is steps to Nice early in 1765, and
then after a brief jaunt to Turin (where he met Sterne) and back by the
Col di Tende, he turned his face definitely homewards. The journey home
confirmed his liking for Pisa, and gives an opening for an amusing
description of the Britisher abroad (Letter XXXV). We can almost
overhear Thackeray, or the author of Eothen, touching this same topic
in Letter XLI. "When two natives of any other country chance to meet
abroad, they run into each other's embrace like old friends, even
though they have never heard of one another till that moment; whereas
two Englishmen in the same situation maintain a mutual reserve and
diffidence, and keep without the sphere of each other's attraction,
like two bodies endowed with a repulsive power." Letter XXXVI gives
opportunity for some discerning remarks on French taxation. Having
given the French king a bit of excellent advice (that he should abolish
the fermiers generaux), Smollett proceeds, in 1765, to a forecast of
probabilities which is deeply significant and amazingly shrewd. The
fragment known as Smollett's Dying Prophecy of 1771 has often been
discredited. Yet the substance of it is fairly adumbrated here in the
passage beginning, "There are undoubtedly many marks of relaxation in
the reins of French government," written fully six years previously.
After a pleasing description of Grasse, "famous for its pomatum,
gloves, wash-balls, perfumes, and toilette boxes lined with bergamot,"
the homeward traveller crossed the French frontier at Antibes, and in
Letter XXXIX at Marseille, he compares the galley slaves of France with
those of Savoy. At Bath where he had gone to set up a practice,
Smollett once astonished the faculty by "proving" in a pamphlet that
the therapeutic properties of the waters had been prodigiously
exaggerated. So, now, in the south of France he did not hesitate to
pronounce solemnly that "all fermented liquors are pernicious to the
human constitution." Elsewhere he comments upon the immeasurable
appetite of the French for bread. The Frenchman will recall the story
of the peasant-persecuting baron whom Louis XII. provided with a
luxurious feast, which the lack of bread made uneatable; he may not
have heard a story told me in Liege at the Hotel Charlemagne of the
Belgian who sought to conciliate his French neighbour by remarking, "Je
vois que vous etes Francais, monsieur, parceque vous mangez beaucoup de
pain," and the Frenchman's reto