us of the author.

Humphry Clinker and Count Fathom are both equally admirable in their way.
Perhaps the former is the most pleasant gossiping novel that ever was
written; that which gives the most pleasure with the least effort to the
reader. It is quite as amusing as going the journey could have been; and
we have just as good an idea of what happened on the road, as if we had
been of the party. Humphry Clinker himself is exquisite; and his
sweetheart, Winifred Jenkins, not much behind him. Matthew Bramble, though
not altogether original, is excellently supported, and seems to have been
the prototype of Sir Anthony Absolute in the Rivals. But Lismahago is the
flower of the flock. His tenaciousness in argument is not so delightful as
the relaxation of his logical severity, when he finds his fortune
mellowing in the wintry smiles of Mrs. Tabitha Bramble. This is the
best-preserved and most severe of all Smollett's characters. The
resemblance to Don Quixote is only just enough to make it interesting to
the critical reader, without giving offence to any body else. The
indecency and filth in this novel are what must be allowed to all
Smollett's writings.--The subject and characters in Count Fathom are, in
general, exceedingly disgusting: the story is also spun out to a degree of
tediousness in the serious and sentimental parts; but there is more power
of writing occasionally shewn in it than in any of his works. I need only
refer to the fine and bitter irony of the Count's address to the country
of his ancestors on his landing in England; to the robber-scene in the
forest, which has never been surpassed; to the Parisian swindler who
personates a raw English country squire (Western is tame in the
comparison); and to the story of the seduction in the west of England. It
would be difficult to point out, in any author, passages written with more
force and mastery than these.

It is not a very difficult undertaking to class Fielding or Smollett;--the
one as an observer of the characters of human life, the other as a
describer of its various eccentricities. But it is by no means so easy to
dispose of Richardson, who was neither an observer of the one, nor a
describer of the other; but who seemed to spin his materials entirely out
of his own brain, as if there had been nothing existing in the world
beyond the little room in which he sat writing. There is an artificial
reality about his works, which is no where else to be met with.