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Of all the models of prose-fiction which the Tudor translations had given to English literature, the first to be copied was that of Cervantes's Don Quixote, rendered into English by Thomas Shelton in 1612. Swift must have had the rambling method of Cervantes well in mind when he wrote his Gulliver; and Smollett confessedly took it as his pattern and set out to imitate.
"Shaftesbury is not too genteel, nor Jonathan Wild too low. But for books which are no books," such as "scientific treatises, and the histories of Hume, Smollett, and Gibbon," &c., he confesses that he becomes splenetic when he sees them perched up on shelves, "like false saints, who have usurped the true shrines" of the legitimate occupants.
Or get Dorothea to read you light things, Smollett 'Roderick Random, 'Humphrey Clinker: they are a little broad, but she may read anything now she's married, you know. I remember they made me laugh uncommonly there's a droll bit about a postilion's breeches. We have no such humor now. I have gone through all these things, but they might be rather new to you."
Yet "Peregrine" is a kind of Odyssey of the eighteenth century: an epic of humour and of adventure. In February 1753, Smollett "obliged the town" with his "Adventures of Ferdinand, Count Fathom," a cosmopolitan swindler and adventurer.
A number of English novelists Goldsmith, Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, Sterne all seem to have seized upon the idea of reflecting life as it is, in the form of a story, and to have developed it simultaneously. The result was an extraordinary awakening of interest, especially among people who had never before been greatly concerned with literature.
Of these one was The Memoirs of a Lady of Quality, so oddly foisted by Smollett into the third volume of his Peregrine Pickle. This was recognised at once as being the work of the frail and adventurous Lady Vane, about whom so many strange stories were already current in society.
If the management of Ranelagh had been on the lookout for a press agent, they would doubtless have preferred Smollett in his Lydia mood. Only occasionally was the even tenor of Ranelagh amusement disturbed by an untoward event. One such occasion was due to that notorious Dr. John Hill who figures so largely in Isaac Disraeli's "Calamities and Quarrels of Authors."
I see things going, as I think, not quite right; and I ask you to take certain precautions, or let me resign my berth. And that's all." "Captain Smollett," began the doctor, with a smile, "did ever you hear the fable of the mountain and the mouse? You'll excuse me, I dare say, but you remind me of that fable. When you came in here I'll stake my wig you meant more than this."
Peregrine's overwhelming vanity, swollen by facile conquests, would inevitably have degraded him to this abyss. The intrigue was only the worst of those infamous practical jokes of his, in which Smollett takes a cruel and unholy delight.
His account of the cicisbeo and his duties, whether in Nice, Florence, or Rome, is certainly one of the most interesting that we have. Before Smollett and his almost contemporary travel correspondent, Samuel Sharp, it would probably be hard to find any mention of the cicisbeo in England, though the word was consecrated by Sheridan a few years later.
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