Born, in the “Lennox,” Dumbartonshire, 1721; baptized, 19 March 1721. Early education at school at Dumbarton. Apprenticed to a doctor. To London, 1739. Entered Navy as Surgeon’s Mate, Oct. 1740. After Carthagena expedition, retired from Navy; settled in Jamaica. Married there Anne Lascelles, 1744 [?]. Returned to London, 1744; devoted himself to literature. Visit to Paris, 1749 [?]. M.D., Marischal Coll., Aberdeen, 1750. Edited “Critical Review,” 1756–60. Imprisoned three months for libel, 1759. Edited “British Mag.,” 1760–67; “The Briton,” May 1762 to Feb. 1763. Travelled abroad, June 1763 to spring 1765. To Italy, 1768; settled at Monte Nuovo, near Leghorn. Died there, Sept. 1771. Buried at Leghorn. Works: “Advice” (anon.), 1746; “Reproof” (anon.), 1747; “Adventures of Roderick Random” (anon.), 1748; “The Regicide” (anon.), 1749; “The History and Adventures of an Atom” (anon.), 1749; “Adventures of Peregrine Pickle” (anon.), 1751; “Essay on the External Use of Water,” 1752; “Adventures of Ferdinand, Count Fathom” (anon.), 1753; “The Reprisal” (anon.), 1757; “Compleat History of England … to the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle” (4 vols.), 1757–58; “Continuation” of preceding (5 vols.), 1763–65; “Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves” (anon.), 1762; “Travels Through France and Italy” (2 vols.), 1766; “The Present State of All Nations” (8 vols.), 1768–69; “The Expedition of Humphery Clinker” (anon.), 1771 (misprinted 1671 on title-page of 1st edn.). Posthumous: “Ode to Independence,” 1773. He translated: “Gil Blas” (anon.), 1749; “Don Quixote,” 1755; “Voltaire’s Works” (with others), 1761–74; “The Adventures of Telemachus,” 1776; and edited: “A Compendium of Authentic and Entertaining Voyages,” 1756. Collected Works: in 6 vols., 1790. Life: by R. Anderson, 1796.

Personal

  Smollett was a man of very agreeable conversation and of much genuine humor; and, though not a professional scholar, possessed a philosophical mind, and was capable of making the soundest observations on human life, and of discerning the excellence or seeing the ridicule of every character he met with. Fielding only excelled him in giving a dramatic story to his novels, but, in my opinion, was inferior to him in the true comic vein. He was one of the many very pleasant men with whom it was my good fortune to be intimately acquainted.

  A most worthless and dangerous fellow, and capable of any mischief.

  Dick Ivy carried me to dine with S— [Smollett], whom you and I have long known by his writings. He lives in the skirts of the town; and every Sunday his house is open to all unfortunate brothers of the quill, whom he treats with beef, pudding, and potatoes, port, punch, and Calvert’s entire butt-beer…. I was civilly received in a plain yet decent habitation, which opened backwards into a very pleasant garden, kept in excellent order; and indeed I saw none of the outward signs of authorship, either in the house or the landlord, who is one of those few writers of the age that stand upon their own foundation, without patronage and above dependence. If there was nothing characteristic in the entertainer, the company made ample amends for his want of singularity. At two o’clock I found myself one of ten messmates at a table; and I question if the whole kingdom could produce such another assemblage of originals…. After dinner we adjourned into the garden, where I observed Mr. S—— gave a short, separate audience to every individual, in a small remote filbert walk, from whence most of them dropped off, one after another, without further ceremony; but they were replaced by other recruits of the class, who came to make an afternoon’s visit.

  In the practice of physic, Smollett, though possessed of superior endowments, and eminent scientific qualifications, had the mortification, from whatever cause, to be unsuccessful, at a moment when perhaps the neglect he experienced was aggravated by the unaccountable success of many a superficial unqualified contemporary, reaping the harvest of wealth and reputation. It has been supposed, that this want of success in a profession where merit cannot always ensure fame and affluence, was owing to his failing to render himself agreeable to the fair sex, whose favour is certainly of great consequence to all candidates for eminence, whether in physic or divinity. But his figure and address, which were uncommonly elegant and prepossessing, and his unsullied manners, renders this supposition highly improbable. It is more likely that his irritable temper, increased by the teasing and uncomfortable circumstances of the profession, and his contempt for the low arts of servility, suppleness, and cunning, were the real causes of his failure. It may be supposed also, that his publications, as a general satirist and censor of manners, were far more calculated to retard his progress as a physician, than to augment his practice.

  The person of Dr. Smollett was stout and well proportioned, his countenance engaging, his manner reserved, with a certain air of dignity that seemed to indicate that he was not unconscious of his own powers. He was of a disposition so humane and generous that he was ever ready to serve the unfortunate, and on some occasions to assist them beyond what his circumstances could justify…. His learning, diligence, and natural acuteness, would have rendered him eminent in the science of medicine, had he persevered in that profession; other parts of his character were ill suited for augmenting his practice. He could neither stoop to impose on credulity nor humour caprice.

  Smollett, who is a great poet, though he has written little in verse, and whose rich genius composed the most original pictures of human life, was compelled by his wants to debase his name by selling it to voyages and translations, which he never could have read. When he had worn himself down in the service of the public, or the booksellers, there remained not, of all his slender remunerations, in the last stage of life, sufficient to convey him to a cheap country and a restorative air on the Continent. The father may have thought himself fortunate, that the daughter whom he loved with more than common affection was no more to share in his wants; but the husband had by his side the faithful companion of his life, left without a wreck of fortune. Smollett, gradually perishing in a foreign land, neglected by an admiring public, and without fresh resources from the booksellers, who were receiving the income of his works, threw out his injured feelings in the character of “Bramble;” the warm generosity of his temper, but not his genius, seemed fleeting with his breath. In a foreign land his widow marked by a plain monument the spot of his burial, and she perished in solitude! Yet Smollett dead—soon an ornamented column is raised at the place of his birth, while the grave of the author seems to multiply the editions of his works. There are indeed grateful feelings in the public at large for a favourite author; but the awful testimony of those feelings, by its gradual progress, must appear beyond the grave! They visit the column consecrated by his name, and his features are most loved, most venerated, in the bust.

  The person of Smollett was eminently handsome, his features prepossessing, and, by the joint testimony of all his surviving friends, his conversation in the highest degree instructive and amusing. Of his disposition, those who have read his works (and who has not done so?) may form a very accurate estimate; for in each of them he has presented, and sometimes under various points of view, the leading features of his own character, without disguising the most unfavourable of them…. We know not that Smollett had any other marked failing, save that which he himself has so often and so liberally acknowledged. When unseduced by his satirical propensities, he was kind, generous, and humane to others; bold, upright, and independent in his own character; stooped to no patron, sued for no favour, but honestly and honourably maintained himself on his literary labours.

