[6] _Notitia Dramatica_ (British Museum. MSS. Dept.) and Genest give 1734 as the date of Don Quixote; Murphy, edition of 1766, vol. iii p. 249, gives 1733. [7] For the refutation of Genest's confusion of Timothy Fielding, a strolling player, with Henry Fielding, see Austin Dobson, _Fielding_, pp. 28, 29. [8] The _Miscellanies_. Edition 1743. CHAPTER III MARRIAGE "What happiness the world affords equal to the possession of such a woman as Sophia I sincerely own I have never yet discovered." --_Tom Jones_. Out of the paint and powder of the green-room, the tobacco clouds of the tavern, the crowded streets where hungry genius went afoot one day, and rode in a coach the next--in a word, out of the Town as Harry Fielding knew it--we step, in the year 1734, into the idyll of his life, his marriage with Charlotte Cradock. For to Fielding the supreme gift was accorded of passionate devotion to a woman of whose charm and virtue he himself has raised an enduring memorial in the lovely portrait of Sophia Western. It is this portrait, explicitly admitted [1], that affords almost our only authentic knowledge of Charlotte Cradock, beyond the meagre facts that her home was in Salisbury, and that there she and her sisters reigned as country belles. For it was not in the gay world of 'Riddoto's, Opera's, and Plays,' nor among the humbler scenes of the great city in which he delighted to watch the humours of simple folk (the highest life being in his opinion 'much the dullest'), that Fielding found his wife. Doubtless his six years about town, as hackney author, with his good birth, his brilliant wit, and his scanty means, had made him well acquainted with every phase of society, "from the Minister at his Levee, to the Bailiff at his spunging-house; from the Duchess at her drum, to the Landlady behind her bar"; but it was in the rural seclusion of an old cathedral town that he wooed and won the beautiful Miss Cradock. Indeed it is impossible to conceive of Sophia as for ever domiciled in streets. The very apostrophe which heralds her first appearance in _Tom Jones_ is fragrant with flower-enamelled meadows, fresh breezes, and the songs of birds "whose sweetest notes not even Handel can excel"; and it is thus, with his reader's mind attuned to the appropriate key, that Fielding ushers in his heroine: "... lo! adorned with all the Charms in which Nature can array her; bedecked with Beauty, Youth, Sprightliness, Innocence, Modesty, and Tenderness, breathing Sweetness from her rosy Lips, and darting Brightness from her sparkling Eyes, the lovely _Sophia_ comes." Of middle size, but rather inclining to tall, with dark hair "curled so gracefully on her neck that few could believe it to be her own," a forehead rather low, arched eyebrows, and lustrous black eyes, a mouth that "exactly answered Sir John Suckling's description in those lines