If the 'Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon' were no more than the chronicle of the facts thus summarized--nay, if it were no more than what Walpole flippantly calls the 'account how his [Fielding's] dropsy was treated and teased by an innkeeper's wife in the Isle of Wight,' it would require and deserve but little consideration. That it is a literary masterpiece is not pretended; nor, in the circumstances of its composition, could a masterpiece be looked for--even from a master. But it is interesting not so much by the events which it narrates as by the indirect light which it throws upon its writer's character, upon his manliness, his patience, and that inextinguishable cheerfulness which, he says in the 'Proposal for the Poor,' 'was always natural to me.' His sufferings must have been considerable (he had to be tapped again before the voyage ended); and yet, with the exception of some not resentful comment upon the inhumanity of certain watermen and sailors who had jeered at his ghastly appearance, no word of complaint as to his own condition is allowed to escape him. On the other hand, his solicitude for his fellow-travellers is unmistakable. One of the most touching pages in the little volume relates how, when his wife, worn out with toothache, lay sleeping lightly in the state room, he and the skipper, who was deaf, sat speechless over a 'small bowl of punch' in the adjoining cabin rather than run the risk of waking her by a sound. 'My dear wife and child,' he says, speaking of a storm in the Channel, 'must pardon me, if what I did not conceive to be any great evil to myself, I was not much terrified with the thoughts of happening to them: in truth, I have often thought they are both too good, and too gentle, to be trusted to the power of any man I know, to whom they could possibly be so trusted.' In another place he relates, quite in his best manner, how he rebuked a certain churlish Custom-house officer for his want of courtesy to Mrs. Fielding. At times one forgets that it is a dying man who is writing, so invincible is that appetite for enjoyment which made Lady Mary say he ought to have been immortal. Not long after they reached Ryde he wrote to his half-brother and successor John (afterwards Sir John) Fielding: 'I beg that on the Day you receive this Mrs. Daniel [his mother-in-law] may know that we are just risen from Breakfast in _Health and Spirits_ [the italics are ours] this twelfth Instant at 9 in the morning.' At Ryde they were shamefully entreated by the most sharp-faced and tyrannical of landladies, in whose incommodious hostelry they sought temporary refuge; and yet it is at Ryde that he chronicles 'the best, the pleasantest, and the merriest meal [in a barn], with more appetite, more real, solid luxury, and more festivity, than was ever seen in an entertainment at White's.' And almost the last lines of the 'Journal' recall a good supper in a Lisbon coffee-house for which they