  We have before us, and painted by his own hand, Tobias Smollett, the manly, kindly, honest and irascible; worn and battered, but still brave and full of heart, after a long struggle against a hard fortune. His brain had been busied with a hundred different schemes; he had been reviewer and historian, critic, medical writer, poet, pamphleteer. He had fought endless literary battles; and braved and wielded for years the cudgels of controversy. It was a hard and savage fight in those days, and a niggard pay. He was oppressed by illness, age, narrow fortune; but his spirit was still resolute, and his courage steady; the battle over, he could do justice to the enemy with whom he had been so fiercely engaged, and give a not unfriendly grasp to the hand that had mauled him. He is like one of those Scotch cadets, of whom history gives us so many examples, and whom, with a national fidelity, the great Scotch novelist has painted so charmingly. Of gentle birth and narrow means, going out from his northern home to win his fortune in the world, and to fight his way, armed with courage, hunger, and keen wits. His crest is a shattered oak tree, with green leaves yet springing from it. On his ancient coat-of-arms there is a lion and a horn; this shield of his was battered and dinted in a hundred fights and brawls, through which the stout Scotchman bore it courageously. You see somehow that he is a gentleman, through all his battling and struggling, his poverty, his hard-fought successes, and his defeats.

  He was by no means the idle half-reprobate he represents in his “Roderick Random.” He was often wrong and always irascible, continually fancying himself aggrieved, and always with a quarrel on his hands; but he was as proud, warm-hearted, and mettlesome a Scot as had then crossed the Tweed—of a spirit so independent, we are told, that he never asked a favour for himself from any great man in his life; paying his way honestly, and helping liberally those about him who were in distress; and altogether, so far from being a mere pleasure-seeker, that there was probably no man then in or near London, who stayed more at home, or worked more incessantly and laboriously to prevent the world from being a shilling the worse for him. He ruined his health by over-work.

  In the following year, Smollett died, leaving to his widow little beyond the empty consolations of his great fame. From her very narrow purse she supplied the means of erecting the stone that marks the spot where he lies; and the pen of his companion … [Dr. John Armstrong], furnished an appropriate inscription. The niggardly hands of government remained as firmly closed against the relief of Mrs. Smollett as they had been in answer to her husband’s own application for himself; an application which must have cost a severe struggle to his proud spirit, and of which his most intimate literary friends were probably never aware. He sought favors for others, says Dr. Moore; but “for himself he never made an application to any great man in his life!” He was not intemperate, nor yet was he extravagant, but by nature hospitable and of a cheerful temperament; his house-keeping was never niggardly, so long as he could employ his pen. Thus his genius was too often degraded to the hackney-tasks of booksellers; while a small portion of those pensions which were so lavishly bestowed upon ministerial dependants and placemen would have enabled him to turn his mind to its congenial pursuits, and probably to still further elevate the literary civilization of his country.

  Most obscure among the other items in that Armada of Sir Chaloner’s, just taking leave of England; most obscure of the items then, but now most noticeable, or almost alone noticeable, is a young Surgeon’s-Mate,—one Tobias Smollett; looking over the waters there and the fading coasts, not without thoughts. A proud, soft-hearted, though somewhat stern-visaged, caustic and indignant young gentleman. Apt to be caustic in speech, having sorrows of his own under lock and key, on this and subsequent occasions. Excellent Tobias; he has, little as he hopes it, something considerable by way of mission in this Expedition, and in this Universe generally. Mission to take Portraits of English Seamanhood, with the due grimness, due fidelity; and convey the same to remote generations, before it vanish. Courage my brave young Tobias; through endless sorrows, contradictions, toils and confusions, you will do your errand in some measure; and that will be something!

  There is something noble and even engaging in the character of Smollett: he stooped to no patron; he sued for no favour; he compromised no opinions; he maintained himself by his talents, and lived and died an independent, dauntless Scot. Yet that stern heart was broken, it is said, by the death of that young, fondly-loved girl who preceded him to the tomb. What a conjunction of fierce and gentle qualities;—of a heart full of tenderness, yet proud; of a nature replete with satirical dispositions, yet candid and forgiving.

  Mrs. Smollett did not exactly appreciate a husband who had no profession. Poor Nancy does not seem to have been a very suitable yokefellow or our busy litterateur. She had no reverence for literature as such, or for its professors. She had all a woman’s desire for social distinction. But in order to take any position in that society after which this poor little Eve of the eighteenth century panted as eagerly as those of the nineteenth, an indispensable desideratum was that her husband should belong to one of the recognised professions, even although it might be only “something in the City!”… In “Narcissa’s” eyes—for there is little doubt that the character of Narcissa in “Roderick Random” was at least suggested by his wife—her husband’s literary work was worse than degrading. In common with many others of her time, she deemed “a man of letters” to be synonymous with a gentleman who spent one-half his time in the Fleet or the Marshalsea for debt, and the other half in dodging bailiffs from post to pillar for the privilege of enjoying God’s sunshine without the walls of a jail.

  His grave is in the old English cemetery in the Via degli Elisi at Leghorn (the only town in north Italy where protestants at that time had rights of burial), and the sea lies to the west of him, as of Fielding at Oporto. A Latin inscription (inaccurate as to dates) was written for his tombstone by Armstrong, and has recently been recut. Three years later a monument was erected by the novelist’s cousin, Commissary James Smollett, on the banks of the Leven—a tall Tuscan column, which still attracts the eye of tourists on their way between the Clyde and Loch Lomond. The inscription was revised and in part written by Dr. Johnson, who visited Bonhill with Boswell in 1774.

Roderick Random, 1748

  I guessed “R. Random” to be his, [Fielding’s] though without his name. I cannot think “Ferdinand Fathom” wrote by the same hand, it is every way so much below it.

  The most popular of all the novels on which his high reputation rests.

  In none of his succeeding volumes has he equalled the liveliness, force, and nature of this his first essay. So just a picture of a seafaring life especially had never before met the public eye. Many of our naval heroes may probably trace the preference which has decided them in their choice of a profession to an early acquaintance with the pages of “Roderick Random.” He has not, indeed, decorated his scenes with any seductive colours; yet such is the charm of a highly wrought description, that it often induces us to overlook what is disgusting in the objects themselves, and transfer the pleasure arising from the mere imitation to the reality.

  “Roderick Random,” indeed, with its varied delineation of life, is almost a romance. Its hero is worthy of his name. He is the sport of fortune rolled about through the “many ways of wretchedness” almost without resistance, but ever catching those tastes of joy which are every where to be relished by those who are willing to receive them. We seem to roll on with him, and get delectably giddy in his company.

  Smollett’s “Roderick Random” is better worth preserving than the same author’s continuation of Hume.

  In spite of its indecency, the world at once acknowledged it to be a work of genius: the verisimilitude was perfect; every one recognized in the hero the type of many a young North countryman going out to seek his fortune. The variety is great, the scenes are more varied and real than those in Richardson and Fielding, the characters are numerous and vividly painted, and the keen sense of ridicule pervading the book makes it a broad jest from beginning to end. Historically, his delineations are valuable; for he describes a period in the annals of the British marine which has happily passed away,—a hard life in little stifling holds or forecastles, with hard fare,—a base life, for the sailor, oppressed on shipboard, was the prey of vile women and land-sharks when on shore. What pictures of prostitution and indecency! what obscenity of language! what drunken infernal orgies! We may shun the book as we would shun the company, and yet the one is the exact portraiture of the other.

