Page:Fielding.djvu/109

 borrowed Mother Cole in The Minor. A third character, Lord Bawble, was considered to reflect upon “a particular person of quality,” and the piece was speedily forbidden by the Lord Chamberlain, although it appears to have been acted a few months later without opposition. One of the results of the prohibition, according to Mr. Lawrence, was a Letter to a Noble Lord (the Lord Chamberlain) ... occasioned by a Representation ... of a Farce called “Miss Lucy in Town.” This, in spite of the Caveat in the Preface to the Miscellanies, he ascribes to Fielding, and styles it “a sharp expostulation ... in which he [Fielding] disavowed any idea of a personal attack.” But Mr. Lawrence must plainly have been misinformed on the subject, for the pamphlet bears little sign of Fielding’s hand. As far as it is intelligible, it is rather against Miss Lucy than for her, and it makes no reference to Lord Bawble’s original. The name of this injured patrician seems indeed never to have transpired; but he could scarcely have been in any sense an exceptional member of the Georgian aristocracy.

In the same month that Miss Lucy in Town appeared at Drury Lane, Millar published it in book form. In the following June, T. Waller of the Temple-Cloisters issued the first of a contemplated series of translations from Aristophanes by Henry Fielding, Esq., and the Rev. William Young who sat for Parson Adams. The play chosen was Plutus, the God of Riches, and a notice upon the original cover stated that, according to the reception it met with from the public, it would be followed by the others. It must be presumed that “the distressed, and at present, declining State of