Sarah Fielding figures frequently in Richardson's _Correspondence_; and it is with Richardson as much as with Fielding that the next jotting is concerned. Previously to 1900, although second-hand booksellers had, I believe, occasionally attributed to Fielding the pamphlet known as _An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews_, April 1741, no one had devoted much attention to that unworshipful performance. But when Miss Clara Thomson began to prepare her excellent and careful life of Richardson (1900), it became a part of her task to examine into this question. She found, first, that Richardson had himself ascribed _Shamela_ to Fielding in a letter to "Mrs. Belfour" (Lady Bradshaigh); [Footnote: _Correspondence_, 1804, iv. p. 286.] and she was acute enough to discover, in the pamphlet itself, which appeared some months before _Joseph Andrews_, the suggestive, though not conclusive, fact that "Mr. B." was provisionally transformed into "Mr. Booby." When, in 1902, I was engaged upon my own Memoir of Richardson for the "Men of Letters" series, I was naturally indisposed to connect this undoubtedly clever, but also unquestionably gross production with Fielding, already "unjustly censured," as he complained in the "Preface" to the _Miscellanies_ of 1743, for much that he had never written (p. 72). But I must honestly confess that for the present it has been my ill-fortune to discover only corroborative evidence. To a document at South Kensington, in which _Shamela_ is mentioned, I found that Richardson had appended, in the tremulous script of his old age:--"Written by Mr. H. Fielding"; and since the publication of my book on Richardson, Mr. Frederick Macmillan has drawn my attention to the fact that a letter written in July 1741, by Mr. T. Dampier, afterwards Sub-Master of Eton and Dean of Durham, to one of the Windhams, contains the following:-- "The book that has made the greatest noise lately in the polite world is _Pamela_, a romance in low life. It is thought to contain such excellent precepts, that a learned divine at London [Footnote: This enables me to correct an error at p. 74. As Miss Thomson points out (_Samuel Richardson_, 1900, p. 31) it was Dr. Benjamin Slocock of St. Saviour's, Southwark, and not Dr. Sherlock, who praised _Pamela_ from the pulpit. The mistake seems to have originated with Jeffrey, and was freely repeated.] recommended it very strongly from the pulpit.... The dedication [of Conyers Middleton's _Life of Cicero_] to Lord Hervey has been very justly and prettily ridiculed by Fielding in a dedication to a pamphlet called _Shamela_ which he wrote to burlesque the fore-mentioned romance." [Footnote: Hist. MSS. Commission, 12th Report, Appendix, Part IX., p. 204.] This shows unmistakably that _Shamela_ was attributed to Fielding by contemporary gossip. But then so was The _Causidicade_ (p. 112), and _The Apology for the Life of Mr. The' Cibber_, _Comedian_ (p. 72).