Smollett, and who usually dined with him at Chelsea on Sundays. In this
book he also found a niche for the exhibition of his own distresses in
the character of Melopoyn the dramatic poet. His applications to the
directors of the theatre, indeed, continued so unavailing, that he at
length resolved to publish his unfortunate tragedy by subscription; and
in 1749 the Regicide appeared with a preface, in which he complained
grievously of their neglect, and of the faithlessness of his patrons,
among whom Lord Lyttelton particularly excited his indignation. In the
summer of this year his view of men and manners was extended by a
journey to Paris. Here he met with an acquaintance and countryman in
Doctor Moore, the author of Zeluco, who a few years after him had been
also an apprentice to Gordon, at Glasgow. In his company Smollett
visited the principal objects of curiosity in the neighbourhood of the
French metropolis.
The canvas was soon stretched for a display of fresh follies: and the
result was, his Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, in 1751. The success he
had attained in exhibiting the characters of seamen led him to a
repetition of similar delineations. But though drawn in the same broad
style of humour, and, if possible, discriminated by a yet stronger hand,
the actors do not excite so keen an interest on shore as in their proper
element. The Memoirs of a Lady of Quality, the substance of which was
communicated by the woman herself, whose story they relate, quickened
the curiosity of his readers at the time, and a considerable sum which
he received for the insertion of them augmented the profits which he
derived from a large impression of the work. But they form a very
disagreeable interruption in the main business of the narrative. The
pedantic physician was intended for a representation of Akenside, who
had probably too much dignity to notice the affront, for which some
reparation was made by a compliment to his talents for didactic poetry,
in our author's History of England.
On his return (in 1749) he took his degree of Doctor in Medicine, and
settled himself at Chelsea[1], where he resided till 1763. The next
effort of his pen, an Essay on the External Use of Water, in a letter to
Dr.----, with particular remarks upon the present method of using the
mineral waters at Bath, in Somersetshire, &c. (in 1752) was directed to
views of professional advancement. In his profession, however, he did
not succeed; and meeting with no encouragement in any other quarter, he
devoted himself henceforward to the service of the booksellers. More
novels, translation, historical compilation, ephemeral criticism, were
the multifarious employments which they laid on him. Nothing that he
afterwards produced quite came up to the raciness of his first
performances. In 1753, he published the Adventures of Ferdinand Count
Fathom. In the dedication of this novel he left a blank after the word
Doctor, which may probably be supplied with the name of Armstrong. From
certain phrases that occur in the more serious parts, I should
conjecture them to be hastily translated from another language. Some of
these shall be laid before the reader, that he may judge for himself. "A
solemn profession, on which she _reposed herself with_ the most implicit
confidence and faith;" ch. xii. (v. 4. p. 54, of Dr. Anderson's
edition.)--"Our hero would have made his retreat through the _port_, by
which he had entered;" instead of the _door_; ch. xiii. p. 55.--"His own
penetration pointed out the _canal_, through which his misfortune had
flowed upon him;" instead of the _channel_; ch. xx. p. 94.--"Public
ordinaries, walks, and _spectacles_;" instead of _places of
entertainment_; ch. xxv. p. 125.--"The Tyrolese, by the _canal_ of
Ferdinand's finger, and recommendation, sold a pebble for a real
brilliant;" ch. xxxvii. p. 204.--"A young gentleman whose pride was
_indomitable_;" ch. xlvi. p. 242. In one chapter we find ourselves in a
stage-coach, with such a company as Smollett loved to introduce to his
readers.
