Authors, English -- 18th century -- Biography; Fielding, Henry, 1707-1754
The farce of _Eurydice_, and the _Wedding Day_, which, with _A Journey
from this World to the Next_, etc., make up the contents of the second
volume of the _Miscellanies_, have been already sufficiently discussed.
But the _Journey_ deserves some further notice. It has been suggested
that this curious Lucianic production may have been prompted by the
vision of Mercury and Charon in the _Champion_, though the kind of
allegory of which it consists is common enough with the elder essayists;
and it is notable that another book was published in April 1743, under
the title of _Cardinal Fleury's Journey to the other World_, which is
manifestly suggested by Quevedo. Fielding's _Journey_, however, is a
fragment which the author feigns to have found in the garret of a
stationer in the Strand. Sixteen out of five-and-twenty chapters in Book
i. are occupied with the transmigrations of Julian the Apostate, which
are not concluded. Then follows another chapter from Book xix., which
contains the history of Anna Boleyn, and the whole breaks off abruptly.
Its best portion is undoubtedly the first ten chapters, which relate the
writer's progress to Elysium, and afford opportunity for many strokes of
satire. Such are the whimsical terror of the spiritual traveller in the
stagecoach, who hears suddenly that his neighbour has died of smallpox,
a disease he had been dreading all his life; and the punishment of Lord
Scrape, the miser, who is doomed to dole out money to all comers, and
who, after "being purified in the Body of a Hog," is ultimately to
return to earth again. Nor is the delight of some of those who profit by
his enforced assistance less keenly realised:--"I remarked a poetical
Spirit in particular, who swore he would have a hearty Gripe at him:
'For, says he, the Rascal not only refused to subscribe to my Works; but
sent back my Letter unanswered, tho' I'm a better Gentleman than
himself.'" The descriptions of the City of Diseases, the Palace of
Death, and the Wheel of Fortune from which men draw their chequered
lots, are all unrivalled in their way. But here, as always, it is in his
pictures of human nature that Fielding shines, and it is this that makes
the chapters in which Minos is shown adjudicating upon the separate
claims of the claimants to enter Elysium the most piquant of all. The
virtuoso and butterfly hunter, who is repulsed "with great Scorn;" the
dramatic author who is admitted (to his disgust), not on account of his
works, but because he has once lent "the whole Profits of a Benefit
Night to a Friend;" the parson who is turned back, while his poor
parishioners are admitted; and the trembling wretch who has been hanged
for a robbery of eighteen-pence, to which he had been driven by poverty,
but whom the judge welcomes cordially because he had been a kind father,
husband, and son; all these are conceived in that humane and generous
spirit which is Fielding's most engaging characteristic. The chapter
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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