so plainly before Smollett. [Losing its
prestige as a ville forte, Nice was henceforth rapidly to gain the new
character of a ville de plaisir. In 1763, says one of the city's
historians, Smollett, the famous historian and novelist, visited Nice.
"Arriving here shattered in health and depressed in spirits, under the
genial influence of the climate he soon found himself a new man. His
notes on the country, its gardens, its orange groves, its climate
without a winter, are pleasant and just and would seem to have been
written yesterday instead of more than a hundred years ago. . . . His
memory is preserved in the street nomenclature of the place; one of the
thoroughfares still bears the appellation of Rue Smollett." (James
Nash, The Guide to Nice, 1884, p. 110.)]

Among other celebrated residents at Nice during the period of
Smollett's visit were Edward Augustus, Duke of York, the brother of
George III., who died at Monaco a few years later, and Andre Massena, a
native of the city, then a lad of six.

Before he left Montpellier Smollett indulged in two more seemingly
irresistible tirades against French folly: one against their persistent
hero-worship of such a stuffed doll as Louis le Grand, and the second
in ridicule of the immemorial French panacea, a bouillon. Now he gets
to Nice he feels a return of the craving to take a hand's turn at
depreciatory satire upon the nation of which a contemporary hand was
just tracing the deservedly better-known delineation, commencing

Gay sprightly land of mirth and social ease,
Pleas'd with thyself, whom all the world can please. . . .

Such inveteracy (like Dr. Johnson's against Swift) was not unnaturally
suspected by friends in England of having some personal motive. In his
fifteenth letter home, therefore, Smollett is assiduous in disclaiming
anything of the kind. He begins by attempting an amende honorable, but
before he has got well away from his exordium he insensibly and most
characteristically diverges into the more congenial path of censure,
and expands indeed into one of his most eloquent passages--a
disquisition upon the French punctilio (conceived upon lines somewhat
similar to Mercutio's address to Benvolio), to which is appended a
satire on the duello as practised in France, which glows and burns with
a radiation of good sense, racy of Smollett at his best.

To eighteenth century lovers the discussion on duelling will recall
similar talks between Boswell and Jo