He was about this time prosecuted in the King's Bench, on a charge of
having intended to assassinate one of his countrymen, whose name was
Peter Gordon. A few blows of the cane, which, after being provoked by
repeated insolence, he had laid across the shoulders of this man,
appeared to be the sole grounds for the accusation, and he was,
therefore, honourably acquitted by the jury. A letter, addressed to the
prosecutor's counsel, who, in Smollett's opinion, by the intemperance of
his invective had abused the freedom of speech allowed on such
occasions, remains to attest the irritability and vehemence of his own
temper. The letter was either not sent, or the lawyer had too much
moderation to make it the subject of another action, the consequences of
which he could have ill borne; for the expense, incurred by the former
suit, was already more than he was able to defray, at a time when
pecuniary losses and disappointments in other quarters were pressing
heavily upon him. A person, for whom he had given security in the sum of
one hundred and eighty pounds, had become a bankrupt, and one remittance
which he looked for from the East Indies, and another of more than a
thousand pounds from Jamaica, failed him. From the extremity to which
these accidents reduced him, he was extricated by the kindness of his
friend, Doctor Macaulay, to which he had been before indebted; and by
the liberality of Provost Drummond, who paid him a hundred pounds for
revising the manuscript of his brother Alexander Drummond's travels
through Germany, Italy, Greece, &c. which were printed in a folio volume
in 1754. He had long anticipated the profits of his next work. This was
a translation of Don Quixote, published at the beginning of 1755. Lord
Woodhouselee, in his Essay on Translation, has observed, that it is
little else than an improvement of the version by Jarvis. On comparing a
few passages with the original, I perceive that he fails alike in
representing the dignity of Cervantes in the mock-heroic, and the
familiarity of his lighter manner. These are faults that might have been
easily avoided by many a writer of much less natural abilities than
Smollett, who wanted both the leisure and the command of style that were
requisite for such an undertaking. The time, however, which he gave to
that great master, was not thrown away. He must have come back from the
study with his mind refreshed, and its powers invigorated by
contemplating so nearly the most skilful delineation that had ever been
made of human nature, according to that view in which it most suited his
own genius to look at it.
On his return from a visit to Scotland, where a pleasant story is told
of his being introduced to his mother as a stranger, and of her
discovery of him after some time, with a burst of maternal affection, in
consequence of his smiling, he engaged (1756) in an occupation that was
not likely to make him a wiser, and certainly did not make him a happier
man. The celebrity obtained by the Monthly Review had raised up a rival
publication, under the name of the Critical. The share which Smollett
had in the latter is left in some uncertainty. Doctor Anderson tells us,
that he undertook the chief direction; and Mr. Nichols,[2] that he
assisted Archibald Hamilton the printer. Whatever his part might be, the
performance of it was enough to waste his strength with ignoble labour,
to embitter his temper by useless altercation, and to draw on him
contempt and insult from those who, however they surpassed him in
learning, could scarcely be regarded as his superiors in native vigour
and fertility of mind. "Sure I," said Gray, in a letter to Mason, "am
something a better judge than all the man-midwives and presbyterian
parsons that ever were born. Pray give me leave to ask you, do you find
yourself tickled with the commendations of such people? (for you have
your share of these too) I dare say not; your vanity has certainly a
better taste. And can then the censure of such critics move you?" And
Warburton, who had probably been exasperated in the same way, called his
History of England the nonsense of a vagabond Scot.
In the same year was published a Compendium of Authentic and
Entertaining Voyages, in seven volumes, which was said to have been made
under his superintendence. We have his own word [3], that he had written
a very small part of it. In 1757, his Reprisal, or the Tars of Old
England, an entertainment in two acts, in which the scene throughout is
laid on board ship, and which describes seamen in his usual happy vein,
was acted at Drury-lane with tolerable success. In 1758, he published
his History of England from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Treaty
of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748, four volumes. Of this work, hasty as it was,
having been compiled in fourteen months, ten thousand copies were
speedily sold.
