replied in an off-hand way, asking what progress Monsieur Pignon was making with the watch, which he wanted to pay for and take away. At the same time he produced his pocket-book.

If ever there were an undecided person on the face of the earth, that person was Monsieur Pignon. The letter from Monsieur Cliquet, of Geneva, informed him that he would get one-sixteenth per cent. on the amount of the transferred bill for his trouble in effecting the arrest of his customer. He calculated what that was in a moment: it came to about seventy-six francs. But he was about to sell a watch to the same party, by which he should make a profit of at least a thousand. Between the two sums there could not, of course, be any hesitation; but another question arose. How should he satisfy Monsieur Cliquet, if he failed to carry out his instructions? To connive at the escape of Milord Hugo might, moreover, entail very serious consequences. Monsieur Pignon's tongue remained silent while these considerations occupied him, but something spoke in his working brow which tended to increase the wariness of William Handyside. At last the jeweller came to a conclusion: he would say nothing about the process till he got his own money; he could finish the watch in a few hours; he would take it home himself, receive the amount, have a huissier ready, perform his duty, and satisfy his Swiss conscience; so he looked up with a smile, and made answer as follows:

"I beg your pardon, milord! I was calculating the time it would take me to complete that superb masterpiece. For forty-eight hours my eyes have never closed upon it. Only ten minutes ago I left it in my workshop. Milord is impatient to have that noble specimen of art? Milord remembers the price?"

"Perfectly," replied Handyside. "Three thousand francs. Here are the notes of the Bank of France." He showed them to the jeweller, whose hand trembled with delight, and replaced them in his pocket-book. "I will pay you the instant the watch is ready."

Monsieur Pignon gulped down his disappointment: he had expected to touch the cash, then and there-in which case he would have done "his duty" so much the sooner.

"Très bien, milord; ça ne presse pas. Quand, milord, voudra! A quelle heure, milord, sera-t-il chez lui ?"

His lordship said he should be at home all day.

"Dans ce cas," returned the jeweller, "milord aura sa montre cet aprèsmidi. A trois heures précises j'aurai l'honneur de l'apporter moi-même." "And at three o'clock, you infernal scoundrel," said William Handyside to himself, "you will not catch me in the canton of Neufchatel." He went back to his hotel, where he found Graysteel busy with his prayer-book-the commercial one.

"We must hook it again," he said.

His partner understood him now without further explanation. He merely asked why? The reason was soon given. He had read the words "faire arrêter," as well as the names of himself and partner. "It must be Brussels over again," he continued; 66 we must take French leave. The lake-steamer is lying at the wharf just beyond the garden-gate. Put your dirk and revolvers into your cloak-pocket, and follow me."

Handyside leisurely strolled down stairs. He met the landlord of the

hotel, and was very precise in his orders for dinner. He particularly wanted to taste some Vin d'Yvorne which he saw on the carte. A trip on the lake would bring him back with a famous appetite,-and, by-theby, covers must be laid for three, as Monsieur Pignon was invited to dine. What a clever person Monsieur Pignon was! He had just paid him three thousand francs for the most beautiful watch that ever was seen. Monsieur Pignon was to bring it at three o'clock. He had never enjoyed any place so much as Neufchatel. He should remain all the

summer."

If the flexibility of the landlord's backbone could have been increased by bowing, that was the moment for ascertaining the fact. He begged permission to be allowed to show the way.

"Ah!" he exclaimed, with ravissement, "quel temps délicieux! Vous aurez, messieurs, une promenade superbe."

So they did, and a superb drive afterwards, -as fast as three posthorses from Yverdun could lay legs to the ground in the direction of the lake of Geneva. He had taken that road as the nearest to the Sardinian frontier. His leisure while at Neufchatel had been usefully occupied in preparing "Government despatches" from the British Minister at Berne to the British Minister at Turin, and in simulating passports which in the capacity of messengers described the bearers.

But while this Exodus was taking place what was Mr. Woodman about? He was waiting for the orders for which he had telegraphed to St. Withold's. By an oversight on the part of Mr. Soaper he had forgotten to put the Detective en rapport with Monsieur Cliquet, who had replied to "Godsends" that the affair was "en train," and he only awoke from his Fools' Paradise on the receipt of a second telegraphic message from Mr. Woodman, which simply said:

"G. and H. off again! Nobody knows where."

While this message was being telegraphed, "G. and H." were crossing the lake of Geneva in an open boat to reach the mountains of Savoy.

LAWRENCE'S LIFE OF FIELDING.*

THIS is a volume which in subject and treatment belongs to the class headed-longo intervallo between the head and shoulders, however-by Mr. Forster's Life of Goldsmith. To the narrative art and dramatic power so memorably and exceptionally shown in the latter work, Mr. Lawrence may have no great claim, and indeed makes little enough pretension-his book being an unpretending but all the more meritorious résumé of the life and times of Henry Fielding. He is well "up" with his subject, and illustrates it with a large yet lively mass of anecdotage, extracts from by-gone magazines, and bits of by-way books. From first to last a good deal of instructive and amusing matter is compressed within his pages, which answer to the promise of the title, in containing pleasant and plenteous notices of, not only the writings of Fielding, but of his times and his contemporaries.

