United States or United States Virgin Islands ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Some of Smollett's faults, too, which are not necessarily connected with the sea a certain ferocity, an over-fondness for practical jokes, and the like appear in Marryat, who is, moreover, a rather careless and incorrect writer, and liable to fits both of extravagance and of dulness.
On a shelf was a small library of not more than twenty-five books, but they were ones that only a lover of good reading would have chosen. Shakespeare and Burns held honored places there. Scott's poems and three or four of his novels were in the collection. In worn leather bindings were "Tristram Shandy," and Smollett's "Complete History of England."
It is pretty certain that most of Smollett's most successful things, from Roderick Random to Humphry Clinker, and in those two capital books, perhaps, most of all, kept very close to actual experience, and sometimes merely reported it.
It was not Smollett's notion of art to present the elaborate academies of Richardson, or the almost uncanny duplications of Nature which Fielding could achieve. He must embolden, in fact grotesque, the line; heighten, in fact splash and plaster, the colour. But he has not left Nature behind here: he has only put her in a higher light.
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 Ferdinand Count Fathom is less interesting for itself than any other piece of fiction from Smollett's pen.
Lady Mary thought Lady Vane's part of "Peregrine" "more instructive to young women than any sermon that I know." She regarded Fielding as with Congreve, the only "original" of her age, but Fielding had to write for bread, and that is "the most contemptible way of getting bread." She did not, at this time, even know Smollett's name, but she admired him, and, later, calls him "my dear Smollett."
Now Strap had rescued Roderick from starvation, had bestowed on him hundreds of pounds, and had carried his baggage, and dined on his leavings. But Strap was not gently born! Smollett would not, probably, have acted thus, but he did not consider such conduct a thing out of nature. On the other side was Smollett's Scottish spirit of independence.
They stand just about the place where once was Kensington House, which had something of a history. Elphinstone, referred to in Boswell's "Life of Johnson," and supposed, on the very slightest grounds, to have been the original of one of Smollett's brutal schoolmasters in "Roderick Random"; though the driest of pedagogues, Elphinstone was the reverse of brutal.
They were written rather en noir than couleur de rose by an experienced, and, we might almost perhaps say, a disillusioned traveller, and not by a naif or a niais. The statement that they were to a certain extent the work of an invalid is, of course, true, and explains much. Smollett's old chum, Dr.
McKerchier in season broke with her Ladyship, and refused her admission to his dying bedside; but, in the mean time, his Memoirs had gone out to the world, and had greatly conduced to the popularity and sale of Smollett's novel.
Word Of The Day