we will speak hereafter), he has taken the pains to vindicate his character, and to lay bare the secrets of his office in the most vehement and characteristic language. A portion of that vindication will not be out of place here. "I will confess," he says, "that my private affairs, at the beginning of the winter (1752-3), had but a gloomy aspect; for I had not plundered the public or the poor of those sums which men, who are always ready to plunder both as much as they can, have been pleased to suspect me of taking; on the contrary, by composing, instead of inflaming the quarrels of porters and beggars (which I blush when I say hath not been universally practised), and by refusing to take a shilling from a man who most undoubtedly would not have had another left, I had reduced an income of about £500 a-year, of the dirtiest money upon earth, to little more than £300, a considerable portion of which remained with my clerk; and, indeed, if the whole had done so, as it ought, he would be but illpaid for sitting sixteen hours in the twenty-four in the most unwholesome, as well as nauseous air in the universe, and which hath in his case corrupted a good constitution without contaminating his morals." In a note to this passage Fielding enters more into detail :: "A predecessor of mine," he adds, "used to boast that he made £1000 a-year in his office; but how he did this (if indeed he did it) is to me a secret. His clerk, now mine, told me I had more business than he had ever known there; I am sure I had as much as any man could do. The truth is, the fees are so very low, when any are due, and so much is done for nothing, that if a single justice of the peace had business enough to employ twenty clerks, neither he nor they would get much by their labour." Whatever might be the opinion entertained with respect to Fielding's office by his contemporaries, it is not unworthy of remark, that he has himself, by his own forcible and inimitable satire, succeeded in rendering it odious in the eyes of posterity. However irreproachable his own conduct as a Middlesex magistrate, he did not spare the order to which he belonged. It is in his pages that we find the ignorance, rapacity, and meanness of the "trading" justices more relentlessly exposed, and more minutely described than in the productions of any other writer of the period. After his appointment to the office, and when he had for some time diligently performed its duties, he did not scruple to embody in one immortal portrait all the popular prejudices against his fraternity. We allude to his sketch of Justice Thrasher, in Amelia—a character which was perhaps drawn from some too well-known original :"On the 1st of April," says the novelist, "in the the watchmen of a certain parish (I year, : know not particularly which) within the liberty of Westminster, brought several persons whom they had apprehended the preceding night, before Jonathan Thrasher, Esq., one of the justices of the peace for that liberty. Mr. Thrasher,.. the justice before whom the prisoners above-mentioned were now brought, had some few imperfections in his magisterial capacity. I own I have been sometimes inclined to think that this office of justice of peace requires some knowledge of the law; for this simple reason, because in every case which comes before him, he is to judge and act according to law. Again, as these laws are contained in a great variety of books, the statutes which relate to the office of a justice of peace making of themselves at least two large volumes in folio, and that part of his jurisdiction which is founded on the common law being dispersed in an hundred volumes, I cannot conceive how this knowledge should be acquired without reading; and yet, certain it is, Mr. Thrasher never read one syllable of the matter. : He per "This, perhaps, was a defect-but this was not all for when mere ignorance is to decide a point between two litigants, it will always be an even chance whether it decides right or wrong; but sorry am I to say, right was often in a much worse situation than this, and wrong hath often had five hundred to one on his side before that magistrate, who, if he was ignorant of the law of England, was yet well versed in the laws of nature. fectly well understood that fundamental principle so strongly laid down in the institutes of the learned Rochefoucault, by which the duty of selflove is so strongly enforced, and every man is taught to consider himself as the centre of gravity, and to attract all things thither. To speak the truth plainly, the justice was never indifferent in a cause, but when he could get nothing on either side." It is almost superfluous to add, that the mode in which justice is administered by this Middlesex Minos forms the subject of one of Fielding's most characteristic chapters. "Sirrah," (he is represented as addressing an offender,) "your tongue betrays your guilt. You are an Irishman, and that is always sufficient evidence with me." The magnificent irony of the following sentence has also never been surpassed-not even by the author of Jonathan Wild:-"In short, the magistrate had too great an honour for truth, to suspect that she ever appeared in sordid apparel; nor did he