THE RISE AND PROGRESS OF MODERN FICTION.
The New Age. Daniel Defoe. Robinson Crusoe. Richardson. Pamela, and
Other Novels. Fielding. Joseph Andrews. Tom Jones. Its Moral. Smollett.
Roderick Random. Peregrine Pickle.
THE NEW AGE.
We have now reached a new topic in the course of English
Literature--contemporaneous, indeed, with the subjects just named, but
marked by new and distinct development. It was a period when numerous and
distinctive forms appeared; when genius began to segregate into schools
and divisions; when the progress of letters and the demands of popular
curiosity gave rise to works which would have been impossible, because
uncalled for, in any former period. English enterprise was extending
commerce and scattering useful arts in all quarters of the globe, and thus
giving new and rich materials to English letters. Clive was making himself
a lord in India; Braddock was losing his army and his life in America.
This spirit of English enterprise in foreign lands was evoking literary
activity at home: there was no exploit of English valor, no extension of
English dominion and influence, which did not find its literary
reproduction. Thus, while it was an age of historical research, it was
also that of actual delineations of curious novelties at home and abroad.
Poetry was in a transition state; it was taking its leave of the unhealthy
satire and the technical wit of Queen Anne's reign, and attempting, on
the one hand, the impostures of Macpherson and Chatterton,--to which we
shall hereafter refer,--and, on the other, the restoration of the pastoral
from the theatrical to the real, in Thomson's song of the Rolling Year,
and Cowper's pleasant Task, so full of life and nature. Swallow-like,
English poetry had hung about the eaves or skimmed the surface of town and
court; but now, like the lark, it soared into freer air--
Cœtusque vulgares et udam
Spernit humum fugiente penna.
In short, it was a day of general awakening. The intestine troubles
excited by the Jacobites were brought to an end by the disaster of
Culloden, in 1745. The German campaigns culminating at Minden, in 1759,
opened a door to the study of German literature, and of the Teutonic
dialects as elements of the English language.
It is, therefore, not astonishing that in this period Literature should
begin to arrange itself into its present great divisions. As in an earlier
age the drama had been born to cater to a popular taste, so in this, to
satisfy the public demand, arose English _prose fiction_ in its peculiar
and enduring form. There had been grand and desultory works preceding
this, such as _Robinson Crusoe, The Pilgrim's Progress_, and Swift's
inimitable story of _Gulliver_; but the modern novel, unlike these, owes
its origin to a general desire for delineations of private life and
manners. "Show us ourselves!" was the cry.
A novel may be defined as a fictitious story of modern life describing the
management and mastery of the human passions, and especially the universal
passion of love. Its power consists in the creation of ideal characters,
which leave a real impress upon the reader's mind; it must be a prose
_epic_ in that there is always a hero, or, at least, a heroine, generally
both, and a _drama_ in its presentation of scenes and supplementary
personages. Thackeray calls his _Vanity Fair_ a novel without a hero: it
is impossible to conceive a novel without a heroine. There must also be a
_dénouement_, or consummation; in short, it must have, in the words of
Aristotle, a beginning, middle, and ending, in logical connection and
consecutive interest.
DANIEL DEFOE.--Before, however, proceeding to consider the modern novel,
we must make mention of one author, distinctly of his own age as a
political pamphleteer, but who, in his chief and inimitable work, stands
alone, without antecedent or consequent. _Robinson Crusoe_ has had a host
of imitators, but no rival.
Daniel Foe, or, as he afterwards called himself, De Foe, was born in
London, in the year 1661. He was the son of a butcher, but such was his
early aptitude, for learning, that he was educated to become a dissenting
minister. His own views, however, were different: he became instead a
political author, and wrote with great force against the government of
James II. and the Established Church, and in favor of the dissenters. When
the Duke of Monmouth landed to make his fatal campaign, Defoe joined his
standard; but does not seem to have suffered with the greater number of
the duke's adherents.
He was a warm supporter of William III.; and his famous poem, _The
True-Born Englishman_, was written in answer to an attack upon the king
and the Dutch, called _The Foreigners_. Of his own poem he says, in the
preface, "When I see the town full of lampoons and invectives against the
Dutch, only because they are foreigners, and the king reproached and
insulted by insolent pedants and ballad-making poets for employing
foreigners and being a foreigner himself, I confess myself moved by it to
remind our nation of their own original, thereby to let them see what a
banter they put upon themselves, since--speaking of Englishmen _ab
origine_--we are really all foreigners ourselves:"
The Pict and painted Briton, treach'rous Scot,
By hunger, theft, and rapine hither brought;
Norwegian pirates, buccaneering Danes,
Whose red-haired offspring everywhere remains;
Who, joined with Norman-French, compound the breed
From whence your true-born Englishmen proceed.
