his countenance, she threw her arms about his neck, saying, "Ah, my son! your old roguish smile has betrayed you at once."

On his return to London he engaged in The Critical Review, the chief direction of which was in his hands for a number of years.-Reviewing is at best but an invidious office, and Smollet's temper was not formed to conciliate. It was the means of bringing him into continual quarrels. One of these was with Dr. Grainger, whose translation of Tibullus he had reviewed with some acrimony.

A little before this he had drawn upon himself a prosecution for an assault, in which he had caned a person who had injured him. This chastisement was magnified into an assassination. He was honourably acquitted; but he gave vent to his indignation in a very angry letter to the prosecutor's counsel.

Another scrape he got into was on account of some strictures in the same Review on the conduct of Admiral Knowles, on occasion of a pamphlet published by him relative to a secret expedition which had failed. For this he was sentenced to a fine of a hundred pounds and three months imprisonment in the King's Bench. Dr. Smollet showed he had not forgotten this when he wrote his History of England, in which he mentions Admiral Knowles with great contempt.

About this time he published another novel, The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves. It is an imitation of Don Quixote, and is but a flat performance.

While Smollet lay in the King's Bench, Garrick generously brought out a farce of his, called The Reprisals, on which the author's former animosities against the manager were buried in oblivion; and he tells Garrick in a letter, that he hopes to have an opportunity of convincing him that his gratitude is at least as warm as any other of his passions.

As Smollet wrote neither for amusement nor for fame, but for subsistence, he soon engaged in another work, which, though hastily composed, had a large sale, namely, A History of England, in four volumes quarto. It was published in the year 1758, and is said to have been composed and finished for the press in fourteen months. Such facility of execution shows powers, but precludes excellence. The narrative is rapid and sprightly, and the characters are drawn with spirit; but it is a hasty work, and strongly tinctured with the political prejudices of the author. It was, however, acceptable to the public, and sold well, because we had at that time no history of credit which came down lower than the Revolution. A Continuation of it was published some years afterwards. In this history, under the head of Arts, he has taken occasion to mention with honour Akenside and others whom he had satirized in Peregrine Pickle. A high eulogium is also paid to Garrick; and he handsomely told him, that he deemed it incumbent upon him to make a public atonement in a work of truth, for wrongs done him in a work of fiction.

Smollet, having decidedly taken his political party, was engaged to write in defence of the

measures of the Earl of Bute, which he did in a weekly paper called The Briton. This occasioned the well-known North Briton of Wilkes, and broke off the friendly intercourse which, as men of literature and genius, they had hitherto held with one another.

Smollet's temper was not well calculated for calmness in such altercations, and the virulence with which he wrote The Adventures of an Atom, a political satire describing public characters that figured upon the stage at the end of the last reign and beginning of the present, lost him many of his best friends.

But his constitution now began to be much broken, and a heavy domestic affliction which fell upon him, the loss of an only daughter, led him to seek relief for himself and his wife in a foreign tour, of which he published an account under the title of Letters from France and Italy. They were entertaining, but full of spleen, and they betray those illiberal prejudices against foreigners and foreign manners of which he gave a specimen in Peregrine Pickle. Smollet never possessed the French language sufficiently to converse in it with freedom, and he probably thought he showed his own delicacy by finding fault with the national usages. Yet whoever reads Smollet's works, even the least exceptionable of them, will be of opinion that he had little title to be fastidious upon the score of delicacy. He was also disappointed in the Pantheon, which he calls a huge cock-pit, and was not enchanted with the Venus de Medicis. These animadversions drew upon him the lively satire of Sterne, who intro

duces him in his Sentimental Journey under the appellation of Smelfungus. "The learned Smelfungus," says he, "travelled from Boulogne to Paris, from Paris to Rome, and so on; but he set out with the spleen and jaundice, and every object he passed by was discoloured and distorted. He wrote an account of them, but it was nothing but an account of his miserable feelings. I met Smelfungus in the grand portico of the Pantheon; he was just coming out of it. It is nothing but a huge cockpit,' said he. I wish you had said nothing worse of the Venus de Medicis,' replied I. He had been flayed alive and bedeviled, and worse used than St. Bartholomew, at every stage he had come at. I'll tell it,' said Smelfungus, to the world.' You had better tell it,' said I,' to your physician.'" The last sentence suggests the best excuse for the author's misanthropy. However, the raillery of Sterne was too amusing to be forgotten, and gave a wound to the book from which it never recovered.

In 1766 he paid another visit to his native country; but his health was at this time so broken, that he was incapable of enjoying his tour. A fretfulness hung upon him the whole time, which, after his return, he himself noticed to his friends, with much sense of mortification at the peevishness which he could not conquer. He recovered, however, to a certain degree, and, in an interval of tolerable health, wrote the last of his novels, Humphrey Clinker. It was indeed the last of his publications. His complaints returned upon him with renewed violence, and he b

VOL. XXX.

was advised to try again change of air and climate; but as his circumstances could but ill support the expense of the voyage, his friends applied to the ministry to obtain the office of consul at Leghorn or Nice, by way of sinecure, that he might be free from all care but that of his health; but it could not be obtained:-a repulse not greatly to be wondered at, considering the part he had taken in politics. And indeed, what was there in any of his works to deserve from the public any other remuneration than what his bookseller afforded him? He went abroad, however, having probably obtained the desired assistance through the channel of private friendship, but died at Leghorn in the month of October 1771, in the fifty-first year of his age. His wife, who was with him, erected a plain monument to his memory on the spot, for which his friend Dr. Armstrong furnished a Latin inscription, highly complementary to the deceased, and highly indignant against those who, he imagined, had not sufficiently patronized him. His cousin, James Smollet of Bonhill, erected a very elegant pillar to his memory on the banks of the Leven, the stream he had celebrated, and near which he was born, with an appropriate Latin inscription. It is one of the objects which attract the attention of the tourist in the neighbourhood of Dunbarton.

Dr. Smollet was in person stout and well-proportioned. His looks and manners had dignity, with a great mixture of reserve and haughtiness. He had a high independent spirit, and, it is said, would not stoop to flatter those who might have