  “Roderick Random” is an exceedingly interesting work of fiction, and it was long popular. Its interest and attraction does not depend on the development of a well-conceived and elaborated plot, but on the inventive power, the native humour, and knowledge of the author. The turns in the fortune of the hero of the novel are many and varied, and scene follows scene with amazing rapidity, so the attention of the reader never flags; but the morality of the novel is low, and some coarse passages occur in it.

  In the year 1809 was interred, in the churchyard of St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields, the body of one Hew Hewson, who died at the age of eighty-five. He was the original of Hugh Strap, in Smollett’s “Roderick Random.” Upwards of forty years he kept a hair-dresser’s shop in St. Martin’s parish; the walls were hung round with Latin quotations, and he would frequently point out to his customers and acquaintances the several scenes in “Roderick Random” pertaining to himself, which had their origin, not in Smollett’s inventive fancy, but in truth and reality. The meeting in a barber’s shop at Newcastle-upon-Tyne, the subsequent mistake at the inn, their arrival together in London, and the assistance they experienced from Strap’s friend, are all facts. The barber left behind an annotated copy of “Roderick Random,” showing how far we are indebted to the genius of the author, and to what extent the incidents are founded in reality.

  “Roderick Random” is intentionally modelled on the plan of Lesage, and here, as elsewhere, Smollett shows himself less original than either Richardson or Fielding. He can hardly be said to invent or to construct; he simply reports. He does this with infinite spirit and variety. Comedy and tragedy, piety and farce, follow one another in bewildering alternation. But although he dazzles and entertains us, he does not charm. The book is ferocious to a strange degree, and so foul as to be fit only for a very well-seasoned reader. The hero, in whom Smollett complacently could see nothing but a picture of “modest merit struggling with every difficulty,” is a selfish bully, whose faults it is exasperating to find condoned. The book of course, is full of good things. The hero is three separate times hurried off to sea, and the scenes of rough sailor-life, though often disgusting, are wonderfully graphic. Tom Bowling, Jack Rattlin, and the proud Mr. Morgan are not merely immortal among salt-sea worthies, but practically the first of a long line of sailors of fiction.

The Adventures of an Atom, 1749

  From our knowledge of his character, we expect, what we find in his work, ideas that indicate a firm and lofty mind, irritated by disappointment and neglect, and a diction ardent and energetic, corresponding to the strength and acuteness of his feelings of indignation and resentment. Though it is inferior, upon the whole, to his other novels, for ingenuity and contrivance in the composition, and for observation of life, it is written, for the most part, with his usual humour, animation, and felicity of expression.

  His extremely clever and extremely coarse political satire, “The Adventures of an Atom,” published in 1769, was probably inspired partly by resentment at the neglect of his own claims by successive ministries.

  “The History of an Atom” was successful, but is to-day the portion of Smollett’s writings with which we could most comfortably dispense. It is a satire, or intended for such, but accommodates itself to none of the known rules of any school of satiric writing. Neither to Swift, Arbuthnot, Steele, nor Butler does it exhibit affinity.

  “The Adventures of an Atom” are mentioned with a shudder when it is necessary to mention them at all, yet they are scarcely worse than the occasional conversation of very reputable medical students in all times. It may be questioned, finally, whether it is any hurt to a language to have nothing but specifically vulgar names for vulgar things, and so escape the deification of lubricity to which the less robust nations commit themselves. Vigorous and outspoken, irreverent, and sometimes too high-tempered, Smollett is a pervading exemplar of the British humorist.

Peregrine Pickle, 1751

  At candlelight D. D., and I read by turns, and what do you think has been part of our study?—why truly “Peregrine Pickle!” We never undertook it before, but it is wretched stuff; only Lady V’s. history is a curiosity.

  It has been said, that Smollett was not successful in drawing female characters; yet the principal female in his romances is always of the strictest purity of mind and manners. The character of “Emilia” in “Peregrine Pickle,” the gayest perhaps of them all, is at the same time watchful and spirited. She does not indeed lecture on virtue like a professor of moral philosophy, nor is she decked in all the flowery ornaments with which the heroines of romance are sometimes adorned. She always appears in the simple dress, so becoming, and so peculiarly natural to young English ladies of virtue and good sense.

  It was received with such extraordinary avidity that a large impression was quickly sold in England, another was bought up in Ireland, a translation was executed into the French language, and it soon made its appearance in a second edition with an apologetic “Advertisement” and “Two Letters” relating to the “Memoirs of a Lady of Quality,” sent to the editor by “a Person of Honour.” This first edition is in our day scarce enough, and sufficiently coarse to fetch an enhanced price.

  Peregrine Pickle attacks by a most brutal and cowardly plot the honour of a young girl, whom he wants to marry, and who is the sister of his best friend. We got to hate his rancorous, concentrated, obstinate character, which is at once that of an absolute king accustomed to please himself at the expense of others’ happiness, and that of a boor with only the varnish of education. We should be uneasy at living near him; he is good for nothing but to shock or tyrannise over others. We avoid him as we would a dangerous beast; the sudden rush of animal passion and the force of his firm will are so overpowering in him, that when he fails he becomes outrageous. He draws his sword against an innkeeper; he must bleed him, grows mad. Everything, even to his generosities, is spoiled by pride; all, even to his gaieties, is clouded by harshness. Peregrine’s amusements are barbarous, and those of Smollett are after the same style.

  Its brightness, and the hearty fun of many of its chapters, like that (ch. xliv.) which describes an entertainment in the manner of the ancients, made the book widely popular and Smollett famous. The pompous gentleman caricatured by Smollett, as the giver of this banquet, was Mark Akenside.

  He keeps the reader’s attention even when he offends his taste. He impaired the literary merit of “Peregrine Pickle,” but at the same time added to its dissolute character and its immediate popularity by the forced insertion of the licentious “Memoirs of a Lady of Quality.” Now a serious blemish, these memoirs formed at the time an added attraction to the book. They were eagerly read as the authentic account of Lady Vane, a notorious woman of rank, and were furnished to Smollett by herself, in the hope, fully gratified, that her infamous career might be known to future generations.

  It is a laughter-provoking book, with abundance of incident and “go,” but it is occasionally indefensibly coarse, and not unfrequently shows that want of gentlemanly feeling which Smollett’s admirers have too often to regret.

  The autobiographic method did not prove pleasing to Akenside and others, whose characters were burlesqued in this novel; and Smollett could hardly employ the excuse of Dr. John Shebbeare, who says that novelists are like army-tailors, they make suits for all mankind, to be taken and fitted on to their persons by Tom, Dick, and Harry. For Smollett fitted his descriptions to the individual, and took care that they should suit no one else. His method is minute and his satire savage and personal.

Ferdinand Count Fathom, 1753

  I think “Count Fathom” (though a bad, affected style) written with a better intention, and Melvin’s character a good one, but they none of them are to be named in a day with our good friend Richardson.

