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This was uncommonly liberal conduct, in a Whig, and our Smollett, though no Jacobite, was in distinct and courageous sympathy with Jacobite Scotland. Indeed, he was as patriotic as Burns, or as his own Lismahago. These were times, we must remember, in which Scottish patriotism was more than a mere historical sentiment.
Lest the marvellous fulfilment of Creichton's dream should induce other seekers to have resort to a like self-preparation, we will merely add, that the village of Hamilton is hard by the castle of the Duke of that name, to whose family we have already seen Smollett was under some obligations, and that it is described in the same pages with Lismahago.
With great justice the Quarterly Reviewer pronounces the character of Lismahago in no whit inferior to that of Scott's Dugald Dalgetty; and who would not go out of his way to trace any circumstance in the history of such a conception as that of the valiant Laird of Drumthwacket, the service-seeking Rittmaster of Swedish Black Dragoons?
And later in the same book occurs a very characteristic passage: "Having drunk hard one night, I dreamed that I had found Captain David Steele, a notorious rebel, in one of the five farmers' houses on a mountain in the shire of Clydesdale and parish of Lismahago, within eight miles of Hamilton, a place I was well acquainted with."
Despite his own birthplace being north of the Tweed, many Scots were aggrieved at the incidental ridicule with which characters from "the land o' cakes" are sometimes treated in that and other works from the same hand; and the picture of Lismahago in "Humphrey Clinker" is said to have still more violently inflamed their ire.
It is not improbable, therefore, that, being at Hamilton, the novelist's attention may have been attracted to "Creichton's Memoirs," which treat of the adjacent districts, and that the mention of Stobo's name therein may have suggested to his mind its connection with Lismahago.
Scott himself tells us that he recollected "a good and gallant officer" who was said to have been the prototype of Lismahago, though probably the opinion had its origin in "the striking resemblance which he bore in externals to the doughty Captain." Sir Walter names no name; but there is a tradition that a certain Major Robert Stobo was the real original from which the picture was drawn.
The hostages chosen were Vanbraam and a brave but eccentric Scotchman, Robert Stobo, an acquaintance of the novelist Smollett, said to be the original of his Lismahago. Omitted in the Journal as printed by the French Government. A short and very incorrect abstract of this Journal will be found in N.Y. Col.
This is odd morality for one who suffered from "the base indifference of mankind." He ought to have known that poverty is not a vice for which the poor are to be blamed; and that intemperance is not the only other cause of their diseases. Perhaps the unfeeling passage is a mere paradox in the style of his own Lismahago.
Yet these things are mere hors d'oeuvre, pickles, sauces, condiments, beside the solid character-food of the Brambles and Melfords, of Winifred Jenkins and of the redoubtable Lismahago. That there is no exaggeration or caricature cannot, of course, be said.
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