But times are hard with him; those fast years of green-room life have told upon him; the "wet {71} towels" round the head are in demand; some of his later plays are condemned by the Lord Chancellor;[11] in 1742, however, he makes that lunge at the sentimentalism of Richardson which, in the shape of _Joseph Andrews_, gives him a trumpeting success. It encourages him to print two or three volumes of miscellanies. But shadows follow him; a year later, his wife dies in his arms; Lady Wortley Montagu (who was a cousin) tells us this; and tells us how other cousins were scandalized because, a few years afterward, the novelist, with an effusive generosity that was characteristic of him, married his maid, who had lamented her mistress so sincerely, and was tenderly attached to his children. At about the same period he accepted office as Justice of the Peace--thereby still further disgruntling his aristocratic Denbigh cousins. But the quick-coming volumes of _Tom Jones_ and their wonderful acclaim cleared the space around him; he had room to breathe and {72} to play the magistrate; it is Henry Fielding, Esq., now,--of Bow Street, Covent Garden. _Amelia_ followed, for which he received £1,000; and we hear of a new home out in the pleasant country, by Baling, north of Brentford, and the Kew Gardens. Finally on a June day of 1754 we see him leaving this home; "at twelve precisely," he says in his last Journal, "my coach was at the door, which I was no sooner told than I kissed my children all around, and went into it with some little resolution." There needed resolution; for he was an utterly broken-down man, the pace of his wild, young days telling now fearfully, and he bound away for a voyage to the sunny climate of Portugal--to try if this would stay the end. But it does not; in October of the same year he died in Lisbon; and there his body rests in the pretty Cemetery of the Cypresses, where all visitors who love the triumphs of English letters go to see his tomb, among the myrtles and the geraniums. If he had only lived to pluck away some of those grosser stains which defile the pages where the characters of an Allworthy and of a Parson Adams will shine forever! {73} _Poet of the Seasons._