Authors, English -- 18th century -- Biography; Fielding, Henry, 1707-1754
The first three, with Sarah, make up Richardson's "Four worthy Sisters"
(p. 140); and the final entry renders it probable that, in May 1753,
Fielding was staying in the house at Hammersmith then occupied by his
surviving sister, Sarah.
No well-authenticated likeness of Fielding has yet superseded Hogarth's
outline (pp. 184-5), nor, if Murphy's statement (_Works_, 1762, i. p.
47) that "no portrait of him had ever been made" previously, be
accurate, can any new likeness be looked for. Nevertheless, both at the
Guelph (1891) and Georgian (1906) exhibitions, the Hon. Gerald Ponsonby
exhibited a portrait of Fielding; and another is included in the picture
attributed to Hogarth (also shown at the latter exhibition, and lately
belonging to Sir Charles Tennant), of the "Green Room, Drury Lane."
There is also a bust (posthumous) by W. F. Woodington at Eton. And this
reminds me that no more fitting tail-piece to this Appendix can be
conceived than the compact and penetrating lines which the late James
Russell Lowell composed as an inscription for the bust of Henry Fielding
at Taunton:--
"He looked on naked nature unashamed,
And saw the Sphinx, now bestial, now divine,
In change and re-change; he nor praised nor blamed,
But drew her as he saw with fearless line.
Did he good service? God must judge, not we.
Manly he was, and generous and sincere;
English in all, of genius blithely free:
Who loves a Man may see his image here."
A. D.
_March_ 1907.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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