It is inexplicable that no records, in the letters or diaries of his brother lawyers, should have come down to us of circuits, enlivened by the wit of Harry Fielding; that practically all traces of his professional work should be lost; and that concerning the many friendships which he is recorded to have made at the Bar we should know practically nothing beyond his own cordial acknowledgment of the lawyers' response, three years after his call, to the subscription for the _Miscellanies_. In the preface to those volumes he writes: "I cannot however forbear mentioning my sense of the Friendship shown me by a Profession of which I am a late and unworthy Member, and from whose Assistance I derive more than half the Names which appear to this subscription." All that we have to add to this, is the unconscious humour of Murphy's observation that the friendships Fielding met with "in the course of his studies, and indeed through the remainder of his life from the gentlemen of the legal profession in general, and particularly from some who have since risen to be the first ornaments of the law, will ever do honour to his memory." Had the names of these worthy 'ornaments' been preserved, posterity could now give them due recognition as having been honoured by the friendship of Henry Fielding. [1] Fielding in his habit, as he lived, is for ever eluding us. His tall figure vanishes behind the prolific playwright, the exuberant politician, the truculent journalist, the indefatigable magistrate, the great creative genius. But at no point does the wittiest man of his day, and a lawyer of some repute--'Mr Fielding is allowed to have acquired a respectable share of jurisprudence'--escape us so completely as during these years of 'punctual assiduity' at the Bar. His very domicile is unknown, after the surrender of those pleasant chambers in Pump Court, on November 28 1740.