"I am, "My Lord, with the utmost Respect and Devotion, "Your Lordship's most Obed't "Most humble Servant "H. Ffielding. [12] "To the Right Hon'ble. "The Lord High Chancellor of G. Britain." All trace of the text of this draft Bill seems to have been lost; but the fact of the Lord Chancellor's consent to consider its provisions shows clearly enough how rapidly Fielding was adding to his now achieved fame as the author of _Tom Jones_ the very different reputation of an authority on criminal legislation. The application on behalf of Joshua Brogden, later if not at this time the Justice's Clerk, recalls the further pleasant tribute paid to the soundness of Mr Brogden's morals in the _Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon_. If all Fielding's modest magisterial income of £300 a year had gone, as he declares it should have done, to his clerk, that functionary would, he tells us, have been "but ill paid for sitting almost sixteen hours in the twenty four, in the most unwholesome, as well as nauseous air in the universe, and which hath in his case corrupted a good constitution without contaminating his morals." It was Joshua Brogden who had witnessed, a few months earlier, the agreement with Andrew Millar for _Tom Jones_. Could the good clerk but have played the part of a Boswell to his illustrious master we should have something more than our present scanty materials for the personal life of Henry Fielding. Yet another of Fielding's rare letters belongs to this year; a letter conveying his formal congratulations to Lyttelton, on that model statesman's second marriage, and in which his warm heart again makes application, not on behalf of his own scanty means, but for a friend. "Bow Street, Aug't 29, 1749. "Sir,