f which Professor W. L.
Phelps calls Young, in his Night Thoughts, the most "conspicuous
exemplar"--that one is at first inclined to think Smollett poking fun at
it. The context, however, seems to prove that he was perfectly serious.
It is interesting, then, as well as surprising, to find traces of the
romantic spirit in his fiction over ten years before Walpole's Castle of
Otranto. It is also interesting to find so much melodramatic feeling in
him, because it makes stronger the connection between him and his
nineteenth-century disciple, Dickens.

From all that I have said, it must not be thought that the usual Smollett
is always, or almost always, absent from Count Fathom. I have spoken of
the dedication and of the opening chapters as what we might expect from
his pen. There are, besides, true Smollett strokes in the scenes in the
prison from which Melvil rescues Fathom, and there is a good deal of the
satirical Smollett fun in the description of Fathom's ups and downs,
first as the petted beau, and then as the fashionable doctor. In
chronicling the latter meteoric career, Smollett had already observed the
peculiarity of his countrymen which Thackeray was fond of harping on in
the next century--"the maxim which universally prevails among the English
people . . . to overlook, . . . on their return to the metropolis,
all the connexions they may have chanced to acquire during their
residence at any of the medical wells. And this social disposition is
so scrupulously maintained, that two persons who live in the most
intimate correspondence at Bath or Tunbridge, shall, in four-and-twenty
hours . . . meet in St. James's Park, without betraying the least
token of recognition." And good, too, is the way in which, as Dr. Fathom
goes rapidly down the social hill, he makes excuses for his declining
splendour. His chariot was overturned "with a hideous crash" at such
danger to himself, "that he did not believe he should ever hazard himself
again in any sort of wheel carriage." He turned off his men for maids,
because "men servants are generally impudent, lazy, debauched, or
dishonest." To avoid the din of the street, he shifted his lodgings into
a quiet, obscure court. And so forth and so on, in the true Smollett
vein.

But, after all, such of the old sparks are struck only occasionally.
Apart from its plot, which not a few nineteenth-century writers of
detective-stories might have improved, The Adventures of F