pocket, was in undoubted difficulties till (and after) he obtained the
post of surgeon's mate on board a man-of-war, and took part in the
Carthagena expedition. After coming home he made at least some attempts
to practise: but was once more drawn off to literature, though
fortunately not to tragedy. For the rest of his life he was a
hard-worked but by no means ill-paid journalist, novelist, and
miscellanist, making as much as L2000 by his _History of England_, not
ill-written, though now never read. Like Fielding (though, unlike him,
more than once) he went abroad in search of health and died in the quest
at Leghorn. Smollett was not ignorant, but he seems to have known modern
languages better than ancient: though there is doubt about his direct
share in the translations to which he gave his name. Moreover he had
some though no great skill in verse.

Lastly Sterne (1713-1768), though hardly, as it is the custom to call
him, "an Irishman," yet vindicated the claims of the third constituent
of the United Kingdom by being born in Ireland, from which country his
mother came. But the Sternes were pure English, of a gentle family which
had migrated from East Anglia through Nottingham to Yorkshire, and was
much connected with Cambridge. Thither Laurence, the novelist, after a
very roving childhood (his father was a soldier), and a rather irregular
education, duly went: and, receiving preferment in the Church from his
Yorkshire relations, lived for more than twenty years in that county
without a history, till he took the literary world--hardly by storm, but
by a sort of fantastic capful of wind--with _Tristram Shandy_ in 1760.
Seven or eight years of fame, some profit, not hard work (for his books
shrink into no great solid bulk), and constant travelling, ended by a
sudden death at his Bond Street lodgings, after a long course of
ill-health very carelessly attended to.

One or two more traits are relevant. All the four were married, and
married pretty early; two of them married twice. Richardson's first wife
was, in orthodox fashion, his master's daughter: of his second little is
known. Fielding's first (he had made a vain attempt earlier to abduct an
heiress who was a relation) was, by universal consent, the model both of
Sophia and Amelia, almost as charming as either, and as amiable; his
second was her maid. Of Mrs. Smollett, who was a Miss Lascelles and a
West Indian heiress in a small way, we know very little--the habit of