mble's establishment. The crotchety Bramble and
his acidulous sister, who is a forerunner of Mrs. Malaprop in
the unreliability of her spelling, and Lieutenant Lishmahago,
who has been complimented as the first successful Scotchman in
fiction--all these are sketched with a verity and in a vein of
genuine comic invention which have made them remembered.
Violence, rage, filth--Smollett's besetting sins--are forgotten
or forgiven in a book which has so much of the flavor and
movement of life, The author's medical lore is made good use of
in the humorous descriptions of poor Bramble's ailments.
Incidentally, the story defends the Scotch against the English
in such a pronounced way that Walpole calls it a "part novel";
and there is, moreover, a pleasant love story interwoven with
the comedy and burlesque. One feels in leaving this fiction that
with all allowance for his defects, there is more danger of
undervaluing the author's powers and place in the modern Novel
than the reverse.

Fielding and Smollett together set the pace for the Novel of
blended incident and character: both were, as sturdy realists,
reactionary from the sentimental analysis of Richardson and
express an instinct contrary to the self-conscious pathos of a
Sterne or the idyllic romanticism of a Goldsmith. Both were
directly of influence upon the Novel's growth in the nineteenth
century: Fielding especially upon Thackeray, Smollett upon
Dickens. If Smollett had served the cause in no other way than
in his strong effect upon the author of "The Pickwick Papers,"
he would deserve well of all critics: how the little Copperfield
delighted in that scant collection of books on his father's
bookshelf, where were "Roderick Random," "Peregrine Pickle" and
"Humphrey Clinker," along with "Tom Jones," "The Vicar of
Wakefield," "Gil Blas" and "Robinson Crusoe"--"a glorious host,"
says he, "to keep me company. They kept alive my fancy and my
hope of something beyond that time and place." And of Smollett's
characters, who seem to have charmed him more than Fielding's,
he declares: "I have seen Tom Pipes go clambering up the
church-steeple: I have watched Strap with the knapsack on his back
stopping to rest himself upon the wicket gate: and I know that
Commodore Trunnion held that Club with Mr. Pickle in the parlor
of our little village ale house." Children are shrewd critics,
in their way, and what an embryo Charles Dickens likes in
fiction is not to be slighted. But a