Some strictures in the Critical Review, which, in order to screen the
printer of it, he generously avowed himself to have written, once more
exposed him to a legal prosecution. The offensive passages were
occasioned by a pamphlet, in which Admiral Knowles had vindicated
himself from some reflections that were incidentally cast on him in the
course of Sir John Mordaunt's trial for the failure of a secret
expedition on the coast of France, near Rochefort. In his comments on
the pamphlet, Smollett had stigmatized Knowles, the author of it, as "an
admiral without conduct, an engineer without knowledge, an officer
without resolution, and a man without veracity." It can scarcely be
wondered, if, after such provocation, the party injured was not deterred
by menaces, or diverted by proposals of agreement, from seeking such
reparation as the law would afford him. This reparation the law did not
fail to give; and Smollett was sentenced to pay a penalty of one hundred
pounds, and to be confined for three months in the prison of the King's
Bench. Cervantes wrote his Don Quixote in a gaol; and Smollett resolved,
since he was now in one, that he would write a Don Quixote too. It maybe
said of the Spaniard, according to Falstaff's boast, "that he is not
only witty in himself, but the cause that wit is in other men;" and
among the many attempts at imitation, to which the admirable original
has given rise, Sir Launcelot Greaves is not one of the worst. That a
young man, whose brain had been slightly affected by a disappointment in
love, should turn knight-errant, at a time when books of chivalry were
no longer in vogue, is not, indeed, in the first instance, very
probable. But we are contented to overlook this defect in favour of the
many original touches of character, and striking views of life,
particularly in the mad-house, and the prison into which he leads his
hero, and which he has depicted with the force of Hogarth. If my
recollection does not mislead me, he will be found in some parts of this
novel to have had before him the Pharsamond of Marivaux, another copy of
Cervantes. But it does not anywhere like Count Fathom, betray symptoms
of being a mere translation. Sir Launcelot Greaves was first printed
piecemeal in the British Magazine, or Monthly Repository, a miscellany
to which Goldsmith was also a contributor. It has the recommendation of
being much less gross and indelicate than any other of his novels.
During the same period, 1761 and 1762, he published, in numbers, four
volumes of a Continuation of his History of England; and in 1765, a
fifth, which brought it down to that time.
Not contented with occupation under which an ordinary man would have
sunk, he undertook, on the 29th of May, 1762, to publish the Briton, a
weekly paper, in defence of the Earl of Bute, on that day appointed
first commissioner of the treasury; and continued it till the 12th of
February in the ensuing year, about two months before the retirement of
that nobleman from office. By his patron he complained that he was not
properly supported; and he incurred the hostility of Wilkes, who had
before been his staunch friend, but who espoused the party in opposition
to the Minister, by an attack, the malignance of which no provocation
could have justified.
In 1763, his name was prefixed, in conjunction with that of Francklin,
the Greek professor at Cambridge, and translator of Sophocles and
Lucian, to a version of the works of Voltaire, in twenty-seven volumes.
To this he contributed, according to his own account, a small part,
including all the notes historical and critical. To the Modern Universal
History, which was published about the same time, he also acknowledged
himself to be a contributor, though of no very large portion.
His life had hitherto been subjected to the toil and anxiety of one
doomed to earn a precarious subsistence by his pen. Though designed by
nature for the light and pleasant task of painting the humours and
follies of men, he had been compelled to undergo the work of a literary
drudge. Though formed to enjoy the endearments of friendship, his
criticisms had made those who were before indifferent to him his
enemies; and his polities, those whom he had loved, the objects of his
hatred. The smile, which the presence of his mother for a moment
recalled, had almost deserted his features. Still we may suppose it to
have lightened them up occasionally, in those hours of leisure when he
was allowed to unbend himself in the society of a wife, with whom he
seems always to have lived happily, and of an only daughter, who was
growing up to share with her his caresses, and to whom both looked as
the future support of their age.
[Greek:
Tautae, gegaetha, kapilaethomai kakon'
Haed anti pollon esti moi parapsychae,
Aeolis, tithaenae, baktron, haegemon hodou]
In her, rejoicing, I forgot mine ills.
I have lost much; but she remains, my comfort,
My city and my nurse, my staff and guide.