In 1702, just after the death of King William, Defoe published his
severely ironical pamphlet, _The Shortest Way with the Dissenters_.
Assuming the character of a High Churchman, he says: "'Tis vain to trifle
in the matter. The light, foolish handling of them by fines is their glory
and advantage. If the gallows instead of the compter, and the galleys
instead of the fines, were the reward of going to a conventicle, there
would not be so many sufferers." His irony was at first misunderstood: the
High Churchmen hailed him as a champion, and the Dissenters hated him as
an enemy. But when his true meaning became apparent, a reward of £50 was
offered by the government for his discovery. His so-called "scandalous and
seditious pamphlet" was burnt by the common hangman: he was tried, and
sentenced to pay two hundred marks, to stand three times in the pillory,
and to be imprisoned during the queen's pleasure. He bore his sentence
bravely, and during his two years' residence in prison he published a
periodical called _The Review_. In 1709 he wrote a _History of the Union_
between England and Scotland.
ROBINSON CRUSOE.--But none of these things, nor all combined, would have
given to Defoe that immortality which is his as the author of _Robinson
Crusoe_. Of the groundwork of the story not much need be said.
Alexander Selkirk, the sailing-master of an English privateer, was set
ashore, in 1704, at his own request, on the uninhabited island Juan
Fernandez, which lies several hundred miles from the coast of Chili, in
the Pacific Ocean. He was supplied with clothing and arms, and remained
there alone for four years and four months. It is supposed that his
adventures suggested the work. It is also likely that Defoe had read the
journal of Peter Serrano, who, in the sixteenth century, had been
_marooned_ in like manner on a desolate island lying off the mouth of the
Oroonoque (Orinoco). The latter locality was adopted by Defoe. But it is
not the fact or the adventures which give power to _Robinson Crusoe_. It
is the manner of treating what might occur to any fancy, even the dullest.
The charm consists in the simplicity and the verisimilitude of the
narrative, the rare adaptation of the common man to his circumstances, his
projects and failures, the birth of religion in his soul, his conflicting
hopes and fears, his occasional despair. We see in him a brother, and a
suffering one. We live his life on the island; we share his terrible fear
at the discovery of the footprint, his courage in destroying the cannibal
savages and rescuing the victim. Where is there in fiction another man
Friday? From the beginning of his misfortunes until he is again sailing
for England, after nearly thirty years of captivity, he holds us
spellbound by the reality, the simplicity, and the pathos of his
narrative; but, far beyond the temporary illusion of the modern novel,
everything remains real: the shipwrecked mariner spins his yarns in sailor
fashion, and we believe and feel every word he says. The book, although
wonderfully good throughout, is unequal: the prime interest only lasts
until he is rescued, and ends with his embarkation for England. The
remainder of his travels becomes, as a narrative, comparatively tiresome
and tame; and we feel, besides, that, after his unrivalled experience, he
should have remained in England, "the observed of all observers." Yet it
must be said that we are indebted to his later journey in Spain and
France, his adventures in the Eastern Seas, his caravan ride overland from
China to Europe, for much which illustrates the manners and customs of
navigation and travel in that day.
_Robinson Crusoe_ stands alone among English books, a perennial fountain
of instruction and pleasure. It aids in educating each new generation:
children read it for its incident; men to renew their youth; literary
scholars to discover what it teaches of its time and of its author's
genius. Its influence continues unabated; it incites boys to maritime
adventure, and shows them how to use in emergency whatever they find at
hand. It does more: it tends to reclaim the erring by its simple homilies;
it illustrates the ruder navigation of its day; shows us the habits and
morals of the merchant marine, and the need and means of reforming what
was so very bad.
Defoe's style is clear, simple, and natural. He wrote several other works,
of which few are now read. Among these are the _Account of the Plague, The
Life and Piracies of Captain Singleton_, and _The Fortunes and Misfortunes
of Moll Flanders_. He died on the 24th of April, 1731.
