n Bath and London towards the end. As a single source of
interest and popularity, no doubt, the principal place must be given to
the naval part of the book. Important as the English navy had been, for
nearly two centuries if not for much longer, it had never played any
great part in literature, though it had furnished some caricatured and
rather conventional sketches. There is something more in a play, _The
Fair Quaker of Deal_, by Charles Shadwell, nephew or son of Dryden's
victim, but this was only of third or fourth rate literary value, and an
isolated example to boot. The causes of the neglect have been set forth
by many writers from Macaulay downwards, and need not be discussed here;
the fact is certain. Smollett's employment of "the service" as a
subject may have been, consciously and intentionally, only one of those
utilisings of personal experience of which we have spoken. But really it
was an instance of the great fact that the novelist, on the instigation
mainly of Fielding himself, was beginning to take all actual life to be
his province.

Smollett brought to his work peculiar powers, the chief of which was a
very remarkable one, and almost as much "improved on" Fielding as
Fielding's exercise of it was improved on Richardson--that of providing
his characters and scenes with accessories. Roderick is not only a much
more disagreeable person than Tom, but he is much _less_ of a person:
and Strap, though (_vice versa_) rather a better fellow than Partridge,
is a much fainter and more washed-out character. But in mere interest of
story and accessories the journey of Roderick and Strap to London is
quite the equal, and perhaps the superior, of that of Tom and his
hanger-on after we once leave Upton, where the interest is of a kind
that Smollett could not reach. It is probable that Fielding might, if he
had chosen, have made the prison in _Amelia_ as horribly and
disgustingly realistic (to use a horrible and disgusting word) as the
ship in _Roderick_, but he at any rate did not choose. Moreover
Smollett, himself a member of one of the less predominant partners of
the British and Irish partnership, perhaps for that reason hit on
utilising the difference of these partners (after a fashion which had
never been seen since Shakespeare) in the Welshman Morgan. As far as
mere plot goes, he enters into no competition whatever with either
Fielding or Richardson: the picaresque model did not require that he
should. When Rode