Of the last, for example, there are sketches of Boyse, the shivering, *The Life of Henry Fielding; with Notices of his Writings, his Times, and his Contemporaries. By Frederick Lawrence. Hall, Virtue, and Co. 1855.

unclothed, dinnerless author of "The Deity"-a man on equally familiar terms with poverty and the pawnbroker-and for whom Johnson once collected a considerable sum "in sixpences, at a time" (the doctor afterwards said), "when to me sixpence was a serious consideration," all to redeem Boyse's clothes from pawn, and so enable him to leave his bed (if bed that can be called where sheets were none)—within forty-eight hours of which release, the clothes were pledged once more;-of Kitty Clive, who, stage queen of giggling, plotting chambermaids, hoydens and romps, "pleased by hiding all attempts to please;" of Colley Cibber, the Ground-Ivy of Fielding's "Historical Register;" of Macklin, that most entertaining of self-complacent men; of Garrick, never so efficiently criticised as by Fielding's Partridge; of the kind, prudent, and honourable George Lillo; of the ex-linendraper Edward Moore, who wrote "The Gamester," and edited that fashionable periodical "The World," contributed to by Lords Chesterfield and Orrery, Sir C. H. Williams, Horace Walpole, Soame Jenyns, &c.; of Dr. (Sir John) Hill, who is said to have shared with Orator Henley the dubious honour of being the most notorious man of his age, and whose transition from an apothecary's shop to the stage of the Haymarket, where he acted in his own abortive farces, occasioned Garrick's epigram:

For physic and farces

His equal there scarce is;
His farces are physic,
His physic a farce is.

In relation to Fielding himself, Mr. Lawrence seems to have made diligent use of all available information. His occasional remarks on his author's writings, if not very novel or searching, are at least in good taste and feeling; he admires heartily, but not indiscriminately, and backs his éloge by well-chosen excerpts from such critics as Scott and Coleridge, Forster and Thackeray. There is an interesting bibliographical appendix, supplied by Mr. Watts of the British Museum, which enumerates the various European* translations of "Tom Jones." Another markworthy feature is the illustration of manners and the state of society, exemplified in chapters like those which treat of Fielding's doings as a Justice of the Peace, the case of Elizabeth Canning, &c. Mr. Lawrence is well read, moreover, in the annals of the stage, and uses his reading to purpose in both text and notes.

He draws Fielding in the best light, alike as man and as author. One of the best of "good fellows" was Fielding, in the convivial sense of the phrase. Whether as Eton boy--the popular chum of Lyttleton and Pitt

• The British Museum contains a Polish translation of "Tom Jones," which was purchased in fulfilment of a since interrupted plan-that, namely, of procuring the whole set of foreign translations of our British classics. The Germans appear to be rich in versions of Mr. Jones. Sweden has translated him too, and so have Holland and Spain, but neither Denmark nor Italy seems to have naturalised him. Russia enjoys translations of nearly all his works-but none of them from the original, which, as the compiler of this Appendix remarks, "is somewhat surprising, as the Russians are remarkably fond of English novels." As an example of this, he adds: "I see by a new number of one of their periodicals (the Otechestvennuiya Zapiski, for June, 1855), that in the midst of the desperate struggle before Sebastopol, the public of St. Petersburg was being amused with translations, given at full length in that magazine, of Lever's 'Dodd Family Abroad,' and Ainsworth's 'Flitch of Dunmow.'"

(both sickly lads, and more conversant with their "Dame's parlour" than the hearty Somersetshire boy), and of Henry Fox and Charles Hanbury Williams-whether as fast young man about town, with an empty purse and a full heart-or as country squire, banqueting Salisbury Shallows and Simples to their astonishment and his own ruin-or as Templar and briefless barrister, making merry on the Western Circuit with another briefless barrister, Charles Pratt (briefless for some nine years to come, and then working his way to a Camden peerage),—or as political journalist and anti-Jacobite satirist, in the stirring times of the '45-or as Bow-street justice, poor-law reformer, and "putter down" extraordinary of wholesale street ruffianism,-at every stage of his journey of life Fielding was a favourite, and with all sorts of men. He had a taking way with him; and in spite of his "inked ruffles and claret stains on his tarnished lace coat," as Thackeray sketches him, "stained as you see him, and worn by care and dissipation, that man retains some of the most precious human qualities and endowments"-to the value of which his present biographer has done ample justice.

