puir child, his son"
(James III. and VIII.), "if he was really such, was innocent, and it were
hard to do anything that would touch the son for the father's fault." The
old gentleman, therefore, though a Member of Parliament, evaded attending
the first Parliament after the Union: "I had no freedom to do it, because
I understood that the great business to be agitated therein was to make
laws for abjuring the Pretender . . . which I could not go in with, being
always of opinion that it was hard to impose oaths on people who had not
freedom to take them."

This was uncommonly liberal conduct, in a Whig, and our Smollett, though
no Jacobite, was in distinct and courageous sympathy with Jacobite
Scotland. Indeed, he was as patriotic as Burns, or as his own Lismahago.
These were times, we must remember, in which Scottish patriotism was more
than a mere historical sentiment. Scotland was inconceivably poor, and
Scots, in England, were therefore ridiculous. The country had, so far,
gained very little by the Union, and the Union was detested even by
Scottish Whig Earls. It is recorded by Moore that, while at the
Dumbarton Grammar School, Smollett wrote "verses to the memory of
Wallace, of whom he became an early admirer," having read "Blind Harry's
translation of the Latin poems of John Blair," chaplain to that hero.
There probably never were any such Latin poems, but Smollett began with
the same hero-worship as Burns. He had the attachment of a Scot to his
native stream, the Leven, which later he was to celebrate. Now if
Smollett had credited Roderick Random with these rural, poetical, and
patriotic tastes, his hero would have been much more human and amiable.
There was much good in Smollett which is absent in Random. But for some
reason, probably because Scotland was unpopular after the Forty-Five,
Smollett merely describes the woes, ill usage, and retaliations of
Roderick. That he suffered as Random did is to the last degree
improbable. He had a fair knowledge of Latin, and was not destitute of
Greek, while his master, a Mr. Love, bore a good character both for
humanity and scholarship. He must have studied the classics at Glasgow
University, where he was apprenticed to Mr. Gordon, a surgeon. Gordon,
again, was an excellent man, appreciated by Smollett himself in after
days, and the odious Potion of "Roderick Random" must, like his rival,
Crab, have been merely a fancy sketch of meanness, hypocrisy, and
profligac