not the real heroine of
this book: her aunt and her aunt's maid divide that position between
them.

A sufficiently ungracious critic may, if he chooses, see in Smollett's
falling back on the letter-plan for _Humphry Clinker_ (1771) an
additional proof of that deficiency in strictly inventive faculty which
has been noticed. The more generous "judge by results" will hardly care
to consider so curiously in the case of such a masterpiece. For a
masterpiece it really is. The comparative absence of "character" in the
higher and literary sense as contrasted with "character-_parts_" in the
technical meaning of the theatre has been admitted in the other books.
Here, with the aid of the letters, it is amply supplied, or perhaps (to
speak with extreme critical closeness) the character-parts are turned
into characters by this means. There is no stint, because of the
provision of this higher interest, of the miscellaneous fun and
"business" which Smollett had always supplied so lavishly out of his
experience, his observation, and, if not his invention, his combining
faculty. And there is the setting of interior and exterior "furniture"
which has been also referred to. Abundant as is the information which
the eighteenth century has given us as to its justly beloved place of
pilgrimage, Bath, there is nothing livelier than the Bath scenes here,
from Chesterfield to Miss Austen, and few things, if any, so vivid and
detailed. So it is with Clifton earlier, with London later, with
Scotland last of all, and with the journeys connecting them. Yet these
things are mere _hors d'oeuvre_, pickles, sauces, condiments, beside the
solid character-food of the Brambles and Melfords, of Winifred Jenkins
and of the redoubtable Lismahago. That there is no exaggeration or
caricature cannot, of course, be said. It was not Smollett's notion of
art to present the elaborate academies of Richardson, or the almost
uncanny duplications of Nature which Fielding could achieve. He must
embolden, in fact grotesque, the line; heighten, in fact splash and
plaster, the colour. But he has not left Nature behind here: he has only
put her in a higher light.

One means of doing so has been condemned in him, as in others, as in its
great earlier master, Swift, and its greatest later one, Thackeray, by
some purists. They call it cheap and inartistic: but this is mere
pedantry and prudery. Mis-spelling is not a thing to be employed every
day or for every purpose: if you