ever sully his sublime notions of that virtue by uniting them with the mean ideas of poverty and distress." The portrait of Justice Thrasher was not the first or only satire on the paid magistrates of Middlesex which proceeded from Fielding's pen. Many years before the res angustæ had compelled him to belong to the fraternitybefore he had studied the law, or been called to the bar-he had perpetrated a dramatic caricature of a Bow-street justice, of the broadest kind. The sketch of Justice Squeezum, in the comedy of The Coffee-house Politician; or, the Justice caught in his own Trap, preceded that of Justice Thrasher by a long interval of time; but the satire is of the same description, and equally forcible and pointed. We quote a fragment of one scene, as a specimen of Fielding's notion of the habits and character of a "trading justice," before he had made a personal acquaintance with the duties of the office : ACT II. SCENE II. Quill. Sir, here's Mr. Staff, the reforming constable. Staff. An't please your worship, we have been at the gaming-house in the alley, and have taken six prisoners, whereof we discharged two, who had your worship's license. Squeezum. What are the others? Staff. One is a half-pay officer; another an attorney's clerk; and the other two are young gentlemen of the Temple. Squeezum. Discharge the officer and the clerk ; there is nothing to be got by the army or the law: the one hath no money, and the other will part with none. But be not too forward to quit the Templars. Staff. Asking your worship's pardon, I don't care to run my finger into the lion's mouth. I would not willingly have to do with any limb of the law. Squeezum. Fear not-these bear no nearer affinity to lawyers, than a militia regiment of squires do to soldiers; the one gets no more by his gown than the other by his sword. These are men that bring estates to the Temple, instead of getting them there. Staff. Nay, they are bedaubed with lace as fine as lords. Squeezum. Never fear a lawyer in lace the lawyer that sets out in lace, always ends in rags. Staff. I'll secure them. We went to the house where your worship commanded us, and heard the dice in the streets; but there were two coaches with coronets on them at the door, so we thought it proper not to go in. Squeezum. You did right. The laws are turnpikes only made to stop people who walk on foot, and not to interrupt those who drive them in their coaches. The laws are like a game at loo, where a blaze of court-cards is always secure, and the knaves are the safest cards in the pack." To render such an office as this respectable, and to perform its duties with honour, fidelity, and zeal, required, it will be admitted, more than ordinary mental vigour. An over-sensitive nature might have shrunk with disgust from its disagreeable duties, and the still more disagreeable reputation which clung to it. But Fielding was no sentimentalist. Like many other great writers, he was by no means enamoured of a life of seclusion. He was as anxious as any man could be to discharge the most responsible duties of the private citizen, and to bear his part in the active business of life. As a magistrate he saw that there were many ways in which he could render himself useful to the public, and this consideration was of itself sufficient to reconcile him to an office which had sunk, and perhaps justly sunk, so low in popular estimation. Although he looked upon the fees by which he was remunerated as 66 some of the dirtiest money upon earth," and doubtless felt humiliated in being obliged to take them at all, he neither disliked nor despised the important functions which devolved on him. On the contrary, we shall be able to show that, as long as his health permitted, he discharged those functions not merely with assiduity, but with hearty good-will; and that the services which he rendered to the public were of so important a kind, that they would entitle him to the grateful reverence of posterity, if he had never written a line. The times are strangely altered since Henry Fielding presided in the justice-room at Bowstreet, committing rogues and vagabonds to Bridewell, and highwaymen to Newgate. Every facility was then offered to the proceedings of the lawless depredator and boldfaced villain. The streets of the metropolis were dangerous after nightfall. When a peaceful tradesman had to take a journey of fifty or sixty miles, he made his will before he took his place in the mail. Notorious highwaymen and swindlers swaggered about in public places, winking at the officers of justice, and enjoying the admiration of the rabble. To prevent the commission of crime, and to detect and secure offenders, the very feeblest means were employed. The nocturnal guardians of the ill-lighted, narrow streets of London were infirm old men, who would have been chargeable to a parish, and shut up in a workhouse, if they had not been employed in protecting the lives and property of the devoted inhabitants of the metropolis. Fielding himself has admirably described the London watchman of 1752 in his Amelia, and has not, in all probability, exaggerated their impotence and incapacity :-"To begin," he says, "I think as low as I well can, with the