  Smollett, notwithstanding his peculiar propensity for burlesque and broad humour, has, in his “Ferdinand Count Fathom,” painted a scene of natural terror with astonishing effect; with such vigour of imagination indeed, and minuteness of detail, that the blood runs cold, and the hair stands erect from the impression. The whole turns upon the Count, who is admitted, during a tremendous storm, into a solitary cottage in a forest, discovering a body just murdered in the room where he is going to sleep, and the door of which, on endeavouring to escape, he finds fastened upon him.

  His “Adventures of Count Fathom” is a description of the career of a hideous and perhaps an anomalous scoundrel. The same tendency to exaggerate both incident and character pervades all Smollett’s novels. He seems to write under the stimulus of brandy. It is the nature and fancy of madness. The atmosphere of atrocity that surrounds the principal character and his associates in the “Count Fathom” is so black and stifling, and their features are so horrible, that one’s imagination takes refuge almost in contempt in order to relieve itself of the disgust they have excited. At the same time it must be owned that there are points in the work which answer to the stimulated energies of an undoubtedly powerful mind by nature…. No one of Smollett’s works, or indeed of any other writer of fiction that I am acquainted with, contains stronger specimens of real power in invention and language, than this exhibits.

  The Count is a scoundrel, or, at least, tries to be one; but he is so weak, so easily baffled, so utterly unable to succeed except where he is helped by the incredible folly of the virtuous characters; so much more in fact of a dupe than a villain, that whatever feeling he does arouse is one of a rather mild contempt. We hear much of his cleverness, but never see it. Smollett’s literary fault in connection with him was not that he drew a greater sinner than any man should put into a book, but that, having introduced his hero as a villain of extraordinary ability, he entirely fails to convince the reader that Count Fathom was other than a very poor rogue indeed. The scene in the Robbers’ Hut in the forest is sometimes spoken of as being original, and the model of many others of the same kind, but the praise can hardly have been given with the due recollection of much that is to be found in the “Spanish and French Authors” whom Smollett took as his masters.

  His most sustained effort. The irony of the opening chapters, the ruthless characterisation of a scoundrel, and the description of the robbers’ hut in the Black Forest exhibit a striking reserve of power. Few novels have been more imitated.

Don Quixote, 1753

  I am sorry my friend Smollett loses his time in translations: he has certainly a talent for invention, though I think it flags a little in his last work. Don Quixote is a difficult undertaking: I shall never desire to read any attempt to new-dress him. Though I am a mere piddler in the Spanish language, I had rather take pains to understand him in the original than sleep over a stupid translation.

  Smollett inherited from nature a strong sense of ridicule, a great fund of original humour, and a happy versatility of talent, by which he could accommodate his style to almost every species of writing. He could adopt, alternately, the solemn, the lively, the sarcastic, the burlesque, and the vulgar. To these qualifications, he joined an inventive genius, and a vigorous imagination.

  It wants that picturesque and romantic tone which is so great a charm in the original—that tenderness of feeling in the midst of, and modifying, the wildest extravagance of gaiety, which forms as it were the atmosphere of the southern humour, and distinguishes alike the frantic wit of the old comedy of Greece, the broad burlesque of the primitive Italian stage, and glows with such a steady and yet subdued radiance through the pages of the gentle Cervantes. Smollett’s “Don Quixote” wants sun—the sun of La Mancha.

  If in many ways not a faithful representation of Cervantes’ immortal novel, is a lively and spirited production, showing Smollett’s great command over language and power of fluent and vivacious narrative.

History of England, 1757–65

  Robertson’s History is, I think, extremely well written.—It was well observed, that nobody in the Augustan age could conceive that so soon after, a Horse should be made Consul: and yet matters were so well prepared by the time of Caligula, that nobody was surprised at the matter. And so when Clarendon and Temple wrote History, they little thought the time was so near when a vagabond Scot should write nonsense ten thousand strong.

  I am reading again, the “History of England,” that of Smollett…. I have to the reign of George the Second, and, in spight of the dislike I have of Smollett’s language and style of writing, I am much entertained.

  Smollett had unquestionably talents, but his genius was entirely turned to the low and the ludicrous; of the dignity and beauty of historic composition, he had no conception, much less could he boast of possessing any portion of its all-pervading and philosophical spirit. His work is a dull and often malignant compilation, equally destitute of instruction and amusement.

  Respect for the great name of Smollett will not suffer me to pass over in silence his “History of England,” the most important of his compilations. It is not to the purpose of the present enquiry to observe that the general concoction of the work reminds us rather of the promptings of the bookseller, than of the talents of its author. It is not however to be wondered at, that the style of a work, thus crudely composed, should not be such as to put contemporary authors to the blush.

  In the beginning of the year 1758, Smollett published his “Complete History of England, deduced from the Descent of Julius Cæsar to the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, in 1748;” in four volumes 4to. It is said that this voluminous work, containing the history of thirteen centuries, and written with uncommon spirit and correctness of language was composed and finished for the press within fourteen months, one of the greatest exertions of facility of composition which was ever recorded in the history of literature…. It cannot be denied that, as a clear and distinct narrative of facts, strongly and vigorously told with a laudable regard to truth and impartiality, the Continuation may vie with our best historical works. The author was incapable of being swayed by fear or favour; and where his judgment is influenced, we can see that he was only misled by an honest belief in the truth of his own arguments.

  Warburton heard of its swift sale while his own “Divine Legation” lay heavy and quiet at his publisher’s; and “the Vagabond Scot who writes nonsense,” was the character vouchsafed to Smollett by the vehement proud priest. But Goldsmith keeps his temper, notwithstanding Smollett’s great and somewhat easily-earned good fortune; and, in this as in former instances, there is no disposition to carp at a good success or quarrel with a celebrated name. His notice has evident marks of the interpolation of Griffiths, though that worthy’s more deadly hostility to Smollett had not yet begun; but even as it stands, in the “Review” which had so many points of personal and political opposition to the subject of it, it is manly and kind. The weak places were pointed out with gentleness, while Goldsmith strongly seized on what he felt to be the strength of Smollett.

  But such a work written in fourteen months could hardly compete in manner, and still less in matter, with the eight years’ careful labour of Hume. The style is fluent and loose, possessing a careless vigour where the subject is naturally exciting, but composed too hastily to rise above dulness in the record of dry transactions. As regards matter, the historian can make no pretension to original research. He executed the book as a piece of hack-work for a London bookseller, availing himself freely of previous publications, and taking no pains to bring new facts to light.

  The versatility of genius was never more fully proved than when Smollett turned historian. Put to the trade of book-making he became the ideal book-maker. The language cannot show a more complete example of the dismal art than the history compiled by a prince of the domain of fiction, a master of fancy as fertile, and of a pen as vivid as English literature has ever produced. To Smollett’s “Continuation of Hume,” and the book trade which tyrannically forced it upon several much-enduring generations of readers, must be imputed not a little of the extraordinary superstition that the eighteenth century is the most tedious portion of English history.

  It is superficial, inaccurate, and a dull and wearisome record.

