Hairbreadth missings of happiness look like the insults of Fortune.

Fielding’s line suggests that when happiness is narrowly missed—when one comes within a “hairbreadth” of the desired outcome—the disappointment can feel less like ordinary bad luck and more like a personal affront dealt by “Fortune” (the classical personification of chance). The nearness of success intensifies the sting: the mind compares what is with what almost was, and the gap seems cruelly deliberate. The quote also hints at a moral-psychological insight common in eighteenth-century writing: our sense of injury often arises not from the magnitude of loss but from frustrated expectation, especially when events appear to toy with us by offering hope and then withdrawing it.