to your unknown Lady, and believe me to be with the highest Esteem, Respect, Love, and Gratitude "Sir, "Y'r most obliged "Most obed't "humble Servant "Henry Fielding. "To the Hon'ble "George Lyttelton, Esqr." [13] This Edward Moore was a poet held worthy, it would seem, to possess the Laureat's 'withered' laurel (even in 1749 Fielding cannot refrain from a thrust at Colley Cibber); a journalist; a writer of whom Dibden declared that the tendency of all his productions was to "cultivate truth and morality"; a tradesman in the linen business; and the son of a dissenting minister: a combination of circumstances closely recalling Fielding's friendship for the good dissenter, jeweller, and poet, George Lillo. And it is to an undated letter by Edward Moore, hitherto overlooked, that we owe one of the rare references to Henry Fielding from a contemporary pen. Moore is writing to a dissenting minister at Taunton, one Mr John Ward, of whom it was said that venerable as he himself was for learning, worth, and piety he deemed it "_an honour to have his name connected with that of Moore_,"--a further proof of the quality of man whom Fielding choose for friend. Moore had been prevented, by Fielding's illness, from appointing an evening on which he might invite the Taunton minister to his lodgings to meet there some of the first wits of the day. "It is not," he writes, "owing to forgetfulness that you have not heard from me before. Fielding continues to be visited for his sins so as to be wheeled about from room to room; when he mends I am sure to see him at my lodgings; and you may depend upon timely notice. What fine things are Wit and Beauty, if a Man could be temperate with one, or a Woman chaste with the other! But he that will confine his acquaintance to the sober and the modest will generally find himself among the dull and the ugly. If this remark of mine should be thought to shoulder itself in without an introduction you will be pleased to note that Fielding is a Wit; that his disorder is the Gout, and intemperance the cause." It is of course idle to contend that Fielding always carried a cool head. Murphy tells us that to him might justly be applied a parody on a saying concerning Scipio,--"always over a social bottle or a book, he enured his body to the dangers of intemperance, and exercised his mind with Studies." But we must in justice remember that the Augustan age of English literature concerned itself but very little with our modern virtue of sobriety. That Fielding, with the other great men of his day, very often drank more than was good for him, amounts to little more than saying that he wore a laced coat when he had one, and carried a sword at his side.