"Poor Harry Fielding!" And yet to
this irregular, sinful character, we owe the inimitable portraitures of
English life as it was, in _Joseph Andrews_, _Tom Jones_, and _Amelia_.
Fielding's habits, acting upon a naturally weak constitution, wore him
out. He left England, and wandered to the English factory at Lisbon, where
he died, in 1754, in the forty-eighth year of his age.
TOBIAS GEORGE SMOLLETT.--Smollett, the third in order and in rank of the
novelists of his age, was born at Cardross, Dumbartonshire, in 1721, of a
good family; but he had small means. After some schooling at Dumbarton and
a university career at Glasgow, he was, from necessity, apprenticed to a
surgeon. But as his grandfather, Sir James Smollett, on whom he depended,
died, he left his master, at the age of eighteen, and, taking in his
pocket a manuscript play he had thus early written,--_The Regicides_,--he
made his way to London, the El Dorado of all youths with literary
aspirations. The play was not accepted; but, through the knowledge
obtained in the surgery, he received an appointment as surgeon's mate, and
went out with Admiral Vernon's fated expedition to Carthagena in that
capacity, and thus acquired a knowledge of the sea and of sailors which he
was to use with great effect in his later writings.
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