He had bemoaned his distresses as an author; but was now to feel
calamity of a different kind. This only daughter was taken from him by
death, in her fifteenth year. Henceforward he was, with some short
intervals, a prey to querulousness and disease. Soon after this loss (in
June, 1763,) being resolved to try what change of climate would do for
him, he set out with his disconsolate partner on a journey through
France and Italy. On quitting his own country, he describes himself
"traduced by malice, persecuted by faction, abandoned by false patrons,
and overwhelmed by the sense of a private calamity, which it was not in
the power of fortune to repair." The account which he published of this
expedition on his return, shews that he did not derive from it the
relief which he had expected. The spleen with which he contemplated
every object that presented itself to him, was ridiculed by Sterne, who
gave him the name of Smelfungus. With this abatement, the narration has
much to interest and amuse, and conveys some information by which a
traveller might perhaps still profit. When he brings before us the
driver pointing to the gibbeted criminal whom he had himself betrayed,
and unconsciously discovering his own infamy to Smollett, we might
suppose ourselves to be reading a highly wrought incident in one of his
own fictions. His prognostics of the approaching Revolution in France
are so remarkable, that I am tempted to transcribe them. "The King of
France, in order to give strength and stability to his administration,
ought to have sense to adopt a sage plan of economy, and vigour of mind
sufficient to execute it in all its parts with the most rigorous
exactness. He ought to have courage enough to find fault, and even to
punish the delinquents, of what quality soever they may be; and the
first act of reformation ought to be a total abolition of all the farms.
There are undoubtedly many marks of relaxation in the reins of the
French government; and in all probability, the subjects of France will
be the first to take the advantage of it. There is at present a violent
fermentation of different principles among them, which under the reign
of a very weak prince, or during a long minority, may produce a great
change in the constitution. In proportion to the progress of reason and
philosophy, which have made great advances in this kingdom [**kingfrom
in original], superstition loses ground; ancient prejudices give way; a
spirit of freedom takes the ascendant. All the learned laity of France,
detest the hierarchy as a plan of despotism, founded on imposture and
usurpation. The protestants, who are very numerous in the southern
parts, abhor it with all the rancour of religious fanaticism. Many of
the Commons, enriched by commerce and manufacture, grow impatient of
those odious distinctions, which exclude them from the honours and
privileges due to their importance in the commonwealth; and all the
parliaments or tribunals of justice in the kingdom seem bent upon
asserting their rights and independence in the face of the king's
prerogative, and even at the expense of his power and authority. Should
any prince, therefore, be seduced, by evil counsellors, or misled by his
own bigotry, to take some arbitrary step that may be extremely
disagreable to all those communities, without having spirit to exert the
violence of his power for the support of his measures, he will become
equally detested and despised, and the influence of the Commons will
insensibly encroach upon the pretensions of the crown." (Travels through
France and Italy, c. xxxvi. Smollett's Works, vol. v. p. 536.) This
presentiment deserves to be classed with that prophecy of Harrington in
his Oceana, of which some were fond enough to hope the speedy fulfilment
at the beginning of the revolution. Smollett passed the greater part of
his time abroad at Nice, but proceeded also to Rome and Florence.
About a year after he had returned from the continent (in June, 1766,)
he again visited his native country, where he had the satisfaction to
find his mother and sister still living. At Edinburgh he met with the
two Humes, Robertson, Adam Smith, Blair, and Ferguson; but the bodily
ailments, under which he was labouring, left him little power of
enjoying the society of men who had newly raised their country to so
much eminence in literature. To his friend, Dr. Moore, then a chirurgeon
at Glasgow, who accompanied him from that place, to the banks of Loch
Lomond, he wrote, in the February following, that his expedition into
Scotland had been productive of nothing but misery and disgust, adding,
that he was convinced his brain had been in some measure affected; for
that he had had a kind of _coma vigil_ upon him from April to November,
without intermission. He was at this time at Bath, where two
chirurgeons, whom he calls the most eminent in England, and whose names
were Middleton and Sharp, had so far relieved him from some of the most
painful symptoms of his malady, particularly an inveterate ulcer in the
arm, that he pronounced himself to be better in health and spirits than
during any part of the seven preceding years. But the flattering
appearance which his disorder assumed was not of long continuance. A
letter written to him by David Hume, on the 18th of July following,
shews that either the state of his health, or the narrowness of his
means, or perhaps both these causes together, made him desirous of
obtaining the consulship of Nice or Leghorn. But neither the
solicitations of Hume, nor those of the Duchess of Hamilton, could
prevail on the Minister, Lord Shelburne, to confer on him either of
these appointments. In the next year, September 21, 1768, the following
paragraph in a letter from Hume convinced him that he had nothing to
expect from any consideration for his necessities in that quarter. "What
is this you tell me of your perpetual exile and of your never returning
to this country? I hope that, as this idea arose from the bad state of
your health, it will vanish on your recovery, which, from your past
experience, you may expect from those happier climates to which you are
retiring; after which, the desire of revisiting your native country will
probably return upon you, unless the superior cheapness of foreign
countries prove an obstacle, and detain you there. I could wish that
means had been fallen on to remove this objection, and that at least it
might be equal to you to live anywhere, except when the consideration of
your health gave the preference to one climate above another. But the
indifference of ministers towards literature, which has been long, and
indeed almost always is the case in England, gives little prospect of
any alteration in this particular."
