Excerpt from Fielding
It would be an excellent subject for one of those dissertations, which are becoming more and more fashionable in academic curricula, to consider Mr. Matthew Arnold"s classification of the English aristocracy as "Barbarians" with special reference to Henry Fielding. He had, indeed, according to the Arnoldian definition, a double title to the designation; for he was at one time of his life at any rate, and as long as he had the opportunity, an enthusiastic sportsman. But as to his possession of the main requisite, what we call "gentle," and what is called abroad "noble," blood, there could be no question whatever. Horace Walpole himself, who regarded Fielding with a curious complication of dislike, and whose weakest point was certainly not genealogy, must have known that he could pick no real hole here. Whether that origin from the House of Hapsburg, which Gibbon has enshrined in one of his most magnificent sentences, be history or myth, and whether the name came from the original Geoffrey of Hapsburg"s claims to a German estate called "Rinfilding," or had a somewhat more obvious etymology, it is quite unnecessary to inquire. The family had certainly been of knightly rank in England for many centuries; and in the seventeenth they had received two earldoms, that of Denbigh in the English peerage, and a generation later that of Desmond in the Irish. The first Earl of Desmond had many sons; the fifth of them, John Fielding, took orders and became a canon of Salisbury.
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