RICHARDSON.--Samuel Richardson, who, notwithstanding the peculiar merits
of Defoe, must be called the _Father of Modern Prose Fiction_, was born in
Derbyshire, in 1689. The personal events of his life are few and
uninteresting. A carpenter's son, he had but little schooling, and owed
everything to his own exertions. Apprenticed to a printer in London, at
the age of fifteen, he labored assiduously at his trade, and it rewarded
him with fortune: he became, in turn, printer of the Journals of the House
of Commons, Master of the Stationers' Company, and Printer to the King.
While young, he had been the confidant of three young women, and had
written or corrected their love-letters for them. He seems to have had
great fluency in letter-writing; and being solicited by a publisher to
write a series of familiar letters on the principal concerns of life,
which might be used as models,--a sort of "Easy Letter-Writer,"--he began
the task, but, changing his plan, he wrote a story in a series of letters.
The first volume was published in 1741, and was no less a work than
_Pamela_. The author was then fifty years old; and he presents in this
work a matured judgment concerning the people and customs of the day,--the
printer's notions of the social condition of England,--shrewd, clever, and
defective.
Wearied as the world had been by what Sir Walter Scott calls the "huge
folios of inanity" which had preceded him, the work was hailed with
delight. There was a little affectation; but the sentiment was moral and
natural. Ladies carried _Pamela_ about in their rides and walks. Pope,
near his end, said it was a better moral teacher than sermons: Sherlock
recommended it from the pulpit.
PAMELA, AND OTHER NOVELS.--_Pamela_ is represented as a poor servant-maid,
but beautiful and chaste, whose honor resists the attack of her dissolute
master, and whose modesty and virtue overcome his evil nature. Subdued and
reclaimed by her chastity and her charms, he reforms, and marries her.
Some pictures which are rather warmly colored and indelicate in our day
were quite in keeping with the taste of that time, and gave greater effect
to the moral lesson assigned to be taught.
In his next work, _Clarissa Harlowe_, which appeared in 1749, he has drawn
the picture of a perfect woman preserving her purity amid seductive
gayeties, and suffering sorrows to which those of the Virgin Martyr are
light. We have, too, an excellent portraiture of a bold and wicked, but
clever and gifted man--Lovelace.
His third and last novel, _Sir Charles Grandison_, appeared in 1753. The
hero, _Sir Charles_, is the model of a Christian gentleman; but is,
perhaps, too faultless for popular appreciation.
In his delineations of humbler natures,--country girls like
_Pamela_,--Richardson is happiest: in his descriptions of high life he has
failed from ignorance. He was not acquainted with the best society, and
all his grandees are stilted, artificial, and affected; but even in this
fault he is of value, for he shows us how men of his class at that time
regarded the society of those above them.
These works, which, notwithstanding their length, were devoured eagerly as
soon as they appeared, are little read at present, and exist rather as
historical interpreters of an age that is past, than as present light
literature: they have been driven from our shelves by Scott, Dickens,
Thackeray, and a host of charming novelists since his day.
Richardson lived the admired of a circle of ladies,--to whose sex he had
paid so noble a tribute,--the hero of tea-drinkings at his house on
Parson's Green; his books gave him fame, but his shop--in the back office
of which he wrote his novels, when not pressed by business--gave him money
and its comforts. He died at the age of seventy-two, on the 4th of July,
1761.
He was an unconscious actor in a great movement which had begun in France.
The brilliant theories of Voltaire, Rousseau, Montesquieu, and
Dalembert--containing much truth and many heresies--were felt in England,
and had given a new impetus to English intellect; indeed, it is not
strange, when we come to consider, that while Richardson's works were
praised in English pulpits, Voltaire and the French atheists declared that
they saw in them an advance towards human perfectibility and
self-redemption, of which, if true, Richardson himself was unconscious.
From the amours of men and women of fashion, aided by intriguing
maid-servants and lying valets, Richardson turned away to do honor to
untitled merit, to exalt the humble, and to defy gilded vice. Whatever
were the charms of rank, he has elevated our humanity; thus far, and thus
far only, has he sympathized with the Frenchmen who attacked the
corruptions of the age, but who assaulted also its faith and its
reverence.
