Excerpt from The History of Henry Fielding On his feet once more, Fielding plunged into work with greater zest than ever. He wrote a novel, he wrote pam phlets, he conducted a newspaper, he issued proposals for a translation of Lucian directly from the Greek, he drafted measures for the Pelham Ministry, he reorganized the metropolitan police, and presided over the principal police court of Middlesex. When Hurd met him in March of 1751, he was only a shadow of his former self. A life of dissipa tion and a life such as Fielding lived, though quite different, end in the same way. As other moralists sometimes do, Hurd discovered vices where there were none as an easy explanation of physical wreckage. Despite the inroads of gout and its train of evils, Fielding still went on in the old way, not yet apprehending the imminent danger. When he dedicated Amelia to Ralph Allen in December of the same year, he wrote as if he expected, in the natural term of man's life, to survive his friend. Neither bandaged legs, nor crutches, nor the invalid's chair could break his spirit. At this time Edward Moore, the young dramatist and journalist whom Fielding helped into happiness and fame, saw much of him. In a letter, unfortunately without date, Moore wrote to John Ward, a dissenting minister of Taunton, with reference to an introduction to Fielding. As planned, the three were to pass an evening together in Moore's rooms; but the meeting had to be postponed on account of Fielding 's illness. Informing Ward how matters stand, Moore says. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.