ellier.
Though, when he chose, he could behave like a man of breeding, and though
he undeniably had a warm heart for his wife and daughter, he did not
always choose to behave well. Except Dr. Moore, his biographer, he seems
to have had few real friends during most of his career.

As to persons whom he chose to regard as his enemies, he was beyond
measure rancorous and dangerous. From his first patron, Lord Lyttelton,
to his last, he pursued them with unscrupulous animosity. If he did not
mean actually to draw portraits of his grandfather, his cousins, his
school-master, and the apothecary whose gallipots he attended--in
"Roderick Random,"--yet he left the originals who suggested his
characters in a very awkward situation. For assuredly he did entertain a
spite against his grandfather: and as many of the incidents in "Roderick
Random" were autobiographical, the public readily inferred that others
were founded on fact.

The outlines of Smollett's career are familiar, though gaps in our
knowledge occur. Perhaps they may partly be filled up by the aid of
passages in his novels, plays, and poems: in these, at all events, he
describes conditions and situations through which he himself may, or
must, have passed.

Born in 1721, he was a younger son of Archibald, a younger son of Sir
James Smollett of Bonhill, a house on the now polluted Leven, between
Loch Lomond and the estuary of the Clyde. Smollett's father made an
imprudent marriage: the grandfather provided a small, but competent
provision for him and his family, during his own life. The father,
Archibald, died; the grandfather left nothing to the mother of Tobias and
her children, but they were assisted with scrimp decency by the heirs.
Hence the attacks on the grandfather and cousins of Roderick Random: but,
later, Smollett returned to kinder feelings.

In some ways Tobias resembled his old grandsire. About 1710 that
gentleman wrote a Memoir of his own life. Hence we learn that _he_, in
childhood, like Roderick Random, was regarded as "a clog and burden," and
was neglected by his father, ill-used by his step-mother. Thus Tobias
had not only his own early poverty to resent, but had a hereditary grudge
against fortune, and "the base indifference of mankind." The old
gentleman was lodged "with very hard and penurious people," at Glasgow
University. He rose in the world, and was a good Presbyterian Whig, but
"had no liberty" to help to forfeit James II. "The