Perhaps _Pamela_ had made them fashionable. On the other hand, the supposed allusion to Lyttelton and Fielding, to be found in the first edition of _Peregrine Pickle_, but afterwards suppressed, receives a certain confirmation. "When," says Smollett, speaking of the relations of an imaginary Mr. Spondy with Gosling Scrag, who is understood to represent Lyttelton, "he is inclined to marry his own cook-wench, his gracious patron may condescend to give the bride away; and may finally settle him in his old age, as a trading Westminster justice." That, looking to the facts, Fielding's second marriage should have gained the approval and countenance of Lyttelton is no more than the upright and honourable character of the latter would lead us to expect. The _Jacobite's Journal_ ceased to appear in November 1748. In the early part of the December following, the remainder of Smollett's programme came to pass, and by Lyttelton's interest Fielding was appointed a Justice of the Peace for Westminster. From a letter in the _Bedford Correspondence_, dated 13th December 1748, respecting the lease of a house or houses which would qualify him to act for Middlesex, it would seem that the county was afterwards added to his commission. He must have entered upon his office in the first weeks of December, as upon the ninth of that month one John Salter was committed to the Gatehouse by Henry Fielding, Esq., "of Bow Street, Covent Garden, formerly Sir Thomas de Veil's." Sir Thomas de Veil, who died in 1746, and whose _Memoirs_ had just been published, could not, however, have been Fielding's immediate predecessor. CHAPTER V. TOM JONES. Writing from Basingstoke to his brother Tom, on the 29th October 1746, Joseph Warton thus refers to a visit he paid to Fielding:-- "I wish you had been with me last week, when I spent two evenings with Fielding and his sister, who wrote David Simple, and you may guess I was very well entertained. The lady indeed retir'd pretty soon, but Russell and I sat up with the Poet [Warton no doubt uses the word here in the sense of 'maker' or 'creator'] till one or two in the morning, and were inexpressibly diverted. I find he values, as he justly may, his Joseph Andrews above all his writings: he was extremely civil to me, I fancy, on my Father's account." [Footnote: i.e. the Rev. Thomas Warton, Vicar of Basingstoke, and sometime Professor of Poetry at Oxford.]