DEDICATION, PREFACE, DRAMATIC PERSONE, AND ACT I OF DANTE CHEHOTE IN ENGLAND, by HENRY FIELDING. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox .org. DEDICATION, TO THE RIGHT HONORABLE PHILIP, EARL OF CHESTERFIELD, NIGHT OF THE MOST NOBLE ORDER OF THE GARTER. My Lord, however unworthy these scenes may be of Your Lordship's protection, the design with which some of them were written cannot fail of recommending them to one who has so gloriously distinguished himself in the cause of liberty, to which the corruption I have here endeavored to expose may one day be a very fatal enemy. The freedom of the stage is, perhaps, as well worth contending for as that of the press. It is the opinion of an author well known to Your Lordship that examples were quicker and stronger on the minds of men than precepts. This will, I believe, my Lord, be found truer with regard to politics than to ethics. The most ridiculous exhibitions of luxury or avarice may likely have little effect on the sensualist or the miser, but I fancy a lively representation of the calamities brought on a country by general corruption might have a very sensible and useful effect on the spectators. Socrates, who owed his destruction greatly to the contempt brought on him by the comedies of Aristophanes, is a lasting instance of the force of theatrical ridicule. Here indeed this weapon was used to an ill purpose, but surely what is able to bring wisdom and virtue into disrepute will, with great facility, lay their opposites under a general contempt. There are among us who seem so sensible of the danger of wit and humor that their resolve to have nothing to do with them, and indeed they are in the right aught, for wit, like hunger, will be with great difficulty restrained from falling on, where there is great plenty and variety of food. But while the powerful sons of Delnus shed all their influence on their inferior brethren, be you, my Lord, who are the most favored offspring of the British muses, the patron of their younger children, whom your lordship has as much reason to love as others to fear, for you must have seen that to be celebrated by them and applauded by the most discerning and worthy are the only rewards which true patriotism, a word scandalously ridiculed by some, can securely expect. And here I am pleading the cause of others, for the only title I have to enroll myself in the number of those I have recommended to your favor is by being, with the most perfect admiration and respect, my Lord, your lordship's most obedient and most humble servant, Henry Fielding. Preface. This comedy was begun at Leighton in the year 1728, and after it had been sketched out into a few loose scenes, was thrown by, and for a long while no more thought