Page:Notes and Queries - Series 12 - Volume 1.djvu/490

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NOTES AND QUERIES. [12 s. i. JUNE 17, 1916.

Bath in 1782. It occurs in vol. i. p. 291, ,nd in a foot-note Mr. Rogers states that " the piece is not printed in any edition of Fielding's works." Your correspondent, ac- cepting this statement, inquired as to the genuineness of the authorship ; but he had been misled by Rogers, since the verses do in fact appear on p. 114 of vol. i. of Fielding's '* Miscellanies,' 1743. That they emanated from Fielding is therefore beyond question. "The lines are here reproduced from the ' Miscellanies,' as the text differs slightly from Mr. Rogers' s :

To Miss H. ..AND AT BATH.

Written extempore in the Pump-Room, 1742. 'Soon shall these bounteous springs thy wish

bestow,

Soon in ea.ch feature sprightly health shall glow ; ~Thy eyes regain their fire, thy limbs their grace, And roses join the lilies in thy face. But say, sweet maid, what waters can remove 'The pangs of cold despa.ir, of hopeless love ? 'The deadly star which lights th* autumnal skies Shines not so bright, so fatal as those eyes. 'The pains which from their influence we endure, Not Brewster, glory of his art, can cure.

The chief difference in the texts is the semi-suppressed name of the lady in whose

"honour they are written. Rogers, or rather the friend who communicated the poem to him, says they are addressed to " Miss

H land'" ; Fielding says to "MissH and."

Though trivial to the eye, the discrepancy becomes important in any attempt at identi- fication. Have we not here a portrait of

-the lady who twelve months later became the wife of Robert Henley, 1708-72, one of the leaders of the Western Circuit when Fielding joined it in 1740, who was appointed Recorder of Bath in 1751, and reached the Woolsack as first Earl of Northington ?

I am prompted to this suggestion by the words of Lord Campbell (' The Lives of the Lord Chancellors,' vol. v. p. 178, 1846) :

" The smart junior barristers used to pass their vacations at Bath, a custom that entirely left

-off when I first knew the profession. Young counsellor Henley was there, the gayest of the ga.y, and distinguished himself among the ladies in the pump-room in the morning, as well as among the topers at night. Here he formed a rather romantic attachment .... There was at Bath, for the benefit of the waters, a very young girl of exquisite beauty, who, from illness, had lost the use of her limbs so completely that she was only able to appear in public wheeled about in a chair. She was the daughter and co-heiress

"of Sir John Husband, of Ipsley, in Warwickshire. . . . .Henley, struck by the charms of her face,

contrived to be introduced to her, when he was still more fascinated by her conversation. His admiration soon ripened into a warm and tender attachment, which he had reason to hope wojld

T be reciprocal. But it seemed as if he had fallen

in love with a Peri, and that he must for ever be contented with sighing and worshipping at her shrine when suddenly the waters produced so effectual and complete a cure, that Miss Husband was enabled to comply with the custom of the place by hanging up her votive crutches to the nymph of the spring, and to dance the minuet de la cour ' at the lower rooms with her lover. Soon after, with the full consent of her family, she gave her hand to the suitor who had so sedulously attended her .... The marriage cere- mony was performed in 1743 at the chapel in South Audley Street."

The " glory of his art " was the popular Bathonian physician, .Thomas Brewster, born 1705, who graduated M.D. Oxford in 1738. Fielding referred to him in 'Tom Jones ' (xviii. 4) as attending with Dr. Harrington on the philosopher " Square " Brewster, as stated by Mr. Rogers, was known in literary circles as the translator of Persius. Both Henley and Brewster were subscribers to Fielding's ' Miscellanies.'

II. " ONE OF THE MERRIEST GENTLEMEN IN ENGLAND."

As ' Tom Jones ' draws to a close, Partridge makes known the occupations he had followed and the vicissitudes he had experienced after quitting Little Baddington, " where he was in danger of starving with the universal compassion of all his neighbours " (ii. 6), until the occasion when, as barber, he attended Jones (by that time a man and a recruit) at the inn where the soldiers dined while marching from Hambrook to Worcester (viii. 4). Recounting his modes of life to Allworthy (xviii. 6), Partridge says :

' ' Well, Sir, from Salisbury I removed to Lymington, where! was above three years in the service of another lawyer, who was likewise a very good sort of a man, and to be sure one of the merriest gentlemen in England."

Mindful that

" one day Mr. Fielding observed to Mrs. Hussey that he was engaged in writing a novel, and that he intended to introduce into it the characters of all his friends " ( J. T. Smith's ' Nollekens and his Times,' vol. i. p. 125),

I sought to identify this particular Hamp- shire acquaintance. I consulted inter alia the privately printed ' Records of the Cor- poration of the Borough of New Lymington in the County of Southampton,' extracted by Charles St. Barbe, Esq., 1848. 'Tom Jones ' was published in 1749, and on examining the list of Free Burgesses of that period I found among the sixteen burgesses incor- porated in 1745 the name of Mr. John Knapton, and on a later page it is recorded that the Town Clerk in 1744 was Mr. Odber Knapton.