This admirable writer was born at Sharpham Park, in Somersetshire, near Glastonbury, April 22, 1707. His father, Edmund Fielding, served in the wars under the Duke of Marlborough, and arrived at the rank of lieutenant-general at the latter end of George I. or beginning of George II. He was grandson to an Earl of Denbigh, and nearly related to the Duke of Kingston, and many other noble families. His mother was the daughter of Judge Gould, the grandfather of Sir Henry Gould, one of the Barons of the Exchequer. Henry received the first rudiments of his education from the Rev. Mr. Oliver, to whom we may judge he was not under very considerable obligations, from the humorous and striking portrait given of him afterwards, under the name of Parson Trulliber, in _Joseph Andrews_. From Mr. Oliver's care he was removed to Eton school, where he had the advantage of being early known to many of the first people in the kingdom,--namely, Lord Lyttelton, Mr. Fox, Mr. Pitt, Sir Charles Hanbury Williams, and the late Mr. Winnington. At this great seminary of education he gave distinguished proofs of strong and peculiar powers; and when he left the place, was said to be uncommonly versed in the Greek authors, and an early master of the Latin classics: for both which he retained a strong predilection in all the subsequent periods of his life. Thus accomplished, he went from Eton to Leyden, and there continued to show an eager thirst for knowledge, and to study the civilians with unwearied assiduity for two years; when, remittances failing, he was obliged to return to London, not then quite twenty years old. The comedy called _Don Quixote in England_, was planned at Leyden, and completed on his return to London; where, from some cause or other, he was induced to bring it on the stage before it was properly wrought up, so that by this first essay he gained no dramatic reputation. Nor were his other productions for the playhouse much more popular; for though he wrote eight comedies and fifteen farces, they have not generally proved what are termed stock plays;[110] and yet from several of them, particularly _Pasquin_, succeeding and successful writers for the stage have borrowed some of their best speeches. He died at Lisbon, to which place he went for the recovery of his health, in the year 1754, aged 47. Of his talents, he has left memorials that will never die while the English nation retains a taste for genuine and Cervantic humour: his features posterity would have only known by description, had not his friend Hogarth, to whom he had often promised to sit, made this drawing; for, singular as it may seem, though this admirable writer lived on intimate terms with the best artists of the day, no portrait of him was ever painted.