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Matthew Bramble and Winifred Jenkins are among the best-drawn and most entertaining of fictitious personages. Smollett's humor is usually of the broadest and most elementary kind. It consists largely of hard blows, a-propos knockdowns, and practical jokes. More than any novelist, he illustrates the coarseness of his time. His pages are filled with cruelties and blackguardism.
"I do not think that the opinion of the Montpellier professor deserves Smollett's condemnation. It seems to me both careful and sensible and contains all the knowledge of its time.
Fielding was too perfect an artist in the higher and purer kind of fiction to favour it: and though Sterne himself was a sufficiently characteristic letter-writer, the form would not have suited the peculiar eccentricity of his two novels. But Smollett's best, Humphrey Clinker, adopts the method, and is perhaps one of its most successful examples.
If she were a woman throbbing with life, she would be different from Smollett's other heroines. The "second lady" of the melodrama, Mademoiselle de Melvil, though by no means vivified, is yet more real than her sister-in-law. The fact that they are mostly inanimate figures is not the only surprise given us by the personages of Count Fathom.
In the early part of the December following, the remainder of Smollett's programme came to pass, and by Lyttelton's interest Fielding was appointed a Justice of the Peace for Westminster.
2 Henry IV. act iii. sc. 1. Spain, in 1719, sent a strong force under the Duke of Ormond to Scotland in behalf of the Chevalier. Owing to storms only a few hundred men landed. These were joined by a large body of Highlanders, but being attacked by General Wightman, the clansmen dispersed and the Spaniards surrendered. Smollett's England, ed. 1800, ii. 382.
POPE'S solemn declaration in the preface to his collected works comes by no means short of Smollett's avowal. HUME'S philosophical indifference could often suppress that irritability which Pope and Smollett fully indulged. James translated in 1750.
"John Bull," quoth Smollett, "is as haughty and valiant to-day, as he was abject and cowardly on the Black Wednesday when the Highlanders were at Derby." "Weep, Caledonia, weep!" he had written in his tragedy. Now he wrote "Mourn, hapless Caledonia, mourn." Scott has quoted, from Graham of Gartmore, the story of Smollett's writing verses, while Gartmore and others were playing cards.
The thermometer was at 28 degrees, yet his coat was only tied round his neck by the sleeves as he swept along all health, fire, manhood, love and hope. He marched this day like dear Smollett's lines, whose thoughts, though he had never heard them, fired his heart.
Smollett's old mental grievances and sores have been shifted and to some extent, let us hope, dissipated by his strenuous journeyings, and in June 1765, after an absence of two years, he is once more enabled to write,
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