ence of temper
which took the form of beating people when on his travels, cannot have
made Smollett a popular character. He knew his faults, as he shows in
the dedication of "Ferdinand, Count Fathom," to himself. "I have known
you trifling, superficial, and obstinate in dispute; meanly jealous and
awkwardly reserved; rash and haughty in your resentment; and coarse and
lowly in your connections."

He could, it is true, on occasion, forgive (even where he had not been
wronged), and could compensate, in milder moods, for the fierce attacks
made in hours when he was "meanly jealous." Yet, in early life at least,
he regarded his own Roderick Random as "modest and meritorious,"
struggling nobly with the difficulties which beset a "friendless orphan,"
especially from the "selfishness, envy, malice, and base indifference of
mankind." Roderick himself is, in fact, the incarnation of the basest
selfishness. In one of his adventures he is guilty of that extreme
infamy which the d'Artagnan of "The Three Musketeers" and of the
"Memoirs" committed, and for which the d'Artagnan of _Le Vicomte de
Bragelonne_ took shame to himself. While engaged in a virtuous passion,
Roderick not only behaves like a vulgar debauchee, but pursues the
meanest arts of the fortune-hunter who is ready to marry any woman for
her money. Such is the modest and meritorious orphan, and mankind now
carries its "base indifference" so far, that Smollett's biographer, Mr.
Hannay, says, "if Roderick had been hanged, I, for my part, should have
heard the tidings unmoved . . . Smollett obviously died without realising
how nearly the hero, who was in some sort a portrait of himself, came to
being a ruffian."

Dr. Carlyle, in 1758, being in London, found Smollett "much of a
humorist, and not to be put out of his way." A "humorist," here, means
an overbearingly eccentric person, such as Smollett, who lived much in a
society of literary dependants, was apt to become. But Dr. Carlyle also
found that, though Smollett "described so well the characters of ruffians
and profligates," he did not resemble them. Dr. Robertson, the
historian, "expressed great surprise at his polished and agreeable
manners, and the great urbanity of his conversation." He was handsome in
person, as his portrait shows, but his "nervous system was exceedingly
irritable and subject to passion," as he says in the Latin account of his
health which, in 1763, he drew up for the physician at Montp