Of this school and period, Fielding is the greatest figure. One word as to his career. Passing through all social conditions,--first a country gentleman, living on or rather squandering his first wife's little fortune in following the hounds and entertaining the county; then a playwright, vegetating very seedily on the proceeds of his comedies; justice of the peace, and encountering, in his vocation, such characters as _Jonathan Wild_; drunken, licentious, unfaithful to his wife, but always--strange paradox of poor human nature--generous as the day; mourning with bitter tears the loss of his first wife, and then marrying her faithful maid-servant, that they may mourn for her together,--he seems to have been a rare mechanism without a _governor_. "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. For a time he remained in the West Indies, where he fell in love with Miss Anne Lascelles, whom he afterwards married. In 1746 he returned to London, and, after an unsuccessful attempt to practise medicine, he threw himself with great vigor into the field of literature. He was a man of strange and antagonistic features, just and generous in theory, quarrelsome and overbearing in practice. From the year 1746 his pen seems to have been always busy. He first tried his hand on some satires, which gained for him numerous enemies; and in 1748 he produced his first novel, _Roderick Random_, which, in spite of its indecency, the world at once acknowledged to be a work of genius: the verisimilitude was perfect; every one recognized in the hero the type of many a young North countryman going out to seek his fortune. The variety is great, the scenes are more varied and real than those in Richardson and Fielding, the characters are numerous