watchmen in our metropolis, who, being to guard our streets by night from thieves and robbers-an office which at least requires strength of body-are chosen out of those poor old decrepid people who are, from their want of bodily strength, rendered incapable of getting a livelihood by work. These men, armed only with a pole, which some of them are scarce able to lift, are to secure the persons and houses of his Majesty's subjects from the attacks of gangs of young, bold, stout, desperate, and well-armed villains. • Quæ non riribus istis Munera conveniunt.' If the poor old fellows should run away from such enemies, no one, I think, can wonder, unless it be that they were able to make their escape." When such men were the only "guardians of the night," it was easy enough for the practised thief to lighten the homereturning reveller of his watch and purse. If the booty were not delivered up in pursuance of a civil request, the unhappy wight was soon stretched upon the pavement, stunned and stupified-sometimes even deprived of life whilst the thief walked quietly away to pursue his profession in some other locality. The Bow-street officers, who were more immediately charged with the apprehension of desperate offenders, were also distinguished for their peculiar remissness and capriciousness in the performance of their duties. No one knew how or why, but, to the great scandal of public justice, known offenders,highwaymen, pickpockets, and footpads,were often at large for months after warrants had been issued for their apprehension; walking about London without disguise or concealment, frequenting their nightly haunts of dissipation, and pursuing, without let or hindrance, their lawless calling. The truth was, that the thief then belonged to a powerful corporation, with its army of spies and desperadoes, and hosts of secret allies. Oftentimes the officer of justice was himself little better than the thief's confederate; but oftener still prudence compelled him to refrain from meddling with a notorious ruffian. For these remarks, again, we have the authority of Fielding, who, in a valuable pamphlet on the Causes of the Increase of Robbers, thus drew public attention to this scandalous and flagrant abuse: "How long," he says, "have we known highwaymen reign in this kingdom after they have been publicly known as such! Have not some of these committed robberies in open daylight, in the sight of many people, and have afterwards rode solemnly and triumphantly through the neighbouring towns, without any danger or molestation? This happens to every rogue who has become eminent for his audaciousness, and is thought to be desperate; and is, in a more particular manner, the case of great and numerous gangs, many of which have for a long time committed the most open outrages in defiance of the law. Officers of justice have owned to me, that they have passed by such, with warrants in their pockets against them, without daring to apprehend them; and, indeed, they could not be blamed for not exposing themselves to sure destruction: for it is a melancholy truth, that, at this very day, a rogue no sooner gives the alarm, within certain purlieus, than twenty or thirty armed villains are found ready to come to his assistance." It was only by severity of punishment that the legislators and administrators of the law in those days attempted to repress crime. Whenever any offence increased to an inconvenient degree, it was made capital. At every assize and Old Bailey sessions the bulk of offenders were liable, on conviction, to undergo the penalty of death. But this severity, which rendered our penal code the most sanguinary in Europe, and called forth the mild censure even of Mr. Justice Blackstone-(who draws attention to "the melancholy truth, that among the variety of actions which men are liable to commit, no less than a hundred and sixty have been declared by act of parliament to be felonies, without benefit of clergy, or, in other words, to be worthy of instant death")-it is needless to say, defeated its own object. The highwayman felt no hesitation in adding the crime of murder to that of robbery, when he knew that it would not alter his punishment if detected. But the greatest mischief which resulted from this extreme severity of the laws, was the reluctance naturally felt by judges, juries, and prosecutors, to carry them into execution. Technical objections of the most absurd description were permitted by the former to prevail-in favorem vitæ. Juries stultified themselves, and disregarded the oath they had taken, by refusing to convict on the clearest evidence, or by committing the pious fraud of finding a £1 note of less value than 1s. All who could escape from prosecuting were too glad to avoid the terrible responsibility of sending a fellow-creature to the scaffold; and even when the thief had been brought to trial, the timid and the tender-hearted would often conceal some important fact to favour his acquittal. Such a state of things favoured the hardened criminal immensely. He chuckled when his counsel discovered a convenient flaw in the indictment, or adroitly managed to shut out some important evidence. But if defeated here, he had still the hope