erintendence. We have his own word [3], that he had written
a very small part of it. In 1757, his Reprisal, or the Tars of Old
England, an entertainment in two acts, in which the scene throughout is
laid on board ship, and which describes seamen in his usual happy vein,
was acted at Drury-lane with tolerable success. In 1758, he published
his History of England from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Treaty
of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748, four volumes. Of this work, hasty as it was,
having been compiled in fourteen months, ten thousand copies were
speedily sold.

Some strictures in the Critical Review, which, in order to screen the
printer of it, he generously avowed himself to have written, once more
exposed him to a legal prosecution. The offensive passages were
occasioned by a pamphlet, in which Admiral Knowles had vindicated
himself from some reflections that were incidentally cast on him in the
course of Sir John Mordaunt's trial for the failure of a secret
expedition on the coast of France, near Rochefort. In his comments on
the pamphlet, Smollett had stigmatized Knowles, the author of it, as "an
admiral without conduct, an engineer without knowledge, an officer
without resolution, and a man without veracity." It can scarcely be
wondered, if, after such provocation, the party injured was not deterred
by menaces, or diverted by proposals of agreement, from seeking such
reparation as the law would afford him. This reparation the law did not
fail to give; and Smollett was sentenced to pay a penalty of one hundred
pounds, and to be confined for three months in the prison of the King's
Bench. Cervantes wrote his Don Quixote in a gaol; and Smollett resolved,
since he was now in one, that he would write a Don Quixote too. It maybe
said of the Spaniard, according to Falstaff's boast, "that he is not
only witty in himself, but the cause that wit is in other men;" and
among the many attempts at imitation, to which the admirable original
has given rise, Sir Launcelot Greaves is not one of the worst. That a
young man, whose brain had been slightly affected by a disappointment in
love, should turn knight-errant, at a time when books of chivalry were
no longer in vogue, is not, indeed, in the first instance, very
probable. But we are contented to overlook this defect in favour of the
many original touches of character, and striking views of life,
particularly in the mad-house, and the prison into which he leads his
hero, and whic