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REFERENCES. Lord Mahon's History of England, which commences with the peace of Utrecht, is one of the most useful and interesting works which have lately appeared. Smollett's continuation of Hume should be consulted, although the author was greater as a novelist than as an historian. Burnet's history on this period is a standard. Hallam should be read in reference to all constitutional questions.
Sometimes we lounged on the floor of ferns, smoking, and telling stories; of which the doctor had as many as a half-pay captain in the army. Sometimes we chatted, as well as we could, with the natives; and, one day joy to us! Po-Po brought in three volumes of Smollett's novels, which had been found in the chest of a sailor, who some time previous had died on the island. Amelia!
The travels in France, which, according to the letter, could not have been posterior to 1749, seem unknown even to the Quarterly Reviewer; but it is possible that here Smollett's memory may have played him false, and that he confounded 1749 with the following year, when, as is well known, he visited that kingdom.
To heighten the effect of his scoundrel, Smollett develops parallel with him the virtuous Count de Melvil. The author's scheme of thus using one character as the foil of another, though not conspicuous for its originality, shows a decided advance in the theory of constructive technique. Only, as I have said, Smollett's execution is now defective.
It is true that, as a schoolboy, a certain pompousness in the style of his letters home suggested to the more clear- sighted among his relatives the possibility that young Thomas might grow up into a prig; but, after all, what else could be expected from a child who, at the age of three, had been presented by his father, as a reward for proficiency in his studies, with the twenty-four volumes of Smollett's History of England?
Nor are the characters, for the most part, life-like enough to be interesting. There is an apparent exception, to be sure, in the hero's mother, already mentioned, the hardened camp-follower, whom we confidently expect to become vitalised after the savage fashion of Smollett's characters.
Smollett's remarks upon the mysterious dispensations of Providence in regard to Genoa and the retreat of the Austrians are charged to the full with his saturnine spirit. His suspicions were probably well founded. Ever since 1685 Genoa had been the more or less humiliated satellite of France, and her once famous Bank had been bled pretty extensively by both belligerents.
The divine Aurelia especially is almost more shadowy than the divine Narcissa and the divine Emilia: and can claim no sort of sistership in personality with Amelia or Sophia, even with Clarissa or Pamela. In fact, up to this time Smollett's women save in the case of Fathom's hell-cat of a mother, and one or two more who are "minors" have done absolutely nothing for his books.
I had spoken to him on two or three occasions subsequent to the one on which I made his acquaintance, and had been every time more and more struck with the resemblance which his ways and manners bore to those of Smollett's character, on which account I shall call him Morgan, though such was not his name.
While it cannot justify the indifference with which Shelburne treated his request, we cannot but perceive that Smollett's contemptuous ridicule of his unfortunate or incapable Grub-Street friends must rob him of much of the sympathy which would otherwise accompany the ministerial neglect with which the claims of literature were visited in his person.
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