ary, he will do so at his peril, and will hardly by any possibility
escape shipwreck unless his line is the purely fantastic. But if he
relies solely, or too much, on such experience, though he may be quite
successful, his success will be subject to discount, bound to pay
royalty to experience itself. It is pretty certain that most of
Smollett's most successful things, from _Roderick Random_ to _Humphry
Clinker_, and in those two capital books, perhaps, most of all, kept
very close to actual experience, and sometimes merely reported it.

This, however, is only a comparative drawback; it is in a sense a
positive merit; and it is connected, in a very intimate way, with the
general character of Smollett's novel-method. This is, to a great
extent, a reaction or relapse towards the picaresque style. Smollett may
have translated both Cervantes and Le Sage; he certainly translated the
latter: and it was Le Sage who in any case had the greatest influence
over him. Now the picaresque method is not exactly untrue to ordinary
life: on the contrary, as we have seen, it was a powerful schoolmaster
to bring the novel thereto. But it subjects the scenes of ordinary life
to a peculiar process of sifting: and when it has got what it wants, it
proceeds to heighten them and "touch them up" in its own peculiar
manner of decoration. This is Smollett's method throughout, even in that
singular _pastiche_ of _Don Quixote_ itself, _Sir Launcelot Greaves_,
which certainly was not his happiest conception, but which has had
rather hard measure.

As used by him it has singular merits, and communicates to at least
three of his five books (_The Adventures of an Atom_ is deliberately
excluded as not really a novel at all) a certain "liveliness" which,
though it is not the life_like_ness of Fielding, is a great attraction.
He showed it first in _Roderick Random_ (1748), which appeared a little
before _Tom Jones_, and was actually taken by some as the work of the
same author. It would be not much more just to take Roderick as
Smollett's deliberate presentment of himself than to apply the same
construction to Marryat's not very dissimilar, but more unlucky, _coup
d'essai_ of _Frank Mildmay_. But it is certain that there was something,
though exactly how much has never been determined, of the author's
family history in the earliest part, a great deal of his experiences on
board ship in the middle, and probably not a little, though less, of his
fortunes i