t biographer
observes, not very satisfactorily, that he would rather praise it than
read it. In the present series, Goldsmith, Smollett, and Johnson
himself, if his Rasselas entitle him to rank in the number, are among
the most distinguished in this species of writing, of whom modern Europe
can boast. To these, if there be added the names of De Foe, Richardson,
Fielding, and Sterne, not to mention living authors, we may produce such
a phalanx as scarcely any other nation can equal. Indeed no other could
afford a writer so wide a field for the exercise of this talent as ours,
where the fullest scope and encouragement are given to the human mind to
expand itself in every direction, and assume every shape and hue, by the
freedom of the government, and by the complexity of civil and commercial
interests. No one has portrayed the whimsical varieties of character,
particularly in lower life, with a happier vein of burlesque than
Smollett. He delights, indeed, chiefly by his strong delineation of
ludicrous incidents and grotesque manners derived from this source. He
does not hold our curiosity entangled by the involution of his story,
nor suspend it by any artful protraction of the main event. He turns
aside for no digression that may serve to display his own ingenuity or
learning. From the beginning to the end, one adventure commonly rises up
and follows upon another, like so many waves of the sea, which cease
only because they have reached the shore.

The billows float in order to the shore,
The wave behind rolls on the wave before.

Admirable as the art of the novelist is, we ought not to confound it
with that of the poet; nor to conclude, because the characters of Parson
Adams, Colonel Bath, and Squire Western in Fielding; and of Strap,
Morgan, and Pipes, in Smollett, impress themselves as strongly on the
memory, and seem to be as really individuals whom we have seen and
conversed with, as many of those which are the most decidedly marked in
Shakspeare himself; that therefore the powers requisite for producing
such descriptions are as rare and extraordinary in one instance as in
the other. For the poet has this peculiar to himself; that he
communicates something from his own mind, which, at the same time that
it does not prevent his personages from being kept equally distinct from
one another, raises them all above the level of our common nature.
Shakspeare, whom we appear not only to know, personally, but to admire