do that, you get into the ineffably
dreary monotony which distinguishes the common comic journalist. But
thrown in occasionally, and in the proper place, it gives an excellent
zest: and it has seldom been employed--never, except in the two
instances quoted--better than in the cases of Tabitha Bramble and her
maid. For it is employed in the only legitimate way, that of zest, not
substance. Tabitha and Winifred would still be triumphs of
characterisation of a certain kind if they wrote as correctly as Uncle
Matthew or Nephew Jery. Further, Lismahago is a bolder and a much less
caricatured utilising of the "national" resource than Morgan. If
Smollett had not been a perfectly undaunted, as well as a not very
amiable, person he would hardly have dared to "_lacess_ the thistle" in
this fashion. But there are few sensible Scotsmen nowadays who would not
agree with that most sensible, as well as greatest, of their
compatriots, Sir Walter Scott, in acknowledging the justice (comic
emphasis granted) of the twitch, and the truth of the grip, at that
formidable plant. The way in which Smollett mixes up actual living
persons, by their own names, with his fictitious characters may strike
us as odd: but there is, for the most part, nothing offensive in it,
and in fact, except a little of his apparently inevitable indulgence in
nasty detail, there is nothing at all offensive in the book. The
contrast of its general tone with that especially of his first two; the
softening and mellowing of the general presentation--is very remarkable
in a man of undoubtedly not very gentle disposition who had long
suffered from extremely bad health, and whose chief original works
recently--the _Journey_ and the _Adventures_--had been, the first a
tissue of grumbles, the second an outburst of savagery. But though the
grumbles recur in Matthew Bramble's mouth, they become merely humorous
there: and there is practically no savagery at all. Leghorn, it has been
observed more than once, was in a fashion a Land of Beulah: a "season of
calm weather" had set in for a rather stormy life just before the end.

Whatever may be his defects (and from the mere point of view of Momus
probably a larger number may be found in him than either in Richardson
or in Fielding), Smollett well deserves an almost equal place with them
in the history of the novel. Richardson, though he had found the
universal as far as certain aspects of it in humanity are concerned, had
confined