What this was, is not specified. It may have been the gift of the leases of those tenements which, as explained, were necessary to qualify Fielding to act as a Justice of the Peace for the county of Middlesex; it may even have been the lease of the Bow Street house; or it may have been simply a gift of money. But whatever it was, it was something considerable. In his appeal to the Duke, at the close of the last chapter, Fielding referred to previous obligations, and in his dedication of _Tom Jones_ to Lyttelton, he returns again to his Grace's beneficence. Another person, of whose kindness grateful but indirect mention is made in the same dedication, is Ralph Allen, who, according to Derrick, the Bath M.C., sent the novelist a present of L200, before he had even made his acquaintance, [Footnote: Derrick's Letters, 1767, ii. 95.] which, from the reference to Allen in _Joseph Andrews_, probably began before 1742. Lastly, there is Lyttelton himself, concerning whom, in addition to a sentence which implies that he actually suggested the writing of _Tom Jones_, we have the express statements on Fielding's part that "without your Assistance this History had never been completed," and "I partly owe to you my Existence during great Part of the Time which I have employed in composing it." These words must plainly be accepted as indicating pecuniary help; and, taking all things together, there can be little doubt that for some years antecedent to his appointment as a Justice of the Peace, Fielding was in straitened circumstances, and was largely aided, if not practically supported, by his friends. Even supposing him to have been subsidised by Government as alleged, his profits from the _True Patriot_ and the _Jacobite's Journal_ could not have been excessive; and his gout, of which he speaks in one of his letters to the Duke of Bedford, must have been a serious obstacle in the way of his legal labours.