ition by tipping the
postillions an amount slightly in excess of the authorized
gratification. He admits that in England once, between the Devizes and
Bristol, he found this plan productive of the happiest results. It was
unfortunate that, upon this occasion, the lack of means or slenderness
of margin for incidental expenses should have debarred him from having
recourse to a similar expedient. For threepence a post more, as
Smollett himself avows, he would probably have performed the journey
with much greater pleasure and satisfaction. But the situation is
instructive. It reveals to us the disadvantage under which the novelist
was continually labouring, that of appearing to travel as an English
Milord, en grand seigneur, and yet having at every point to do it "on
the cheap." He avoided the common conveyance or diligence, and insisted
on travelling post and in a berline; but he could not bring himself to
exceed the five-sou pourboire for the postillions. He would have meat
upon maigre days, yet objected to paying double for it. He held aloof
from the thirty-sou table d'hote, and would have been content to pay
three francs a head for a dinner a part, but his worst passions were
roused when he was asked to pay not three, but four. Now Smollett
himself was acutely conscious of the false position. He was by nature
anything but a curmudgeon. On the contrary, he was, if I interpret him
at all aright, a high-minded, open-hearted, generous type of man. Like
a majority, perhaps, of the really open-handed he shared one trait with
the closefisted and even with the very mean rich. He would rather give
away a crown than be cheated of a farthing. Smollett himself had little
of the traditional Scottish thriftiness about him, but the people among
whom he was going--the Languedocians and Ligurians--were notorious for
their nearness in money matters. The result of all this could hardly
fail to exacerbate Smollett's mood and to aggravate the testiness which
was due primarily to the bitterness of his struggle with the world,
and, secondarily, to the complaints which that struggle engendered. One
capital consequence, however, and one which specially concerns us, was
that we get this unrivalled picture of the seamy side of foreign
travel--a side rarely presented with anything like Smollett's skill to
the student of the grand siecle of the Grand Tour. The rubs, the rods,
the crosses of the road could, in fact, hardly be presented to us more
gra