n fined and imprisoned for defamation. He had
been grossly caricatured as a creature of Bute, the North British
favourite of George III., whose tenure of the premiership occasioned
riots and almost excited a revolution in the metropolis. Yet after
incurring all this unpopularity at a time when the populace of London
was more inflamed against Scotsmen than it has ever been before or
since, and having laboured severely at a paper in the ministerial
interest and thereby aroused the enmity of his old friend John Wilkes,
Smollett had been unceremoniously thrown over by his own chief, Lord
Bute, on the ground that his paper did more to invite attack than to
repel it. Lastly, he and his wife had suffered a cruel bereavement in
the loss of their only child, and it was partly to supply a change from
the scene of this abiding sorrow, that the present journey was
undertaken.

The first stages and incidents of the expedition were not exactly
propitious. The Dover Road was a byword for its charges; the Via Alba
might have been paved with the silver wrung from reluctant and
indignant passengers. Smollett characterized the chambers as cold and
comfortless, the beds as "paultry" (with "frowsy," a favourite word),
the cookery as execrable, wine poison, attendance bad, publicans
insolent, and bills extortion, concluding with the grand climax that
there was not a drop of tolerable malt liquor to be had from London to
Dover. Smollett finds a good deal to be said for the designation of "a
den of thieves" as applied to that famous port (where, as a German lady
of much later date once complained, they "boot ze Bible in ze bedroom,
but ze devil in ze bill"), and he grizzles lamentably over the seven
guineas, apart from extras, which he had to pay for transport in a
Folkestone cutter to Boulogne Mouth.

Having once arrived at Boulogne, Smollett settled down regularly to his
work as descriptive reporter, and the letters that he wrote to his
friendly circle at home fall naturally into four groups. The first
Letters from II. to V. describe with Hogarthian point, prejudice and
pungency, the town and people of Boulogne. The second group, Letters
VI.-XII., deal with the journey from Boulogne to Nice by way of Paris,
Lyon, Nimes, and Montpellier. The third group, Letters XIII.-XXIV., is
devoted to a more detailed and particular delineation of Nice and the
Nicois. The fourth, Letters XXV.-XLI., describes the Italian expedition
and the return journey