remaining that either the prosecutor or the jury would take a lenient view of his case, rather than have him hanged. If he had stolen a gentleman's watch or purse, and the facts were too clear to warrant an acquittal, still a mercifulminded jury would take the value of the articles into consideration, and solemnly determine that they were not worth a shilling. Instead of being hanged, he would then be sentenced to a whipping-a public whipping at the cart's tail. Although the sentence had a disagreeable sound, the thief chuckled again, for he knew that the flogging, like the trial, would be only a farce. When the barebacked ruffian was tied to the cart, his associates crowded the streets, jostled the hangman, and adroitly impeded his operations. If necessary, a riot upon a small scale was got up, to defeat the execution of the sentence; until at length the lucky thief, uninjured by the cat-o'-nine-tails, was untied from the cart, and perhaps the very same day renewed his trade of picking pockets. The whip was much in vogue at this period. If a prentice-lad got into bad company and robbed his master, he was publicly whipped through the street in which his master dwelt ; and if he was not a hardened criminal, with hosts of abandoned associates to protect him, the lash was laid on with savage severity, whilst in character he was ruined and disgraced for life. Women, too, were whippedpublicly whipped at noonday through the crowded streets of London, in defiance of public decency, and to the disgrace of the national character. And what was the result of these brutal punishments? Did they deter from the commission of crime, or excite a wholesome respect for the law and its administrators? The answer may be found in the criminal records of the period, which are filled with details of cruelty and brutality, happily unparalleled at the present day. We cannot refrain from noticing another mischievous consequence of the Draconian code of the eighteenth century: we allude to the frequency of capital punishments, and the disgraceful scenes by which they were attended; for, in spite of the difficulties interposed, there were of course many convictions, after which the law was generally allowed to take its course. There is a grave doubt whether the infliction of capital punishment at all—even as that punishment is now inflicted, at rare intervals, and for atrocious crimes, has not a most demoralising effect. What, then, must have been the effect of the wholesale hangings of the period of which we are speaking, when men and women were executed by scores, and often for offences which would be now expiated by a few months' imprisonment? Henry Fielding was too sensible a man not to perceive the brutalising tendency of these shameful scenes; but he does not appear to have felt that horror at the indiscriminate severity of the law which one would have expected. The coarse and common spectacle of a public execution he readily admitted was an unmixed evil; and for that objectionable spectacle he advocated the substitution of a more solemn and imposing show-fantastic and peculiarbut, to our mind, no less barbarous and revolting. His suggestion was as follows: "Suppose," he says, "that the court at the Old Bailey was, at the end of the trials, to be adjourned during four days; that, against the adjournment day, a gallows was erected in the area before the court; that the criminals were all brought down on that day to receive sentence; and that this was executed the very moment after it was pronounced, in the sight and presence of the judges. Nothing can, I think, be imagined (not even torture, which I am an enemy to the very thought of admitting) more terrible than such an execution; and I leave it to any man to resolve himself upon reflection, whether such a day at the Old Bailey, or a holiday at Tyburn, would make the strongest impression on the mind of any one."* Such was the aspect of crime in the metropolis, and such the state of our criminal code, when Fielding commenced the exercise of his magisterial functions. That he would apply his powerful mind to the exposure and correction of the abuses within his reach might have been safely predicted by any one at all acquainted with his active temperament and earnest disposition. That he would, however, have been equally successful in the performance of the laborious and irksome duties of his office, might have seemed, as we have before hinted, more problematical. Although not old in years, he was now old in constitution. He was a martyr to the gout in its worst and most virulent form. And even had he been blessed with uninterrupted health, his previous pursuits-the irregularities of his life, his taste for literature, his want of business habitsmight justify the apprehension that he would shun the fœtid air of Bow-street as much as possible, and find little interest in taking the depositions of reluctant witnesses, and examining into the complicated details of atrocious criminality. But the result proved that such apprehensions were groundless. As we have already intimated, the Man of Letters and the Novelist proved a most efficient Magistrate. We have looked through the newspapers of the period, and find constant