Book excerpt: Excerpt from The History of Henry Fielding, Vol. 1 To the Shame of all who write and speak our mother tongue, no one has yet brought together the works of a great master who, like Shakespeare, was careless of his fame. Nor have the biographers given more than casual attention to anything beyond what a very mediocre jour nalist once selected for them; all the rest, except such stray pieces as they happened to read in the most cursory manner, they have in turn consigned to the land of matters forgot because they knew nothing of them. I have at tempted to discover what these secondary works are, to fix their dates, and to give some account of them in connection with the half-known plays and the famous novels. These rejected publications have been a primary source of this biography; they have let light in upon the long-prevailing darkness. Their number, their scope, their character, make absurd the dissipated Fielding of tradition; they are a monument to Fielding's energy and earnestness, which once established time cannot remove. 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.