II

In the meantime let us look a little more closely into the special and
somewhat exceptional conditions under which the Travel Letters of
Smollett were produced. Smollett, as we have seen, was one of the first
professional men of all work in letters upon a considerable scale who
subsisted entirely upon the earnings of his own pen. He had no
extraneous means of support. He had neither patron, pension, property,
nor endowment, inherited or acquired. Yet he took upon himself the
burden of a large establishment, he spent money freely, and he prided
himself upon the fact that he, Tobias Smollett, who came up to London
without a stiver in his pocket, was in ten years' time in a position to
enact the part of patron upon a considerable scale to the crowd of
inferior denizens of Grub Street. Like most people whose social
ambitions are in advance of their time, Smollett suffered considerably
on account of these novel aspirations of his. In the present day he
would have had his motor car and his house on Hindhead, a seat in
Parliament and a brief from the Nation to boot as a Member for
Humanity. Voltaire was the only figure in the eighteenth century even
to approach such a flattering position, and he was for many years a
refugee from his own land. Smollett was energetic and ambitious enough
to start in rather a grand way, with a large house, a carriage,
menservants, and the rest. His wife was a fine lady, a "Creole" beauty
who had a small dot of her own; but, on the other hand, her income was
very precarious, and she herself somewhat of a silly and an incapable
in the eyes of Smollett's old Scotch friends. But to maintain such a
position--to keep the bailiffs from the door from year's end to year's
end--was a truly Herculean task in days when a newspaper "rate" of
remuneration or a well-wearing copyright did not so much as exist, and
when Reviews sweated their writers at the rate of a guinea per sheet of
thirty-two pages. Smollett was continually having recourse to loans. He
produced the eight (or six or seven) hundred a year he required by
sheer hard writing, turning out his History of England, his Voltaire,
and his Universal History by means of long spells of almost incessant
labour at ruinous cost to his health. On the top of all this cruel
compiling he undertook to run a Review (The Critical), a magazine (The
British), and a weekly political organ (The Briton). A charge of
defamation for a paragraph in the nature of what wo