In April 1754, however, Fate so far prevailed against her that she herself, in turn, was tried for perjury. Thirty-eight witnesses swore that Squires had been in Dorsetshire; twenty-seven that she had been seen in Middlesex. After some hesitation, quite of a piece with the rest of the proceedings, the jury found Canning guilty; and she was transported for seven years. At the end of her sentence she returned to England to receive a legacy of L500, which had been left her by an enthusiastic old lady of Newington-green. [Footnote: So says the _Annual Register_ for 1761, p. 179. But according to later accounts (_Gent. Mag._ xliii. 413), she never returned, dying in 1773 at Weathersfield in Connecticut.] Her "case" is full of the most inexplicable contradictions; and it occupies in the _State Trials_ some four hundred and twenty closely-printed pages of the most curious and picturesque eighteenth-century details. But how, from the 1st of January 1753 to the 29th of the same month, Elizabeth Canning really did manage to spend her time is a secret that, to this day, remains undivulged. CHAPTER VII. THE JOURNAL OF A VOYAGE TO LISBON. In March 1753, when Fielding published his pamphlet on Elizabeth Canning, his life was plainly drawing to a close. His energies indeed were unabated, as may be gathered from a brief record in the _Gentleman's_ for that month, describing his judicial raid, at four in the morning, upon a gaming-room, where he suspected certain highwaymen to be assembled. But his body was enfeebled by disease, and he knew he could not look for length of days. He had lived not long, but much; he had seen in little space, as the motto to _Tom Jones_ announced, "the manners of many men;" and now that, prematurely, the inevitable hour approached, he called Cicero and Horace to his aid, and prepared to meet his fate with philosophic fortitude. Between _"Quem fors dierum cunque dabit, lucro Appone,"_ and _"Grata superveniet, quae non sperabitur, hora,"_ he tells us in his too-little-consulted _Proposal for the Poor_, he had schooled himself to regard events with equanimity, striving above all, in what remained to him of life, to perform the duties of his office efficiently, and solicitous only for those he must leave behind him. Henceforward his literary efforts should be mainly philanthropic and practical, not without the hope that, if successful, they might be the means of securing some provision for his family. Of fiction he had taken formal leave in the trial of _Amelia_; and of lighter writing generally in the last paper of the _Covent-Garden Journal_. But, if we may trust his Introduction, the amount of work he had done for his poor-law project must have been enormous, for he had read and considered all the laws upon the subject, as well as everything that had been written on it since the days of Elizabeth, yet he speaks nevertheless as one over whose head the sword had all the while been impending:--