date he had, it seems to me,
a good deal. What, however, we attribute in their case to bile or
liver, a consecrated usage prescribes that we must, in the case of
Smollett, accredit more particularly to the spleen. Whether dyspeptic
or "splenetic," this was not the sort of man to see things through a
veil of pleasant self-generated illusion. He felt under no obligation
whatever to regard the Grand Tour as a privilege of social distinction,
or its discomforts as things to be discreetly ignored in relating his
experience to the stay-at-home public. He was not the sort of man that
the Tourist Agencies of to-day would select to frame their
advertisements. As an advocatus diaboli on the subject of Travel he
would have done well enough. And yet we must not infer that the magic
of travel is altogether eliminated from his pages. This is by no means
the case: witness his intense enthusiasm at Nimes, on sight of the
Maison Carree or the Pont du Gard; the passage describing his entry
into the Eternal City; [Ours "was the road by which so many heroes
returned with conquest to their country, by which so many kings were
led captive to Rome, and by which the ambassadors of so many kingdoms
and States approached the seat of Empire, to deprecate the wrath, to
sollicit the friendship, or sue for the protection of the Roman
people."] or the enviable account of the alfresco meals which the party
discussed in their coach as described in Letter VIII.

As to whether Smollett and his party of five were exceptionally
unfortunate in their road-faring experiences must be left an open
question at the tribunal of public opinion. In cold blood, in one of
his later letters, he summarised his Continental experience after this
wise: inns, cold, damp, dark, dismal, dirty; landlords equally
disobliging and rapacious; servants awkward, sluttish, and slothful;
postillions lazy, lounging, greedy, and impertinent. With this last
class of delinquents after much experience he was bound to admit the
following dilemma:--If you chide them for lingering, they will contrive
to delay you the longer. If you chastise them with sword, cane, cudgel,
or horsewhip (he defines the correctives, you may perceive, but leaves
the expletives to our imagination) they will either disappear entirely,
and leave you without resource, or they will find means to take
vengeance by overturning your carriage. The only course remaining would
be to allow oneself to become the dupe of impos