rick has made use of his friends, knocked down his
enemies, and generally elbowed and shoved his way through the crowd of
adventures long enough, Narcissa and her fortune are not so much the
reward of his exertions as a stock and convenient method of putting an
end to the account of them. The customer has been served with a
sufficient amount of the commodity he demands: and the scissors are
applied, the canister shut up, the tap turned off. It almost results--it
certainly coincides--that some of the minor characters, and some of the
minor scenes, are much more vivid than the hero (the heroine is almost
an absolute nonentity) and the whole story. The curate and the exciseman
in the ninth chapter are, by common consent, among Smollett's greatest
triumphs; but the curate might be excommunicated and the exciseman
excised without anybody who read the book perceiving the slightest gap
or missing link, as far as the story is concerned.

Smollett's second venture, _Peregrine Pickle_ (1751), was more
ambitious, perhaps rose higher in parts, but undoubtedly contained even
more doubtful and inferior matter. No one can justly blame him, though
any one may most justly refrain from praising, from the general point of
view, as regards the "insets" of Miss Williams's story in _Roderick_ and
of that of Lady Vane here. From that point of view they range with the
"Man of the Hill" in _Tom Jones_, and in the first case at least, though
most certainly not in the second, have more justification of connection
with the central story. He may so far underlie the charge of error of
judgment, but nothing worse. Unluckily the "Lady Vane" insertion was, to
a practical certainty, a commercial not an artistic transaction: and
both here and elsewhere Smollett carried his already large licence to
the extent of something like positive pornography. He is in fact one of
the few writers of real eminence who have been forced to Bowdlerise
themselves. Further, there would be more excuse for the most offensive
part of _Peregrine_ if it were not half plagiarism of the main
situations of _Pamela_ and _Clarissa_: if Smollett had not deprived his
hero of all the excuses which, even in the view of some of the most
respectable characters of _Pamela_, attached to the conduct of Mr. B.;
and if he had not vulgarised Lovelace out of any possible attribution of
"regality," except of being what the time would have called King of the
Black Guard. As for Tom Jones, he does n