Page:The Adventures of David Simple (1904).djvu/9



is possible that The Adventures of David Simple would have been far better known as a work of some importance in the early development of English fiction had the authoress' name not been Fielding. To be the near relative of a great genius is by no means a passport to fame: a good many instances may be called to mind of its being altogether the reverse. Although Richardson himself complimented "Sally" upon her knowledge of the human heart, and quoted her saying of "a critical judge of writing," perhaps Dr. Johnson, "that your late brother's knowledge of it was not (fine writer as he was) comparable to yours," and further, "his was but as the knowledge of the outside of a clockwork machine, while yours was that of all the finer springs and movements of the inside"; in spite of such eulogy from such a man, Sarah Fielding's name has been completely overshadowed by that of her brother, and is now familiar only to special students of our eighteenth-century literature.

What little, furthermore, we know about herself has been gleaned mostly from the records of her brother's life. She was born three years after him, in 1710, at East Stower at Dorsetshire. Her father was Lieutenant (afterwards General) Edmund Fielding, descendant of an old family that numbered the Earls of Denbigh in its elder branch, and in its younger, to which he belonged, the earls of Desmond