e fields. One sees how the dinner is done: with a knowledge of
Athenaeus, Juvenal, Petronius, and Horace, many men could have written
this set piece. But Trunnion is quite inimitable: he is a child of
humour and of the highest spirits, like Mr. Weller the elder. Till Scott
created Mause Headrig, no Caledonian had ever produced anything except
"Tam o' Shanter," that could be a pendant to Trunnion. His pathos is
possibly just a trifle overdone, though that is not my own opinion. Dear
Trunnion! he makes me overlook the gambols of his detestable _protege_,
the hero.

That scoundrel is not an impossible caricature of an obstinate, vain,
cruel libertine. Peregrine was precisely the man to fall in love with
Emilia _pour le bon motif_, and then attempt to ruin her, though she was
the sister of his friend, by devices worthy of Lovelace at his last and
lowest stage. Peregrine's overwhelming vanity, swollen by facile
conquests, would inevitably have degraded him to this abyss. The
intrigue was only the worst of those infamous practical jokes of his, in
which Smollett takes a cruel and unholy delight. Peregrine, in fact, is
a hero of _naturalisme_, except that his fits of generosity are mere
patches daubed on, and that his reformation is a farce, in which a modern
_naturaliste_ would have disdained to indulge. Emilia, in her scene with
Peregrine in the _bouge_ to which he has carried her, rises much above
Smollett's heroines, and we could like her, if she had never forgiven
behaviour which was beneath pardon.

Peregrine's education at Winchester bears out Lord Elcho's description of
that academy in his lately published Memoirs. It was apt to develop
Peregrines; and Lord Elcho himself might have furnished Smollett with
suitable adventures. There can be no doubt that Cadwallader Crabtree
suggested Sir Malachi Malagrowther to Scott, and that Hatchway and Pipes,
taking up their abode with Peregrine in the Fleet, gave a hint to Dickens
for Sam Weller and Mr. Pickwick in the same abode. That "Peregrine"
"does far excel 'Joseph Andrews' and 'Amelia'," as Scott declares, few
modern readers will admit. The world could do much better without
"Peregrine" than without "Joseph"; while Amelia herself alone is a study
greatly preferable to the whole works of Smollett: such, at least, is the
opinion of a declared worshipper of that peerless lady. Yet "Peregrine"
is a kind of Odyssey of the eighteenth century: an epic of humour and o