom Thumb (1730)
• UG Universal Gallant (1735)
• V Vernoniad (1741)
• WD Wedding Day (1743)