HENRY FIELDING.--The path of prose fiction, so handsomely opened by
Richardson, was immediately entered and pursued by a genius of higher
order, and as unlike him as it was possible to be. Richardson still clung
to romantic sentiment, Fielding eschewed it; Richardson was a teacher of
morality, Fielding shielded immorality; Richardson described artificial
manners in a society which he did not frequent, Fielding, in the words of
Coleridge, "was like an open lawn on a breezy day in May;" Richardson was
a plebeian, a carpenter's son, a successful printer; Fielding was a
gentleman, the son of General Fielding, and grandson of the Earl of
Denbigh; Richardson steadily rose, by his honest exertions, to independent
fortune, Fielding passed from the high estate of his ancestors into
poverty and loose company; the one has given us mistaken views of high
life, the other has been enabled, by his sad experience, to give us
truthful pictures of every grade of English society in his day from the
lord, the squire, and the fop to the thief-taker, the prostitute, and the
thief.
Henry Fielding was born on the 22d of April, 1707, at Sharpham Park,
Somersetshire. While yet a young man, he had read _Pamela_; and to
ridicule what he considered its prudery and over-righteousness, he hastily
commenced his novel of _Joseph Andrews_. This Joseph is represented as the
brother of Pamela,--a simple country lad, who comes to town and finds a
place as Lady Booby's footman. As Pamela had resisted her master's
seductions, he is called upon to oppose the vile attempts of his mistress
upon his virtue.
In that novel, as well as in its successors, _Tom Jones_ and _Amelia_,
Fielding has given us rare pictures of English life, and satires upon
English institutions, which present the social history of England a
century ago: in this view our sympathies are not lost upon purely ideal
creations.
In him, too, the French _illuminati_ claimed a co-laborer; and their
influence is more distinctly seen than in Richardson's works: great
social problems are discussed almost in the manner of a Greek chorus;
mechanical forms of religion are denounced. The French philosophers
attacked errors so intertwined with truth, that the violent stabs at the
former have cut the latter almost to death; Richardson attacked the errors
without injuring the truth: he is the champion of purity. If _Joseph
Andrews_ was to rival _Pamela_ in chastity, _Tom Jones_ was to be
contrasted with both in the same particular.
TOM JONES.--Fielding has received the highest commendations from literary
men. Byron calls him the "prose Homer of human nature;" and Gibbon, in
noticing that the Lords of Denbigh were descended, like Charles V., from
Rudolph of Hapsburg, says: "The successors of Charles V. may despise their
brethren of England, but the romance of _Tom Jones_--that exquisite
picture of human manners--will outlive the Palace of the Escurial and the
Imperial Eagle of Austria." We cannot go so far; we quote the praise but
doubt the prophecy. The work is historically valuable, but technically
imperfect and unequal. The plot is rambling, without method: most of the
scenes lie in the country or in obscure English towns; the meetings are as
theatrical as stage encounters; the episodes are awkwardly introduced, and
disfigure the unity; the classical introductions and invocations are
absurd. His heroes are men of generous impulses but dissolute lives, and
his women are either vile, or the puppets of circumstance.
ITS TRUE VALUE.--What can redeem his works from such a category of
condemnation? Their rare portraiture of character and their real glimpses
of nature: they form an album of photographs of life as it was--odd,
grotesque, but true. They have no mysterious Gothic castles like that of
Otranto, nor enchanted forests like that of Mrs. Radcliffe. They present
homely English life and people,--_Partridge_, barber, schoolmaster, and
coward; _Mrs. Honor_, the type of maid-servants, devoted to her mistress,
and yet artful; _Squire Western_, the foul and drunken country gentleman;
_Squire Allworthy_, a noble specimen of human nature; _Parson Adams_, who
is regarded by the critics as the best portrait among all his characters.
And even if we can neither commend nor recommend heroes like _Tom Jones_,
such young men really existed, and the likeness is speakingly drawn: we
bear with his faults because of his reality. Perhaps our verdict may be
best given in the words of Thackeray. "I am angry," he says, "with Jones.
Too much of the plum-cake and the rewards of life fall to that boisterous,
swaggering young scapegrace. Sophia actually surrenders without a proper
sense of decorum; the fond, foolish, palpitating little creature. 'Indeed,
Mr. Jones,' she says, 'it rests with you to name the day.' ... And yet
many a young fellow, no better than Mr. Thomas Jones, has carried by a
_coup-de-main_ the heart of many a kind girl who was a great deal too good
for him."
