"Humour, still free from an indecent Flame, Which, should it raise your Mirth, must raise your Shame: Indecency's the Bane to Ridicule, And only charms the Libertine, or Fool: Nought shall offend the Fair One's Ears to-day, Which they might blush to hear, or blush to say. No private Character these Scenes expose, Our Bard, at Vice, not at the Vicious, throws." Thus it was with an honourable declaration of war against indecency and libel that the young wit and man of fashion, began his career as "hackney writer." If to modern taste the first promise lacks something of fulfilment, it is but just to remember that to other times belong other manners. In the play, rustic and philosophic virtue is prettily rewarded by the possession of a beautiful heiress, while certain mercenary fops withdraw in signal discomfiture; and that Fielding, at one and twenty, had already passed judgment on that glittering 'tinsel' tribe, is clear enough from his portrait of the "empty gaudy nameless thing," Lord Formal. Lord Formal appears on the stage with a complexion much agitated by a day of business spent with "three milleners, two perfumers, my bookseller's and a fanshop." In the course of these fatigues he has "rid down two brace of chairmen"; and had raised his colour to "that exorbitancy of Vermeille" that it will hardly be reduced "under a fortnight's course of acids." It is the true spirit of comedy which introduces into this closely perfumed atmosphere the bluff country figure of Sir Positive Trap, with his exordiums on the rustic ladies, and on "the good old English art of clear-starching." Sir Positive hopes "to see the time when a man may carry his daughter to market with the same lawful authority as any other of his cattle"; and causes Lord Formal some moments' perplexity, his lordship being "not perfectly determinate what species of animal to assign him to, unless he be one of those barbarous insects the polite call country squires." In this production of a youth of twenty we may find a foretaste of that keen relish in watching the human comedy, that vigorous scorn of avarice, that infectious laughter at pretentious folly, which accompanied the novelist throughout his life. To this same year is attributed a poem called the _Masquerade_, which need only be noticed as again emphasising its author's lifelong war against the evils of his time. The _Masquerade_ is a satire on the licentious gatherings organised by the notorious Count Heidegger, Master of the Revels to the Court of George II. Many years later Fielding reprinted [3] two other poetical effusions bearing the date of this his twenty-first year. Of these the first, entitled "A Description of U----n G----(alias _New Hog's Norton_) in _Com-Hants_" identified by Mr Keightley as Upton Grey in Hampshire, is addressed to the fair _Rosalinda,_ by her disconsolate _Alexis_. Alexis bewails his exile among "Unpolish'd Nymphs and more unpolish'd Swains,"