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Updated: May 18, 2025
At the description of this nautical manoeuvre I observed that Smollett grinned, and a gentleman who was sitting higher up the table in the uniform of the Royal Navy, and who I guessed to be Captain Marryat, became very uneasy and fidgeted in his seat.
On the other hand, Smollett is only funny, hardly witty, where he condenses all his wrath against the Dutch into an epigram of two lines: Amphibious creatures, sudden be your fall, May man undam you and God damn you all. Of satirists I have hitherto said nothing, because some, perhaps the most eminent of them, do not come under the head either of wit or humor.
It was apt to develop Peregrines; and Lord Elcho himself might have furnished Smollett with suitable adventures. There can be no doubt that Cadwallader Crabtree suggested Sir Malachi Malagrowther to Scott, and that Hatchway and Pipes, taking up their abode with Peregrine in the Fleet, gave a hint to Dickens for Sam Weller and Mr. Pickwick in the same abode.
He had with him the gentlemen of the name of Buchanan, with the Grahams, and other gentry of the Lennox, and a party of the citizens of Dumbarton, under command of Tobias Smollett, a magistrate, or bailie, of that town, and ancestor of the celebrated author.
Here is a change indeed from the method of the chronique scandaleuse, and a restraint to be wondered at when we remember the worthies caricatured by so eminent a writer as Smollett. But even more remarkable is the difference of spirit between "Betsy Thoughtless" and Mrs. Haywood's earlier and briefer romances.
"I have read Smollett's account of his illness as it appears in several passages in his travels and in the statement which he drew up for Professor 'F. at Montpellier. "Smollett speaks of his pulmonic disorder, his 'asthmatical disorder, and uses other expressions which show that his lungs were affected.
Perhaps they may partly be filled up by the aid of passages in his novels, plays, and poems: in these, at all events, he describes conditions and situations through which he himself may, or must, have passed. Born in 1721, he was a younger son of Archibald, a younger son of Sir James Smollett of Bonhill, a house on the now polluted Leven, between Loch Lomond and the estuary of the Clyde.
And one of the six forecastle hands was little better. "There's a man," says Captain Smollett, nodding towards him, "new to this work. He came nigh-hand fainting, doctor, when he heard the cry. Another touch of the rudder and that man would join us." I told my plan to the captain, and between us we settled on the details of its accomplishment.
And clapping me in the friendliest way upon the shoulder, he hobbled off forward, and went below. Captain Smollett, the squire, and Dr. Livesey were talking together on the quarter-deck, and, anxious as I was to tell them my story, I durst not interrupt them openly. While I was still casting about in my thoughts to find some probable excuse, Dr. Livesey called me to his side.
Such were the chiefs in whose rude school were formed those sturdy warriors from whom Smollett, in the next age, drew Lieutenant Bowling and Commodore Trunnion.
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