phically or magisterially than they are in some of these chapters.
Like Prior, Fielding, Shenstone, and Dickens, Smollett was a
connoisseur in inns and innkeepers. He knew good food and he knew good
value, and he had a mighty keen eye for a rogue. There may, it is true,
have been something in his manner which provoked them to exhibit their
worst side to him. It is a common fate with angry men. The trials to
which he was subjected were momentarily very severe, but, as we shall
see in the event, they proved a highly salutary discipline to him.

To sum up, then, Smollett's Travels were written hastily and vigorously
by an expert man of letters. They were written ad vivum, as it were,
not from worked-up notes or embellished recollections. They were
written expressly for money down. They were written rather en noir than
couleur de rose by an experienced, and, we might almost perhaps say, a
disillusioned traveller, and not by a naif or a niais. The statement
that they were to a certain extent the work of an invalid is, of
course, true, and explains much. The majority of his correspondents
were of the medical profession, all of them were members of a group
with whom he was very intimate, and the letters were by his special
direction to be passed round among them. [We do not know precisely who
all these correspondents of Smollett were, but most of them were
evidently doctors and among them, without a doubt, John Armstrong,
William Hunter, George Macaulay, and above all John Moore, himself an
authority on European travel, Governor on the Grand Tour of the Duke of
Hamilton (Son of "the beautiful Duchess"), author of Zeluco, and father
of the famous soldier. Smollett's old chum, Dr. W. Smellie, died 5th
March 1763.] In the circumstances (bearing in mind that it was his
original intention to prune the letters considerably before
publication) it was only natural that he should say a good deal about
the state of his health. His letters would have been unsatisfying to
these good people had he not referred frequently and at some length to
his spirits and to his symptoms, an improvement in which was the
primary object of his journey and his two years' sojourn in the South.
Readers who linger over the diary of Fielding's dropsy and Mrs.
Fielding's toothache are inconsistent in denouncing the luxury of
detail with which Smollett discusses the matter of his imposthume.

What I claim for the present work is that, in the first place, to any