olly boy, he
was intimately familiar; with the West Indies he was acquainted; and he
later resided in Paris, and travelled in Flanders, so that he had more
experience, certainly, if not more invention, than Fielding.

In "Roderick Random" he used Scottish "local colour" very little, but his
life had furnished him with a surprising wealth of "strange experiences."
Inns were, we must believe, the favourite home of adventures, and
Smollett could ring endless changes on mistakes about bedrooms. None of
them is so innocently diverting as the affair of Mr. Pickwick and the
lady in yellow curl-papers; but the absence of that innocence which
heightens Mr. Pickwick's distresses was welcome to admirers of what Lady
Mary Wortley Montagu calls "gay reading."

She wrote from abroad, in 1752, "There is something humorous in R.
Random, that makes me believe that the author is H. Fielding"--her
kinsman. Her ladyship did her cousin little justice. She did not
complain of the morals of "R. Random," but thought "Pamela" and
"Clarissa" "likely to do more general mischief than the works of Lord
Rochester." Probably "R. Random" did little harm. His career is too
obviously ideal. Too many ups and downs occur to him, and few orphans of
merit could set before themselves the ideal of bilking their tailors,
gambling by way of a profession, dealing in the slave trade, and
wheedling heiresses.

The variety of character in the book is vast; in Morgan we have an
excellent, fiery, Welshman, of the stage type; the different minor
miscreants are all vividly designed; the eccentric lady author may have
had a real original; Miss Snapper has much vivacity as a wit; the French
adventures in the army are, in their rude barbaric way, a forecast of
Barry Lyndon's; and, generally, both Scott and Thackeray owe a good deal
to Smollett in the way of suggestions. Smollett's extraordinary love of
dilating on noisome smells and noisome sights, that intense affection for
the physically nauseous, which he shared with Swift, is rather less
marked in "Roderick" than in "Humphrey Clinker," and "The Adventures of
an Atom." The scenes in the Marshalsea must have been familiar to
Dickens. The terrible history of Miss Williams is Hogarth's Harlot's
Progress done into unsparing prose. Smollett guides us at a brisk pace
through the shady and brutal side of the eighteenth century; his vivacity
is as unflagging as that of his disagreeable rattle of a hero. The
passi