If ministers would in no other way conduce to his support, he was
determined to levy on them at least an involuntary contribution, and
accordingly (in 1769,) he published the Adventures of an Atom, in which
he laid about him to right and left, and with a random humour, somewhat
resembling that of Rabelais and Swift, made those whom he had defended
and those whom he had attacked, alike the subject of very gross
merriment.
But his sport and his suffering were now coming to a close. The
increased debility under which he felt himself sinking, induced him
again to try the influence of a more genial sky. Early in 1770, he set
out with his wife for Italy; and after staying a short time at Leghorn,
settled himself at Monte Nero, near that port. In a letter to Caleb
Whitefoord, dated the 18th of May, he describes himself rusticated on
the side of a mountain that overlooks the sea, a most romantic and
salutary situation. One other flash broke from him in this retirement.
His novel, called the Expedition of Humphry Clinker, which he sent to
England to be printed in 1770, though abounding in portraitures of
exquisite drollery, and in situations highly comical, has not the full
zest and flavour of his earlier works. The story does not move on with
the same impetuosity. The characters have more the appearance of being
broad caricatures from real life, than the creatures of a rich and
teeming invention. They seem rather the representation of individuals
grotesquely designed and extravagantly coloured, than of classes of men.
His bodily strength now giving way by degrees, while that of his mind
remained unimpaired, he expired at his residence near Leghorn, on the
21st of October, 1771, in the 51st year of his age.
His mother died a little before him. His widow lived twelve years
longer, which she passed at Leghorn in a state of unhappy dependence on
the bounty of the merchants at that place, and of a few friends in
England. Out of her slender means she contrived to erect a monument to
her deceased husband, on which the following inscription from the pen of
his friend Armstrong was inscribed:
Hic ossa conduntur
TOBIAE SMOLLETT, Scoti;
Qui prosapia generosa et antiqua natus,
Priscae virtutis exemplar emicuit;
Aspectu ingenue,
Corpore valido,
Pectore animoso,
Indole apprime benigna,
Et fere supra facultates munifica
Insignis.
Ingenio feraci, faceto, versatili,
Omnigenae fere doctrinae mire capaci,
Varia fabularum dulcedine
Vitam moresque hominum,
Ubertate summa ludens depinxit.
Adverso, interim, nefas! tali tantoque alumno,
Nisi quo satyrae opipare supplebat,
Seculo impio, ignavo, fatuo,
Quo Musse vix nisi nothae
Maerenatulis Britannicis
Fovebantur.
In memoriam
Optimi et amabilis omnino viri,
Permultis amicis desiderati,
Hocce marmor,
Dilectissima simul et amantissima conjunx
L. M.
Sacravit.
A column with a Latin inscription was also placed to commemorate him on
the banks of his favourite Leven, near the house in which he was born,
by his kinsman Mr. Smollett of Bonhill.
The person of Smollett is described by his friend Dr. Moore as stout and
well-proportioned, his countenance engaging, and his manner reserved,
with a certain air of dignity that seemed to indicate a consciousness of
his own powers.