  Some critics have urged that Smollett might have taken a broader view of the sources and progress of national expansion and development. Minto rather off-handedly designates his style as “fluent and loose, possessing a careless vigour where the subject is naturally exciting,” and concluded with the words, “the history is said to be full of errors and inconsistencies.” Now, this last clause is taken word for word from Chambers’s “Cyclopædia of English Literature,” who took it from Angus’s “English Literature,” who borrowed it from Macaulay, who annexed it from the Edinburgh Review, which journal had originally adopted it with alterations from Smollett’s own prefatory remarks in the first edition of the book. How many of these authors had read the history for themselves, to see if it really contained such errors and inconsistencies? Criticism conducted on that mutual-trust principle is very convenient for the critic; is it quite fair to the author? Now, anyone who faithfully reads Smollett’s “History of England” and its “Continuation” will not discover a larger percentage of either errors or inconsistencies than appear in the works of his contemporary historians, Tytler, Hume, and Robertson. Smollett is as distinguishingly fair and impartial as it was possible for one to be, influenced so profoundly by his environment as were all the historians of the eighteenth century. The mind of literary Europe was already tinged by that spiritual unrest and moral callousness that was to induce the new birth of the French Revolution.

  Another expedient for the rapid sale of books was their issue in numbers. Smollett’s “History of England” was published in sixpenny numbers, and had an immediate sale of 20,000 copies. This immense success is said to have been due to an artifice practised by the publisher. He sent down a packet of prospectuses carriage free (with half-a-crown enclosed) to every parish clerk in the kingdom, to be distributed by him through the pews of the church. This being generally carried out, a valuable advertisement was obtained, which resulted in an extensive demand for the work.

Sir Launcelot Greaves, 1762

  In the first number of the British Magazine was the opening of the tale which contained his most feminine heroine (Aurelia Darnel), and the most amiable and gentlemanly of his heroes (Sir Launcelot Greaves); for, though Sir Launcelot is mad, wise thoughts made him so; and in the hope to “remedy evils which the law cannot reach, to detect fraud and treason, to a base insolence, to mortify pride, to discourage slander, to disgrace immodesty, and to stigmatise ingratitude,” he stumbles through his odd adventures. There is a pleasure in connecting this alliance of Smollett and Goldsmith, with the first approach of our great humourist to that milder humanity and more genial wisdom which shed their mellow rays on Matthew Bramble.

  It is only in externals that this work bears any resemblance to “Don Quixote.” The author seems to have hesitated between making Sir Lancelot a mere madman and making him a pattern of perfectly sane generosity. The fun and the seriousness do not harmonize. The young knight’s craze for riding about the country to redress wrongs armed cap-a-pie is too harshly out of tune with the rightness of his sympathies and the grave character of the real abuses against which his indignation is directed. In execution the work is very unequal and irregular, but the opening chapters are very powerful, and have been imitated by hundreds of novelists since Smollett’s time.

  An absurd and exaggerated satire which added nothing to his fame.

  Of “Sir Launcelot Greaves,” originally contributed as a serial to “The British Review,” the scheme, as one of the characters remarks, “is somewhat too stale and extravagant.” The plot is the merest excuse for variety of scene, and the characters do not live. What he borrowed from Cervantes is as little put to its proper use by Smollett as what he borrowed from Fielding. His work loses its chief merit when he attempts to exchange his own method of reminiscence for a wider imaginative scheme.

Travels Through France and Italy, 1766

  I was best pleased with my old and excellent friend Smollett, testy and discontented as he is, he writes with perspicuity; his observations are generally sensible, and even his oddities are entertaining.

  Distinguished by acuteness of remark, and shrewdness of expression,—by strong sense and pointed humour.

  That Smollett, in recording the incidents of such a journey, should have put a good deal of gall into his ink, is not a matter of surprise; but it is rather remarkable that his journal should be so devoid of literary merit. The author of “Humphrey Clinker” seems to have packed his genius away at the bottom of his trunk, and not taken it out during his whole tour. His spirit is all put forth in vituperation; but otherwise he is tame and commonplace.

  To see his self-will, in its last soured and savage state, let us consult his “Travels.” He was the “Smelfungus” of Sterne, who travelled from Dan to Beersheba, and found all barren. We are among the very few who have read the book. It is a succession of asthmatic gasps and groans.

  Wherever I have been able to test Smollett’s accuracy, I have found him so invariably exact and truthful, that I should be inclined to take a good deal for granted on his mere assertion. It is beside my purpose—which is simply that of recalling attention to a book that has been extravagantly abused by some, and unreasonably neglected or forgotten by others—to follow the author through all his various wanderings by sea and land.

  Concerning Smollett’s “Letters from Abroad” much need not be said. They are far from being without glimpses of the man in his best style, and they light up objects and places to the untravelled man with many vivid touches and references; but they occupy small ground towards forming an estimate of the value of the novelist’s intellectual labours.

Humphrey Clinker, 1771

  A party novel written by that profligate hireling Smollett to vindicate the Scots and cry down juries.

  In this novel the author most successively executes, what had scarcely ever been before attempted—a representation of the different effects which the same scenes, and persons, and transactions, have on different dispositions and tempers. He exhibits through the whole work a most lively and humorous delineation, confirming strongly the great moral truth, that happiness and all our feelings are the result, less of external circumstances, than the constitution of the mind.

  The very ingenious scheme of describing the various effects produced upon different members of the same family by the same objects, was not original, though it has been supposed to be so. Anstey, the facetious author of the “New Bath Guide,” had employed it six or seven years before “Humphrey Clinker” appeared. But Anstey’s diverting satire was but a light sketch compared to the finished and elaborate manner in which Smollett has, in the first place, identified his characters, and then fitted them with language, sentiments, and powers of observation, in exact correspondence with their talents, temper, condition, and disposition.

  The novel of “Humphrey Clinker” is, I do think, the most laughable story that has ever been written since the goodly art of novel-writing began. Winifred Jenkins and Tabitha Bramble must keep Englishmen on the grin for ages yet to come; and in their letters and the story of their loves there is a perpetual fount of sparkling laughter, as inexhaustible as Bladud’s well.

  The poor peevish author was hastening to his end; but before he sank beneath this life’s horizon, his genius shot forth its brightest beam. Disappointed in his last earthly hope—that of obtaining a consulship on some shore of the Mediterranean, where his last hours might be prolonged in a milder air—he travelled to the neighbourhood of Leghorn, and, settling in a cottage there, finished “Humphrey Clinker,” which is undoubtedly his finest work. Lismahago is the best character in this picture of English life; Bath is the principal scene, upon which the actors play their various parts. Scarcely was this brilliant work completed, when Smollett died, an invalided exile, worn out long before the allotted seventy years. His pictures of the navy-men who trod English decks a century ago, are unsurpassed and imperishable. Trunnion, the one-eyed commodore; Hatchway and Bowling, the lieutenants; Ap-Morgan, the kind but fiery Welsh surgeon; Tom Pipes, the silent boatswain, remain as types of a race of men long extinct, who manned our ships when they were, in literal earnest, wooden walls, and when the language and the discipline, to which officers of the royal navy were accustomed, were somewhat of the roughest and the hardest.

  “Humphrey Clinker” is the best of his novels. It is pervaded by a manly tone of feeling, natural, caustic, and humorous observation, and fine discrimination of character. The descriptions of rural scenery, society, and manners are clear and fascinating. Smollett was gifted with a keen sense of the comic and ludicrous, which he deftly used, while touches of pathos also occur in his writings.

