one interested in Smollett's personality it supplies an unrivalled key.
It is, moreover, the work of a scholar, an observer of human nature,
and, by election, a satirist of no mean order. It gives us some
characteristic social vignettes, some portraits of the road of an
unsurpassed freshness and clearness. It contains some historical and
geographical observations worthy of one of the shrewdest and most
sagacious publicists of the day. It is interesting to the etymologist
for the important share it has taken in naturalising useful foreign
words into our speech. It includes (as we shall have occasion to
observe) a respectable quantum of wisdom fit to become proverbial, and
several passages of admirable literary quality. In point of date
(1763-65) it is fortunate, for the writer just escaped being one of a
crowd. On the whole, I maintain that it is more than equal in interest
to the Journey to the Hebrides, and that it deserves a very
considerable proportion of the praise that has hitherto been lavished
too indiscriminately upon the Voyage to Lisbon. On the force of this
claim the reader is invited to constitute himself judge after a fair
perusal of the following pages. I shall attempt only to point the way
to a satisfactory verdict, no longer in the spirit of an advocate, but
by means of a few illustrations and, more occasionally, amplifications
of what Smollett has to tell us.

III

As was the case with Fielding many years earlier, Smollett was almost
broken down with sedentary toil, when early in June 1763 with his wife,
two young ladies ("the two girls") to whom she acted as chaperon, and a
faithful servant of twelve years' standing, who in the spirit of a
Scots retainer of the olden time refused to leave his master (a good
testimonial this, by the way, to a temper usually accredited with such
a splenetic sourness), he crossed the straits of Dover to see what a
change of climate and surroundings could do for him.

On other grounds than those of health he was glad to shake the dust of
Britain from his feet. He speaks himself of being traduced by malice,
persecuted by faction, abandoned by false patrons, complaints which
will remind the reader, perhaps, of George Borrow's "Jeremiad," to the
effect that he had been beslavered by the venomous foam of every
sycophantic lacquey and unscrupulous renegade in the three kingdoms.
But Smollett's griefs were more serious than what an unkind reviewer
could inflict. He had bee