le of the new species than the Great Cham himself.
The late Professor Beljame has shown us how the milieu was created in
which, with no subvention, whether from a patron, a theatre, a
political paymaster, a prosperous newspaper or a fashionable
subscription-list, an independent writer of the mid-eighteenth century,
provided that he was competent, could begin to extort something more
than a bare subsistence from the reluctant coffers of the London
booksellers. For the purpose of such a demonstration no better
illustration could possibly be found, I think, than the career of Dr.
Tobias Smollett. And yet, curiously enough, in the collection of
critical monographs so well known under the generic title of "English
Men of Letters"--a series, by the way, which includes Nathaniel
Hawthorne and Maria Edgeworth--no room or place has hitherto been found
for Smollett any more than for Ben Jonson, both of them, surely,
considerable Men of Letters in the very strictest and most
representative sense of the term. Both Jonson and Smollett were to an
unusual extent centres of the literary life of their time; and if the
great Ben had his tribe of imitators and adulators, Dr. Toby also had
his clan of sub-authors, delineated for us by a master hand in the
pages of Humphry Clinker. To make Fielding the centre-piece of a group
reflecting the literature of his day would be an artistic
impossibility. It would be perfectly easy in the case of Smollett, who
was descried by critics from afar as a Colossus bestriding the summit
of the contemporary Parnassus.

Whatever there may be of truth in these observations upon the eclipse
of a once magical name applies with double force to that one of all
Smollett's books which has sunk farthest in popular disesteem. Modern
editors have gone to the length of excommunicating Smollett's Travels
altogether from the fellowship of his Collective Works. Critic has
followed critic in denouncing the book as that of a "splenetic"
invalid. And yet it is a book for which all English readers have cause
to be grateful, not only as a document on Smollett and his times, not
only as being in a sense the raison d'etre of the Sentimental Journey,
and the precursor in a very special sense of Humphry Clinker, but also
as being intrinsically an uncommonly readable book, and even, I venture
to assert, in many respects one of Smollett's best. Portions of the
work exhibit literary quality of a high order: as a whole it represents