t was also a time
of licence which sometimes looked very like lawlessness. But its
eccentricities were not at this special period romantic: and its
lawlessness was rather abuse of law than wholesale neglect of it. A
rascally attorney or a stony-hearted creditor might inflict great
hardship under the laws affecting money: and a brutal or tyrannical
squire might do the same under those affecting the tenure or the
enjoyment of house or land. "Persons of quality" might go very far. But
even a person of quality, if he took to riding about the country in
complete steel, assaulting the lieges, and setting up a sort of
cadi-justice of his own in opposition to the king's, would probably
have been brought pretty rapidly, if not to the recovery of his senses,
to the loss of his liberty. Nor, with rare exceptions, are the
subordinate or incidental humours of the first class. But I have always
thought that the opening passage more than entitles the book to an
honourable place in the history of English fiction. I do not know where
to look, before it, for such an "interior"--such a complete Dutch
picture of room and furniture and accessories generally. Even so learned
a critic as the late M. Brunetiere thought that things of the kind were
not older than Balzac. I have known English readers, not ignorant, who
thought they were scarcely older than Dickens. Dickens, however,
undoubtedly took them from Smollett, of whom we know that he was an
early and enthusiastic admirer: and Scott, who has them much earlier
than Dickens, not improbably was in some degree indebted for them to his
countryman. At any rate in that countryman they are: and you will not
find a much better example of them anywhere than this of the
inn-kitchen. But apart from it, and from a few other things of the same
or similar kinds, there is little to be said for the book. The divine
Aurelia especially is almost more shadowy than the divine Narcissa and
the divine Emilia: and can claim no sort of sistership in personality
with Amelia or Sophia, even with Clarissa or Pamela. In fact, up to this
time Smollett's women--save in the case of Fathom's hell-cat of a
mother, and one or two more who are "minors"--have done absolutely
nothing for his books. It was to be quite otherwise in the last and
best, though even here the heroine _en titre_ is hardly, even though we
have her own letters to body her out, more substantial than her elder
sisters. But Lydia, though the _ingenue_, is