connoisseurship, is tantamount to confessing oneself a
Galilean of the outermost court. In this connection, too, the itinerant
divine gave the travelling doctor a very nasty fall. Meeting the latter
at Turin, just as Smollett was about to turn his face homewards, in
March 1765, Sterne wrote of him, in the famous Journey of 1768, thus:

"The learned Smelfungus travelled from Boulogne to Paris, from Paris to
Rome, and so on, but he set out with the spleen and jaundice, and every
object he passed by was discoloured or distorted. He wrote an account
of them, but 'twas nothing but the account of his miserable feelings."
"I met Smelfungus," he wrote later on, "in the grand portico of the
Pantheon--he was just coming out of it. ''Tis nothing but a huge
cockpit,' said he--'I wish you had said nothing worse of the Venus de
Medici,' replied I--for in passing through Florence, I had heard he had
fallen foul upon the goddess, and used her worse than a common
strumpet, without the least provocation in nature. I popp'd upon
Smelfungus again at Turin, in his return home, and a sad tale of
sorrowful adventures had he to tell, 'wherein he spoke of moving
accidents by flood and field, and of the cannibals which each other
eat, the Anthropophagi'; he had been flayed alive, and bedevil'd, and
used worse than St. Bartholomew, at every stage he had come at. 'I'll
tell it,' cried Smelfungus, 'to the world.' 'You had better tell it,'
said I, 'to your physician.'"

To counteract the ill effects of "spleen and jaundice" and exhibit the
spirit of genteel humour and universal benevolence in which a man of
sensibility encountered the discomforts of the road, the incorrigible
parson Laurence brought out his own Sentimental Journey. Another effect
of Smollett's book was to whet his own appetite for recording the
adventures of the open road. So that but for Travels through France and
Italy we might have had neither a Sentimental Journey nor a Humphry
Clinker. If all the admirers of these two books would but bestir
themselves and look into the matter, I am sure that Sterne's only too
clever assault would be relegated to its proper place and assessed at
its right value as a mere boutade. The borrowed contempt of Horace
Walpole and the coterie of superficial dilettanti, from which
Smollett's book has somehow never wholly recovered, could then easily
be outflanked and the Travels might well be in reasonable expectation
of coming by their own again.