on usually understood as love is, to be sure, one of which he seems
to have no conception; he regards a woman much as a greedy person might
regard a sirloin of beef, or, at least, a plate of ortolans. At her
marriage a bride is "dished up;" that is all.

Thus this "gay writing" no longer makes us gay. In reading "Peregrine
Pickle" and "Humphrey Clinker," a man may find himself laughing aloud,
but hardly in reading "Roderick Random." The fun is of the cruel
primitive sort, arising merely from the contemplation of somebody's
painful discomfiture. Bowling and Rattlin may be regarded with
affectionate respect; but Roderick has only physical courage and vivacity
to recommend him. Whether Smollett, in Flaubert's deliberate way,
purposely abstained from moralising on the many scenes of physical
distress which he painted; or whether he merely regarded them without
emotion, has been debated. It seems more probable that he thought they
carried their own moral. It is the most sympathetic touch in Roderick's
character, that he writes thus of his miserable crew of slaves: "Our ship
being freed from the disagreeable lading of negroes, _to whom indeed I
had been a miserable slave since our leaving the coast of Guinea_, I
began to enjoy myself." Smollett was a physician, and had the
pitifulness of his profession; though we see how casually he makes Random
touch on his own unwonted benevolence.

People had not begun to know the extent of their own brutality in the
slave trade, but Smollett probably did know it. If a curious prophetic
letter attributed to him, and published more than twenty years after his
death, be genuine; he had the strongest opinions about this form of
commercial enterprise. But he did not wear his heart on his sleeve,
where he wore his irritable nervous system. It is probable enough that
he felt for the victims of poverty, neglect, and oppression (despite his
remarks on hospitals) as keenly as Dickens. We might regard his
offensively ungrateful Roderick as a purely dramatic exhibition of a
young man, if his other heroes were not as bad, or worse; if their few
redeeming qualities were not stuck on in patches; and if he had omitted
his remark about Roderick's "modest merit." On the other hand, the good
side of Matthew Bramble seems to be drawn from Smollett's own character,
and, if that be the case, he can have had little sympathy with his own
humorous Barry Lyndons. Scott and Thackeray leaned to the fav