Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
We may speak of "caricature," but if an author can make us sob with laughter, to criticise him solemnly is ungrateful. Except Fielding occasionally, and Smollett, and Swift, and Sheridan, and the authors of "The Rovers," one does not remember any writers of the eighteenth century who quite upset the gravity of the reader.
Some obscure and temporary connection with Bartholomew Fair he may have had, as Smollett, in the scurrilous pamphlet issued in 1742, makes him say that he blew a trumpet there in quality of herald to a collection of wild beasts; but this is probably no more than an earlier and uglier form of the apparition laid by Mr. Latreille.
Some of Johnson's whims on literary subjects can be compared only to that strange nervous feeling which made him uneasy if he had not touched every post between the Mitre tavern and his own lodgings. His preference of Latin epitaphs to English epitaphs is an instance. An English epitaph, he said, would disgrace Smollett.
Little was known as to their actual condition, or whether the descendants of the primitive Vaudois Church continued to exist or not. Though English travellers amongst others, Addison, Smollett, and Sterne passed through the country in the course of last century, they took no note of the people of the valleys.
Asaph: poets like Collins and Young: historians and divines like Robertson and Hugh Blair: philosophers and men of science like Adam Smith and Sir Joseph Banks: with a certain number of intelligent peers like Lord Orrery the friend of Swift, Lord Marchmont the friend of Pope, and Lord Elibank whom Smollett praised for his "universal intelligence" and who said, when he was already seventy, that he would go five hundred miles to enjoy a day in Johnson's company; besides public men like Lord Charlemont the Irish statesman and traveller who once went to visit Montesquieu, and Lord Macartney who had gone as ambassador to Russia and was soon to go in the same position to Pekin.
The "Annual Register," the "Gentleman's Magazine," "Blair's Sermons," and "Hume and Smollett."
Smollett makes a certain Captain C tell this anecdote of George II. and his enlightened minister, the Duke of Newcastle: "In the beginning of the war this poor, half-witted creature told me, in a great fright, that thirty thousand French had marched from Acadie to Cape Breton.
I read Fielding and Smollett, Richardson, Radcliffe, 'Monk' Lewis, Thackeray, and Dickens, under a running fire of comment and criticism from Rossetti. It was terrible labor, this reading for hours night after night, till dawn came and I could drag myself wearily upstairs to bed. But it was a very useful study, and this is indeed the debt which I owe to Rossetti."
The heroine, Aurelia Darrel, is more of a lady, and less of a luxury, than perhaps any other of Smollett's women. But how Smollett makes love! "Tea was called. The lovers were seated; he looked and languished; she flushed and faltered; all was doubt and delirium, fondness and flutter." "All was gas and gaiters," said the insane lover of Mrs. Nickleby, with equal delicacy and point.
"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.
Word Of The Day