Though from the time he was of age, and before it, Fielding had to look to his pen as his bread-winner, it was long ere he made more than a plaything of it-or at best, a thing to win the necessary bread by, without looking further. "Since I was born," writes his brilliant kinswoman, Lady Mary Wortley Montague, "no original has appeared except Congreve and Fielding, who [Fielding] would, I believe, have approached nearer to his [Congreve's] excellences, if not forced by necessity to publish without correction, and throw many productions into the world he would have thrown into the fire, if meat could have been got without money, or money without scribbling." Arthur Murphy tells us that Fielding, after having contracted to bring on a play or a farce, would go home rather late from a tavern, and would the next morning deliver a scene to the players, written upon the papers in which he had wrapped the tobacco he so much delighted in. When his farce or interlude of "Eurydice," produced at Drury Lane in 1737, was unequivocally and not unjustifiably "damned," Fielding took an opportunity of parading his careless facility of composition, by endeavouring to show, in a subsequent piece (at the Haymarket) called " "Eurydice Hissed," that the condemned farce had been-not hastily and inconsiderately condemned by the public (for he did not arraign the judgment of the public), but-hastily and inconsiderately composed by himself

The trifling offspring of an idle hour:

an excuse which, as Mr. Lawrence observes, possessed, no doubt, the merit of truth, although there was more vanity than policy in urging it with such vehemence on the attention of the public. Fielding's comparative indifference to fame, while engaged in hurrying on an essay for "The Champion," or a comedy for Drury Lane Theatre, is one of the many characteristics which distinguish him so completely from his great rival, Richardson. "The breath of adulation was pleasant to Richardson, but Fielding estimated it at its true worth. The one was childishly covetous of praise, and greedy of the applause of partial friends; the other was as reckless of his reputation as of his purse. If the proceeds from an essay or a pamphlet were sufficient to buy out an execution, or to satisfy a relentless tax-gatherer, Fielding was a happier man than if

the whole Society of Wits at Will's, or all the critics of the press, had combined to trumpet forth his excellences."

For, Harry Fielding, who mores multorum hominum vidit, had personal experience of the mores of bum-bailiffs, and other rough-andready specimens of in-humanity, in the course of his ups and downs in life, and doubtless could have wished these gentry better mores, by means of a better acquaintance (fideliter didicisse) with those "ingenuous arts" which, a good authority declares, have an "emollient" influence on "manners." Better manners to ye! might once and again have been his benediction on sponging-householders, duns, and tax-collectors, whose only interest in books (and bookmen) was confined to those in which they kept their accounts-a province of literature by which a man's mores are but imperceptibly softened, so that to say nec sinit esse feros were to say the thing that is not: witness Dick Steele, Harry Fielding, and a whole noble (or ignoble) army of martyrs to impecuniosity. Between the ages of twenty and twenty-two, a life about town had initiated Fielding "into all the mysteries of Bohemianism." If he was familiar with the boisterous jollity and reckless unthrift of tavern life, so was he with chill penury in some of its dreariest aspects. Almost his only means of support he derived from the playhouse treasury: supplementary aid, to make both ends meet, came sometimes in the "questionable shape" of a "tip" perhaps from his old fellow-Etonian, George Lyttleton, or from some honoured patron, such as the Dukes of Richmond and Argyle. It is no imaginary picture, therefore, that Mr. Lawrence draws of the jovial author in his early days of alternate light and shade-one day, familiar with the sordid haunts of poverty; the next, gay in velvet, ruffles, and embroidery; now, dining at the tables of the great, and quaffing champagne in ducal banquet-halls; and now seeking out the cheapest ordinary;. or, if dinner was impossible, solacing himself with a pipe of tobacco. A satire entitled "Seasonable Reproof," published anonymously in 1735, thus describes his "sudden transformations from the grub to the butterfly condition :"

Fg, who yesterday appeared so rough,

Clad in coarse frieze, and plastered down with snuff,
See how his instant gaudy trappings shine!

What playhouse bard was ever seen so fine?
But this not from his humour flows, you'll say,

But mere necessity-for last night lay

In

pawn the velvet which he wears to-day.

Colley Cibber, defined by Ralph "a bottle of as pert small beer as ever whizzed in any man's face," called Fielding, in one of these effervescent ebullitions of small beer sourness, 66 a broken wit." Old Colley was right though. In circumstances, the man who had ridiculed him in "Pasquin" and the " Register," was a broken and battered bankrupt. In intellectuals, he was as undeniably a wit. And Cibber knew to his. cost that the "chill penury," at which he indirectly sneered, availed not repress the noble rage" of a wit of Fielding's inches. Care killed a cat, they say; and a cat has (according to the same on dit authority) lives three times three; Fielding had only one life, but Care killed not him. If, amid straits and embarrassments the most irksome, he did not exactly laugh and grow fat, at least he laughed and grew-thin. He breathed

to "

VOL. XXXIX.

M