  It is worth while noticing that in “Humphrey Clinker” the veritable British poorly-educated and poor-spelling woman begins to express herself in the actual dialect of the species, and in the letters of Mrs. Winifred Jenkins to her fellow maid-servant Mrs. Mary Jones at Brambleton Hall, daring a journey made by the family to the North, we have some very worthy and strongly-marked originals not only of Mrs. Malaprop and Mrs. Partington, but of the immortal Sairey Gamp and of scores of other descendants in Thackeray and Dickens, here and there.

  At Pisa he was visited by Sir Horace Mann, who did what he could for him; and among other work he wrote his charming novel of “Humphrey Clinker,” in which he has evidently figured himself under the character of Matthew Bramble, whom Hannay calls “the most credible specimen of the bourru bienfaisant in literature.” The charm of the book lies in its sweetness, which is the ripe product of Southern influence combined with ill health.

  Matthew Bramble and Obadiah Lismahago, the ’squire’s sister and her Methodist maid, have passed permanently into literature, and their places are as secure as those of Partridge and Parson Adams, of Corporal Trim and “my Uncle Toby.” Not even the Malapropoism of Sheridan or Dickens is quite as riotously diverting, as rich in its unexpected turns, as that of Tabitha Bramble and Winifred Jenkins, especially Winifred, who remains delightful even when deduction is made of the poor and very mechanical fun extracted from the parody of her pietistic phraseology. That it could ever have been considered witty to spell “grace” “grease,” and “Bible” “byebill,” can only be explained by the indiscriminate hostility of the earlier assailants of Enthusiasm. Upon this, as well as upon a particularly evil-smelling taint of coarseness which, to the honour of the author’s contemporaries was fully recognized in his own day as offensive, it is needless now to dwell.

  This charming work, with its multitudinous lights and shadows, its variety of incident and character, and its easy and picturesque style of narrative, besides being one of the most mirth-provoking stories in the language, is a vivid portraiture of the times…. Fielding’s coarseness belongs to his own time, and is incidental; Smollett’s is ingrained and inherent.

Poetry and Dramas

  This ode [“Tears of Scotland”] by Dr. Smollett does rather more honour to the author’s feelings than his taste. The mechanical part, with regard to numbers and language, is not so perfect as so short a work as this requires; but the pathetic it contains, particularly in the last stanza but one, is exquisitely fine.

  The few poems which he has left have a portion of delicacy which is not to be found in his novels: but they have not, like those prose fictions, the strength of a master’s hand. Were he to live over again, we might wish him to write more poetry, in the belief that his poetical talent would improve by exercise; but we should be glad to have more of his novels just as they are.

  Of Smollett’s poems much does not remain to be said. The “Regicide” is such a tragedy as might be expected from a clever youth of eighteen. The language is declamatory, the thoughts inflated, and the limits of nature and verisimilitude transgressed in describing the characters and passions. Yet there are passages not wanting in poetical vigour. His two satires have so much of the rough flavour of Juvenal, as to retain some relish, now that the occasion which produced them has passed away. The “Ode to Independence,” which was not published till after his decease, amid much of commonplace, has some very nervous lines. The personification itself is but an awkward one. The term is scarcely abstract and general enough to be invested with the attributes of an ideal being. In the “Tears of Scotland,” patriotism has made him eloquent and pathetic; and the “Ode to Leven Water” is sweet and natural. None of the other pieces except the “Ode to Mirth,” which has some sprightliness of fancy, deserves to be particularly noticed.

  As a poet, though he takes not a very high rank, yet the few poems which he has left have a delicacy which is not to be found in his novels.

  The “Reprisal,” which appeared in 1757, stands alone in two respects in Smollett’s life. It was his only successful attempt to reach the stage, and it led to the soldering up of an old quarrel. The plot of this two-act comedy may have given Marryat the first idea of “The Three Cutters,” and is worked up with no small liveliness. Its characters have a distinct comic vis of a rather broad kind. The sailors Lyon, Haulyard, and Block, are good as Smollett’s sailors always were; Oclabber and Maclaymore, the exiled Jacobites in the French service, are first drafts of the immortal Lismahago. Like most of Smollett’s work in those years, this comedy has its touch of journalism.

  Except for some fiery passages, Smollett’s “Regicide” is not of much account. Smollett was constitutionally able to express anger, and there are indignant explosions in almost every scene, often very forcible, but without real feeling. The persistent writing of irate lines made a fire in the author’s ears, but his heart remained untouched.

General

  There was a third, somewhat posterior in time, not in talents, who was indeed a rough driver, and rather too severe to his cattle; but in faith he carried us at a merry pace, over land or sea; nothing came amiss to him, for he was up to both elements, and a match for nature in every shape, character, and degree; he was not very courteous, it must be owned, for he had a capacity for higher things, and was above his business; he wanted only a little more suavity and discretion to have figured with the best.

  He has published more volumes, upon more subjects, than perhaps any other author of modern date; and, in all, he has left marks of his genius. The greater part of his novels are peculiarly excellent. He is nevertheless a hasty writer; when he affects us most, we are aware that he might have done more. In all his works of invention, we find the stamp of a mighty mind. In his lightest sketches, there is nothing frivolous, trifling and effeminate. In his most glowing portraits, we acknowledge a mind at ease, rather essaying its powers, than tasking them. We applauded his works; but it is with profounder sentiment that we meditate his capacity. The style of Smollett has never been greatly admired, and it is brought forward here merely to show in what manner men of the highest talents, and of great eminence in the belles lettres, could write forty or fifty years ago.

  Smollett had much penetration, though he is frequently too vulgar to please; but his knowledge of men and manners is unquestionable.

  There is a vein in Smollett—a Scotch vein—which is always disgusting to people with delicacy; but it is enough to say of him in his work, that he is an invalid with whom even invalids cannot sympathise—one has no patience with his want of patience.

  It was his misfortune that the fair display of his talents, and perhaps the genuine sentiments of his heart, were perverted by the prejudices of friendship, or by the more inexcusable impulses of jealousy, revenge, and all that enter into the composition of an irritable character. He seems to have gladly embraced the opportunity, which secrecy afforded, of dealing his blows around without discrimination, and without mercy. It is painful to read the continual personal abuse he levelled at his rival Mr. Griffiths, and the many vulgar and coarse sarcasms he directed against every author, who presumed to doubt the infallibility of his opinion. It is no less painful to contemplate the self-sufficiency displayed on every occasion where he can introduce his own character and works.

  You ask me what degrees there are between Scott’s novels and those of Smollett. They appear to me to be quite distinct in every particular, more especially in their aims. Scott endeavours to throw so interesting and romantic a colouring into common and low characters as to give them a touch of the sublime. Smollett on the contrary pulls down and levels what with other men would continue romance. The grand parts of Scott are within the reach of more minds than the finest humours in Humphrey Clinker. I forget whether that fine thing of the Serjeant is Fielding or Smollett but it gives me more pleasure than the whole novel of the Antiquary. You must remember what I mean. Some one says to the Serjeant: “That’s a non-sequitur!”—“If you come to that,” replies the Serjeant, “you’re another!”