When _Joseph Andrews_ appeared, and Richardson found that so profane a
person as Fielding had dared to burlesque his _Pamela_, he was angry; and
his little tea-drinking coterie was warm in his defence; but Fielding's
party was then, and has remained, the stronger.
In his novel of _Amelia_, we have a general autobiography of Fielding.
Amelia, his wife, is lovely, chaste, and constant. Captain Booth--Fielding
himself--is errant, guilty, generous, and repentant. We have besides in it
many varieties of English life,--lords, clergymen, officers; Vauxhall and
the masquerade; the sponging-house and its inmates, debtors and
criminals,--all as Fielding saw and knew them.
The condition of the clergy is more clearly set forth in Fielding's novels
than in the pages of Echard, Oldham, Wood, Macaulay, or Churchill
Babington. So changed was their estate since the Reformation, that few
high-born youths, except the weak or lame, took holy orders. Many
clergymen worked during the week. One, says South, was a cobbler on
weekdays, and preached on Sundays. Wilmot says: "We are struck by the
phenomenon of a learned man sitting down to prove, with the help of logic,
that a priest or a chaplain in a family is not a servant,"--Jeremy
Collier: _Essays on Pride and the Office of a Chaplain_.
Fielding drew them and their condition from the life. Parson Adams is the
most excellent of men. His cassock is ten years old; over it he dons a
coarse white overcoat, and travels on foot to London to sell nine volumes
of sermons, wherewithal to buy food for his family. He engages the
innkeeper in serious talk; he does desperate battle to defend a young
woman who has fallen into the hands of ruffians on the highway; and when
he is arrested, his manuscript Eschylus is mistaken for a book of ciphers
unfolding a dreadful plot against the government. This is a hit against
the ignorance and want of education among the people; for it is some time
before some one in the company thinks he saw such characters many years
ago when he was young, and that it may be Greek. The incident of Parson
Trulliber mistaking his fellow-priest for a pork-merchant, on account of
his coarse garments, is excellent, but will not bear abbreviation. Adams
is splattered by the huge, overfed swine, and ejaculates, "_Nil habeo cum
porcis_; I am a clergyman, sir, and am not come to buy hogs!" The
condition of a curate and the theology of the publican are set forth in
the conversation between Parson Adams and the innkeeper.
The works of Fielding may be justly accused of describing immoral scenes
and using lewd language; but even in this they are delineative of the
manners and conversation of an age in which such men lived, such scenes
occurred, such language was used. I liken the great realm of English prose
fiction to some famous museum of art. The instructor of the young may
carefully select what pictures to show them; but the student of English
literature moves through the rooms and galleries, gazing, judging,
approving, condemning, comparing. Genius may have soiled its canvas with
what is prurient and vile; lascivious groups may stand side by side with
pictures of saints and madonnas. To leave the figure, it is wise counsel
to read on principle, and, armed with principle, to accept and imitate the
good, and to reject the evil. Conscience gives the rule, and for every
bane will give the antidote.
Of this school and period, Fielding is the greatest figure. One word as to
his career. Passing through all social conditions,--first a country
gentleman, living on or rather squandering his first wife's little fortune
in following the hounds and entertaining the county; then a playwright,
vegetating very seedily on the proceeds of his comedies; justice of the
peace, and encountering, in his vocation, such characters as _Jonathan
Wild_; drunken, licentious, unfaithful to his wife, but always--strange
paradox of poor human nature--generous as the day; mourning with bitter
tears the loss of his first wife, and then marrying her faithful
maid-servant, that they may mourn for her together,--he seems to have been
a rare mechanism without a _governor_. "Poor Harry Fielding!" And yet to
this irregular, sinful character, we owe the inimitable portraitures of
English life as it was, in _Joseph Andrews_, _Tom Jones_, and _Amelia_.
Fielding's habits, acting upon a naturally weak constitution, wore him
out. He left England, and wandered to the English factory at Lisbon, where
he died, in 1754, in the forty-eighth year of his age.
