before seen the light.

It is something, says Washington Irving, to have seen the dust of
Shakspeare. It is assuredly not less true that one can hardly examine
without a peculiar emotion the private letters of such a man as
Smollett. A strange sensation accompanies the unfolding of the faded
sheets, that have hardly been disturbed during the greater part of a
century. And as one at least of the documents in question is of an
almost autobiographical character, its tattered folds at once assume a
value to the literary student far beyond the usual scope of an inedited
autograph.

The first letter to which we shall call attention was written by
Smollett in 1763. It was in reply to one from Richard Smith, Esq., of
Burlington, New Jersey, by whose family it has been carefully preserved,
together with a copy of the letter which called it forth. Mr. Smith was
a highly respectable man, and in later years, when the Revolution broke
out, a delegate from his Province to the first and second Continental
Congress. He had written to Smollett, expressing his hopes that the
King had gratified with a pension the author of "Peregrine Pickle" and
"Roderick Random," and asking under what circumstances these books were
composed, and whether they contained any traces of his correspondent's
real adventures. He adverts to a report that, in the case of "Sir
Launcelot Greaves," Smollett had merely lent his name to "a mercenary
bookseller." "The Voyages which go under your name Mr. Rivington (whom
I consulted on the matter) tells me are only nominally your's, or, at
least, were chiefly collected by understrappers. Mr. Rivington also
gives me such an account of the shortness of time in which you wrote
the History, as is hardly credible." A list of Smollett's genuine
publications is also requested.

The Mr. Rivington referred to in the foregoing extract was probably the
well-known New York bookseller, whose press was so obnoxious to the
Whigs a few years later. To the letter itself Smollett thus replied:--

DR. SMOLLETT TO MR. SMITH.

"Sir,--I am favoured with your's of the 26th of February, and cannot
but be pleased to find myself, as a writer, so high in your esteem. The
curiosity you express, with regard to the particulars of my life and
the variety of situations in which I may have been, cannot be gratified
within the compass of a letter. Besides, there are some particulars of
my life which it would ill become me to relate. The only simil