Good Gods! What Words can describe the Raptures, the melting passionate Tenderness, with which we kiss'd each other, continuing in our Embrace, with the most extatic Joy, a Space, which if Time had been measured here as on Earth, could not have been less than half a Year." The fittest final comment on Henry Fielding's marriage with Charlotte Cradock is, perhaps, that saying of a member of his own craft of the drama, "Now to love anything sincerely is an act of grace, but to love the best sincerely is a state of grace." [1] _Daily Post_, June 5, 1742. [2] MS. copy of the Minutes of the Meetings of the Partners in the _Champion_, in the possession of the present writer. [3] See _Daily Post_. May 29, 1742. [4] Preface to the _Miscellanies_. [5] Such as the inscription on some verses, published in the _Miscellanies_, as "Written _Extempore_ in the Pump-room" at Bath, in 1742. [6] Preface to _David Simple_. CHAPTER X PATRIOTIC JOURNALISM "he only is the _true Patriot_ who always does what is in his Power for his Country's Service without any selfish Views or Regard to private Interests."--The _True Patriot_. Fielding's active pen seems to have been laid aside for twelve months after the death of his wife; and it is perfectly in accord with all that we know of his passionate devotion to Charlotte Cradock that her loss should have shattered his energies for the whole of the ensuing year. Murphy, as we have seen, speaks of the first vehemence of his grief as being so acute that fears were entertained for his reason. According to Fielding's kinswomen, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Lady Bute, the first agonies of his grief approached to frenzy; but "when the first emotions of his sorrow were abated" his fine balance reasserted itself, and to quote again from Murphy, "philosophy administered her aid; his resolution returned, and he began again to struggle with his fortune." As we hear no more of exclusive devotion to the law, it may be assumed that the attempt of the previous year to live by that arduous calling alone was now abandoned; and to a man of Fielding's strong Protestant and Hanoverian convictions the year of the '45, when a Stewart Prince and an invading Highland army had captured Edinburgh and were actually across the border, could not fail to bring occupation. Fielding believed ardently that Protestant beliefs, civil liberty, and national independence of foreign powers were best safeguarded by a German succession to the English throne; so by the time Prince Charles and 6,000 men had set foot on English soil, the former 'Champion of Great Britain' was again up in arms, discharging his sturdy blows in a new weekly newspaper entitled the _True Patriot_.