traces of his activity, energy, and spirit, in the performance of his duties. In the commencement of the year 1749, aggravated street robberies appear to have been peculiarly prevalent, and the following extracts from the General Ad vertizer will afford some notion of the cha * Causes of the Increase of Robbers, &c. racter of crime in those days, and the sort of cases which came before Fielding at the commencement of his magisterial career. On the 18th of February, 1748-9, we read that the day before "One Edward Mullins was committed to Newgate, by Henry Fielding, Esq., on the oaths of John Ball and John Few, for assaulting them, with several other persons, cutting and wounding them with cutlasses and hangers in a desperate manner; and also for going armed by night in the publick streets." The following paragraph of the 20th February following, proves that Fielding was zealously endeavouring to put a stop to these outrages, and taking the most effectual means for that purpose : "This morning, at eleven o'clock, Edward Mullins is to be brought from Newgate before Justice Fielding, at his house in Bow Street. And tomorrow, at the same time, Atkinson, Roach, and Michael Malony, will be brought before the same justice, in order to be re-examined and confronted with Nicholas Marney, who has given information against them concerning divers robberies in the streets, and in the highway, when it is hoped that all gentlemen and others who have been robbed within these last six months, either in the streets, or on the highway between Kensington and London, or on Constitution Hill, will attend, in order to see the said persons, and if they should know them, to give evidence against them." On the 24th of February, there is also the following significant announcement: "On Wednesday night, two notorious street robbers were committed to Newgate by Justice Fielding, under a guard of twelve soldiers." Four days after this (viz. Tuesday, February 28th), there appeared in the same newspaper the following advertisement, which (as it recalls our attention to Fielding's literary pursuits) we venture to copy verbatim et literatim:· This day is published, in six vols. 12mo., THE HISTORY OF TOM JONES, A FOUNDLING. -Mores hominum multorum vidit. It being impossible to get sets bound fast enough to answer the demand for them, such Gentlemen and Ladies as please, may have them served in Blue Paper and Boards, at the price of 168. a set, of A. Millar, over against Catherine Street, in the Strand. Tom Jones was not composed by Fielding (as some writers have asserted) amidst the bustle of his magisterial duties. On the contrary, this inimitable novel had been some years in preparation, and, in all probability, the manuscript was completed before the author commenced his official duties. During the time occupied in its composition, Fielding confesses to have received assistance from more than one friend to letters and humanity. Foremost among these was his friend, George Lyttleton, to whom, without permission, he dedicated the work on its completion. Lyttleton would appear, from the language of that dedication, not merely to have dispensed pecuniary assistance to the necessitous author, while engaged upon his novel, but also to have favoured him with suggestions, or at any rate with encouraging exhortations to compose a work worthy of his genius. "To you, sir," says Fielding, "it is owing that this history was ever begun. It was by your desire that I first thought of such a composition. . . Again, sir, without your assistance this history had never been completed. Be not startled at the assertion. I do not intend to draw upon you the suspicion of being a romance writer. I mean no more than that I partly owe to you my existence during great part of the time which I have employed in composing it." Another benefactor of Fielding's during the same period was the Duke of Bedford, Lyttleton's political friend and patron; and a third was that generous and unostentatious friend of the distressed, whose virtues are immortalised in the well-known couplet of Pope : ..... "Let honest ALLEN, with an awkward shame, Do good by stealth, and blush to find it fame." As a mark of gratitude to these friends, and of homage to their virtues, Fielding professed to embody the various excellences of their characters in one of the most prominent delineations in his novel. According to his own statement, Mr. Allworthy is not a mere fancy portrait. The partial eye of friendship kept steadily in view the mental lineaments of his three patrons, whilst the hand was employed in penning this exquisite delineation of a wise and good man. The result is, that we have in the character of Allworthy an assemblage of qualities which rarely, if ever, meet in the same individual: the most perfect benevolence, tempered by a stern sense of justice; a complete immunity from the common faults and frailties of our species, joined to an exquisite compassion for, and large toleration of, the frailties of others; in short, a character more nearly approaching perfection than it is possible to conceive of, and offering a marked contrast (perhaps we should say too marked a contrast) to the other persons in the story. |