The rest of the year shows nothing from a pen somewhat exhausted perhaps with the production of _Joseph Andrews_ of the historical _Vindication_, and of parts of a Drury Lane farce and of the _Plutus_, all within five months. And the winter following, in which the promised _Miscellanies_ should have appeared, brought, in the renewed illness of his wife, an anxiety that paralysed even Fielding's buoyant vigour. This we learn from his own touching apology for the further delay of those volumes; a delay due, their author tells us, to "the dangerous Illness of one from whom I draw all the solid Comfort of my Life, during the greatest Part of this Winter. This, as it is most sacredly true, so will it, I doubt not, sufficiently excuse the Delay to all who know me." [4] Early in the following year, after this second winter of crushing anxiety, and under an urgent pressure for means, Fielding tried again his familiar _rôle_ of popular dramatist, giving his public the husks they preferred, in the comedy of the _Wedding Day_. This comedy was produced at Drury Lane on the 17th of February 1743. If Fielding had failed to descend to the taste of the Town in offering them Aristophanes, he flung them in the _Wedding Day_ something too imperfect for acceptance, even by the 'critic jury of the pit,' And the bitter humour in which he was now shackling his genius to the honourable task of immediate bread-winning, or in his own words to the part of "hackney writer," comes out clearly enough in the well-known anecdote of the first night of this comedy. In Murphy's words, Garrick, then a new player, just taking the Town by storm, "told Mr Fielding he was apprehensive that the audience would make free in a particular passage; adding that a repulse might so flurry his spirits as to disconcert him for the rest of the night, and therefore begged that it might be omitted. 'No, d--mn 'em,' replied the bard, 'if the scene is not a good one, let them find _that_ out.' Accordingly the play was brought on without alteration, and, just as had been foreseen, the disapprobation of the house was provoked at the passage before objected to; and the performer alarmed and uneasy at the hisses he had met with, retired into the green-room, where the author was indulging his genius, and solacing himself with a bottle of champaign." Fielding, continues Murphy, had by this time drank pretty plentifully, and "'_What's the matter, Garrick?_' says he, '_what are they hissing now?_' Why the scene that I begged you to retrench; I knew it would not do; and they have so frightened me that I shall not be able to collect myself again the whole night. _Oh! d--mn 'em_, replies the author, _they HAVE found it out, have they!_" That Fielding should be scornfully indifferent to the judgment of the pit on work forced from him by overwhelming necessities, and which his own judgment condemned, is a foregone conclusion; but that he suffered keenly in having to produce