  In Smollett’s Strap, his Lieutenant Bowling, his Morgan the honest Welshman, and his Matthew Bramble, we have exquisite humour,—while in his Peregrine Pickle we find an abundance of drollery, which too often degenerates into mere oddity; in short, we feel that a number of things are put together to counterfeit humour, but that there is no growth from within.

  Smollett’s humour often arises from the situation of the persons, or the peculiarity of their external appearance; as, from Roderick Random’s carroty locks, which hung down over his shoulders like a pound of candles, or Strap’s ignorance of London, and the blunders that follow from it. There is a tone of vulgarity about all his productions. The incidents frequently resemble detached anecdotes taken from a newspaper or magazine; and, like those in “Gil Blas,” might happen to a hundred other characters. He exhibits the ridiculous accidents and reverses to which human life is liable, not “the stuff” of which it is composed. He seldom probes to the quick, or penetrates beyond the surface; and, therefore, he leaves no stings in the minds of his readers, and in this respect is far less interesting than Fielding. His novels always enliven, and never tire us; we take them up with pleasure, and lay them down without any strong feeling of regret.

  Upon the whole, the genius of Smollett may be said to resemble that of Rubens. His pictures are often deficient in grace; sometimes coarse, and even vulgar in conception; deficient in keeping, and in the due subordination of parts to each other; and intimating too much carelessness on the part of the artist. But these faults are redeemed by such richness and brilliancy of colours; such a profusion of imagination,—now bodying forth the grand and terrible—now the natural, the easy, and the ludicrous; there is so much of life, action, and bustle, in every group he has painted; so much force and individuality of character,—that we readily grant to Smollett an equal rank with his great rival Fielding, while we place both far above any of their successors in the same line of fictitious composition.

  The intellect of Smollett, acute and penetrating, enabled him to dive a certain way, but not as with the genius of a Fielding, into the very recesses of the human mind. His humour, lively and versatile as it was, lay rather in broad and strong painting, approaching caricature, than in situation and incident, which require no comment, which possess the soul and naked power of wit, without the ornament of language. Yet he could paint vividly and accurately the weaknesses and absurdities which presented themselves in ludicrous points of view. He had a clear conception, and he conveyed it in a perspicuous and forcible style. He combines simplicity with correctness, and elegance and ease with grace. His wit, bold and sudden, never fails to strike; and it is keen as it is strong and manly. His humour, though exquisite at times, and always lively, cannot compete with the innate power of Fielding, nor with that of Swift and Congreve. Nor as a general writer does he possess the delicate taste or chastened moral, with the poignant satire and pleasing variety of Addison, but his great forte lay in displaying the various incongruities of conduct and manners, as well as the sources of human actions, in all which he proved himself no unworthy rival of Theophrastus, of Bruyere, and Molière.

  “Humphry Clinker” is certainly Smollett’s best. I am rather divided between “Peregrine Pickle” and “Roderick Random,” both extraordinary good in their way, which is a way without tenderness; but you will have to read them both, and I send the first volume of “Peregrine” as the richer of the two.

  The “Briton,” which probably suggested the title of Wilke’s famous publication, was established also under the auspices of Bute, and conducted by Smollett. But no trace of the genius which produced “Roderick Random,” and “Humphrey Clinker,” is to be found in this production. Like his continuation of the “History of England,” a vapid chronicle, put together by contract with the booksellers, these political essays, written for the wages of a minister, were among the dullest productions of their kind.

  Smollett, a practised writer for the press, had the command, indeed, of a style the fluency of which is far from being without force, or rhetorical parade either; but it is animated by no peculiar expressiveness, by no graces either of art or of nature. His power consists in the cordiality of his conception and the breadth and freedom of his delineation of the humourous, both in character and in situation. The feeling of the humourous in Smollett always overpowers, or at least has a tendency to overpower, the merely satirical spirit; which is not the case with Fielding, whose humour has generally a sly vein of satire running through it even when it is most gay and genial.

  I have read over “Roderick Random,” too—an odd contrast—but did not learn anything new from it. I found I knew Smollett well enough before. However, I shall get “Peregrine Pickle” for the sake of Trunnion and Pipes, who are grown very dim to me. Fielding’s coarseness belongs to his time, Smollett’s is of all time. But there are good sketches in him.

  He reflects, in many respects, the character of the age more fully than any other writer—its material pleasures, its coarse amusements, its hard drinking, loud swearing, and practical jokes. His heroes are generally libertines, full of mirth and animal spirits, who make small account of woman’s chastity, and whose adventures are intrigues, and their merriment broad farce. Such are the chief features of “Roderick Random” and “Peregrine Pickle,” neither of which, however, is so offensive as the “Adventures of Ferdinand, Count Fathom,” the hero of which is a blackguard and a scoundrel, without a redeeming virtue.

  He exaggerates caricature; he thinks to amuse us by showing us mouths gaping to the ears, and noses half-a-foot long; he magnifies a national prejudice or a professional trick until it absorbs the whole character; he jumbles together the most repulsive oddities,—a Lieutenant Lismahago half roasted by Red Indians; old jack-tars who pass their life in shouting and travestying all sorts of ideas into their nautical jargon; old maids as ugly as monkeys, as withered as skeletons, and as sour as vinegar; maniacs steeped in pedantry, hypochondria, misanthropy, and silence.

  Smollett’s talent lay in vigorous descriptions of broad humour, whether in person, character, action, or scenery, and in these it may be said he has been surpassed by few. The scenes he had witnessed in life he described in the broadest sunlight of vividness. He had been a surgeon on board of a man-of-war, and every portion of his novels that have any reference to the seaman of a seafaring life may be given in upon evidence and sworn to. The whole scene on board the man-of-war is as minute and true as a Dutch painting. Smollett’s language, moreover, is admirably adapted for humorous description, being natural, easy, concise, and home-striking to the point. He likewise possesses amazing power in narrations of terrific adventure, as, witness the forest scene with the robbers in “Count Fathom.” And for his humour, all the night adventures in inns may be quoted. What can surpass in drollery of thought his making one of the landladies rush forth upon an occasion of alarm, installed in that never-described article of her husband’s wardrobe, with the wrong side before? The humour of the circumstance may surely plead for this allusion to it.

  He is full of wit and humour, but his humour is too broad and occasionally rather coarse. Smollett, however, is not only comic, he also possesses wonderful power for the representation of the pathetic and the horrible. The most original and the most carefully written of his novels is “Humphrey Clinker.”

  Dickens in early childhood sat at the feet of Tobias Smollett. From the author of “Roderick Random” came to the author of “David Copperfield” the first inspiration of the story-teller. Each of these two men was the most popular fiction writer of his time, and there cannot be a doubt that the artist whose loss from among us we have not yet ceased to mourn gathered something both in style and substance from the novelist whose fictions so delighted his own childhood. It is not then quite wise in us, whose moral and intellectual lives have been largely influenced by Dickens, to pass by wholly unheeded the old master whom the child Dickens studied so intently and to such great purpose.