TOBIAS GEORGE SMOLLETT.--Smollett, the third in order and in rank of the
novelists of his age, was born at Cardross, Dumbartonshire, in 1721, of a
good family; but he had small means. After some schooling at Dumbarton and
a university career at Glasgow, he was, from necessity, apprenticed to a
surgeon. But as his grandfather, Sir James Smollett, on whom he depended,
died, he left his master, at the age of eighteen, and, taking in his
pocket a manuscript play he had thus early written,--_The Regicides_,--he
made his way to London, the El Dorado of all youths with literary
aspirations. The play was not accepted; but, through the knowledge
obtained in the surgery, he received an appointment as surgeon's mate, and
went out with Admiral Vernon's fated expedition to Carthagena in that
capacity, and thus acquired a knowledge of the sea and of sailors which he
was to use with great effect in his later writings. For a time he remained
in the West Indies, where he fell in love with Miss Anne Lascelles, whom
he afterwards married. In 1746 he returned to London, and, after an
unsuccessful attempt to practise medicine, he threw himself with great
vigor into the field of literature. He was a man of strange and
antagonistic features, just and generous in theory, quarrelsome and
overbearing in practice. From the year 1746 his pen seems to have been
always busy. He first tried his hand on some satires, which gained for him
numerous enemies; and in 1748 he produced his first novel, _Roderick
Random_, which, in spite of its indecency, the world at once acknowledged
to be a work of genius: the verisimilitude was perfect; every one
recognized in the hero the type of many a young North countryman going out
to seek his fortune. The variety is great, the scenes are more varied and
real than those in Richardson and Fielding, the characters are numerous
and vividly painted, and the keen sense of ridicule pervading the book
makes it a broad jest from beginning to end. Historically, his
delineations are valuable; for he describes a period in the annals of the
British marine which has happily passed away,--a hard life in little
stifling holds or forecastles, with hard fare,--a base life, for the
sailor, oppressed on shipboard, was the prey of vile women and land-sharks
when on shore. What pictures of prostitution and indecency! what obscenity
of language! what drunken infernal orgies! We may shun the book as we
would shun the company, and yet the one is the exact portraiture of the
other.
Roderick Random was followed, in 1751, by _Peregrine Pickle_, a book in
similar taste, but the characters in which are even more striking. The
forms of Commodore Trunnion, Lieutenant Hatchway, Pipes the boatswain, and
Ap Morgan the choleric Welsh surgeon, are as familiar to us now as at the
first.
Smollett had now retired to Chelsea, where his facile pen was still hard
at work. In 1753 appeared his _Ferdinand Count Fathom_, the portraiture of
a complete villain, corresponding in character with Fielding's _Jonathan
Wild_, but with a better moral.
About this time he translated _Don Quixote_; and although his version is
still published, it is by no means true to the idiom of the language, nor
to the higher purpose of Cervantes.
Passing by his _Complete History of Authentic and Entertaining Voyages_,
we come to his _History of England from the Descent of Julius Cæsar to the
Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, in 1748_. It is not a profound work; but it is
so currently written, that, in lieu of better, the latter portion was
taken to supplement Hume; as a work of less merit than either, that of
Bissett was added in the later editions to supplement Smollett and Hume.
For this history he is said to have received £2000.
In 1762 he issued _The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves_, who, with his
attendant, _Captain Crowe_, goes forth, in the style of Don Quixote and
Sancho, to _do_ the world. Smollett's forte was in the broadly humorous,
and this is all that redeems this work from utter absurdity.
HUMPHREY CLINKER.--His last work of any importance, and perhaps his best,
is _The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker_, described in a series of letters
descriptive of this amusing imaginative journey. Mrs. Winifred, Tabitha,
and, best of all, Lismahago, are rare characters, and in all respects,
except its vulgarity, it was the prototype of Hood's exquisite _Up the
Rhine_.
From the year 1756, Smollett edited, at intervals, various periodicals,
and wrote what he thought very good poetry, now forgotten,--an _Ode to
Independence_, after the Greek manner of strophe and antistrophe, not
wanting in a noble spirit; and _The Tears of Scotland_, written on the
occasion of the Duke of Cumberland's barbarities, in 1746, after the
battle of Culloden:
Mourn, hapless Caledonia, mourn
Thy banished peace, thy laurels torn!
Thy sons, for valor long renowned,
Lie slaughtered on thy native ground.
Smollett died abroad on the 21st of October, 1771. His health entirely
broken, he had gone to Italy, and taken a cottage near Leghorn: a slight
resuscitation was the consequence, and he had something in prospect to
live for: he was the heir-at-law to the estate of Bonhill, worth £1000 per
annum; but the remorseless archer would not wait for his fortune.