written case in spite of its
explicit statements, and when Professor F-- wrote that the patient had
tubercles in his lungs, this was displeasing to poor Smollett, who had
hoped against hope to receive--some other opinion than the only
possible one, viz., that he undoubtedly had a consumption certain to
prove fatal."

The cruel truth was not to be evaded. Smollett had tuberculosis, though
not probably of the most virulent kind, as he managed to survive
another seven years, and those for the most part years of unremitting
labour. He probably gained much by substituting Nice for Montpellier as
a place to winter in, for although the climate of Montpellier is clear
and bright in the highest degree, the cold is both piercing and
treacherous. Days are frequent during the winter in which one may stand
warmly wrapped in the brilliant sun and feel the protection of a
greatcoat no more than that of a piece of gauze against the icy and
penetrating blast that comes from "the roof of France."

Unable to take the direct route by Arles as at present, the
eastward-bound traveller from Montpellier in 1764 had to make a
northerly detour. The first stone bridge up the Rhone was at Avignon,
but there was a bridge of boats connecting Beaucaire with Tarascon.
Thence, in no very placable mood, Smollett set out in mid-November by
way of Orgon [Aix], Brignolles and le Muy, striking the Mediterranean
at Frejus. En route he was inveigled into a controversy of unwonted
bitterness with an innkeeper at le Muy. The scene is conjured up for us
with an almost disconcerting actuality; no single detail of the
author's discomfiture is omitted. The episode is post-Flaubertian in
its impersonal detachment, or, as Coleridge first said, "aloofness." On
crossing the Var, the sunny climate, the romantic outline of the
Esterelles, the charms of the "neat village" of Cannes, and the first
prospect of Nice began gradually and happily to effect a slight
mitigation in our patient's humour. Smollett was indubitably one of the
pioneers of the Promenade des Anglais. Long before the days of "Dr.
Antonio" or Lord Brougham, he described for his countrymen the almost
incredible dolcezza of the sunlit coast from Antibes to Lerici. But how
much better than the barren triumph of being the unconscious fugleman
of so glittering a popularity must have been the sense of being one of
the first that ever burst from our rude island upon that secluded
little Piedmontese town, as it