  So long as his odes to “Leven Water” and to “Independence” exist, Smollett can never fail to be admired as a poet, nor can a feeling of regret be avoided that he did not devote more of his genius to poetic compositions. We cannot take leave of this distinguished Scotchman—distinguished as a historian, as a novelist, and as the author of lines which possess the masculine strength of Dryden—without alluding to a passage in his novel of “Peregrine Pickle,” that passage so inexpressibly touching where the Jacobite exiles stand every morning on the coast of France to contemplate the blue hills of their native land, to which they are never to return!

  There is a great similarity between Smollett and Lever. It rarely happens that the men who write prescriptions also write novels; but Smollett like Lever had combined the parts of physician and comic novelist. The tone of both is tinged by Tory tendencies. Smollett and Lever put their own adventures in books. Smollett introduced Dr. Akenside into “Peregrine Pickle” as Dr. Smellfungus. Lever puts Dr. Cusack into “O’Malley,” and Dr. Finucane in “Lorrequer.” Both started Tory journals in support of the Government; and both papers survived not many weeks; both wrote with ease and eschewed revision; both had a military bias; and martial scenes and rollicking adventure, with a relish of practical jokes, equally constitute their characteristics.

  It is in keeping with Smollett’s deliberate dwelling on the more brutal phases of life, that the would-be sentimental parts of his stories are so terribly forced, cold, and prosaically positive. We are told that the physician listened with complacency to the ravings of Renaldo, Count de Melville, over the loss of the peerless Monimia, ravished from him by the machinations of the wicked Fathom. At this distance of time we do not listen to him with complacency, nor indeed to any of the amorous parts of Smollett’s work. When posterity reads that “the lovers were seated; he looked and languished; she flushed and faltered; all was doubt and delirium, fondness and flutter,” posterity laughs. There is no love scene in Smollett, though there are many which would be love-scenes if elaborate description and persistent filling up of adjectives could give them the spirit they lack…. To this prosaic accuracy of language ought to be attributed much of what is called Smollett’s brutality. He certainly describes and almost insists on the merely physical sufferings and weakness of mankind. Disease and deformity, rags and vermin, are introduced by him with undesirable frequency—undesired, that is, by the taste of our time. Further, he is very apt to speak of mere brutal violence, done either in jest or in anger, with little or no appearance of indignation on his own part. For one thing, there are more blows given and received in Smollett; there is more flogging than could be paralleled in the work of any other writer who can fairly be called a man of letters.

  While Smollett occasionally rises above Fielding, he does not maintain the same high level, and though free of digression, to which Fielding was prone, he is of coarser tastes. He is remarkable for a variety of incidents and characters almost bewildering in their abundance, and expressed in an easy, flowing style which is never obscure or tedious. If Fielding anticipated Thackeray, Smollett was the forerunner of Dickens. His love of fun leads him often to the verge of caricature. He painted a whole gallery of original characters, among which are the life-like portraits of Squire Bramble and Lieutenant Lesmahago, Commodore Trunnion and Jack Hatchway, Morgan and Tom Bowling, besides Strap, and Pipes, and Winifred Jenkins.

  A coarse anticipator of Captain Marryat.

  Observation, and observation of the outside rather than of the inside, is Smollett’s characteristic. He had seen much; he had felt much; he had desired, and enjoyed, and failed in, and been indignant at much. And he related these experiences, or something like them, with a fresh and vigorous touch, giving them for the most part true life and nature, but not infusing any great individuality into them either from the artistic or the ethical side. He was a good writer but not one of distinction. He never takes the very slightest trouble about construction: his books are mere lengths cut off from a conceivably infinite bead-roll of adventurers. Vivid as are his sketches they all run (except perhaps in his last and best book) to types. His humour though exuberant is for the most part what has been called “the humour of the stick.” He has no commanding or profound knowledge of human nature below the surface.

  The constructive power of Fielding is absent from Smollett, but in inventive tale-telling and in cynical characterisation, he is not easily equalled.

  As a novelist he stands among the British classics, probably unsurpassed in his own region—an amusing delineation of the stronger humours and absurdities of character.

  This rough and strong writer was troubled with no superfluous refinements of instinct. He delighted in creating types of eccentric profligates and ruffians, and to do this was to withdraw from the novel as Richardson, Fielding, and Sterne conceived it, back into a form of the picaresque romance. He did not realise what his greatest compeers were doing, and when he wrote “Roderick Random” (1748) he avowedly modelled it on “Gil Blas,” coming, as critics have observed, even closer to the Spanish picaros spirit than did Le Sage himself. If Smollett had gone no further than this, and had merely woven out of his head one more romance of the picaresque class, we should never have heard of him. But his own life, unlike those of his three chief rivals, had been adventurous on land and under sail, and he described what he had seen and suffered. Three years later he published “Peregrine Pickle” (1751), and just before he died, in 1771, “Humphrey Clinker.” The abundant remainder of his work is negligible, these three books alone being worthy of note in a sketch of literature so summary as this.

  Smollett was placed in a very high rank by his contemporaries. Lady Wortley-Montagu praised her “dear Smollett” to all her friends (including Mrs. Delany and other pious people), Johnson commended his ability, Burke delighted in “Roderick Random,” and Lydia Languish seems to have had an impartial affection for all his novels. Of later generations, Scott readily grants to him an equality with his great rival Fielding. Elia makes his imaginary aunt refer with a sigh of regret to the days when she thought it proper to read “Peregrine Pickle.” Oblivious of Dickens, Leigh Hunt called Smollett the finest of all caricaturists. Talfourd puts his Strap far above Fielding’s Patridge, and Thackeray gives to “Clinker” the palm among laughable stories since the art of novel-writing was invented. More critical is the estimate of Hazlitt. Smollett, he says, portrays the eccentricities rather than the characters of human life, but no one has praised so well the charm of “Humphrey Clinker” or the “force and mastery” of many episodes in “Court Fathom.” Taine would appear to sympathise with Mr. Leslie Stephen in a much lower estimate of Smollett as the interpreter of the extravagant humours of “ponderous well-fed masses of animated beefsteak.” Of the five great eighteenth century novelists, Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne, Smollett is now valued the least; yet in the influence he has exercised upon successors he is approached by Sterne alone of his contemporaries.

  Smollett’s realism is marked by the spot of decay. All his first novels have one characteristic of the fictions of Mrs. Manley and Mrs. Haywood, Tom Brown, and numerous other early eighteenth-century writers: he crowds his pages with well-known characters of his own time, usually for the purpose of fierce satire. He is a Swift without Swift’s clear and wide vision. He ridicules Fielding for marrying his “cook-maid;” Akenside—a respectable poet and scholar—is a mere “index-hunter who holds the eel of science by the tail;” Garrick is “a parasite and buffoon, whose hypocrisy is only equalled by his avarice;” Lyttelton is “a dunce;” he insults Newcastle, Bute, and Pitt, and sneers at his king, and the “sweet princes of the royal blood.” In making his characters at will the mouthpiece of his venom, he takes no pains to preserve their consistency; and frequently, under the excitement of his ferocious hate, he forgets they are there, and speaks out in his own name. This kind of work, though done brilliantly and under the inspiration of robust indignation, does not form a novel.