reader dust
and ashes instead of good red blood. It lacks the comic verve of
Smollett's typical fiction and manipulates virtue and vice in
the cut-and-dried style of the penny-dreadful. Even its attempts
at the sensational leave the modern reader, bred on such
heavenly fare as is proffered by Stevenson and others,
indifferent-cold.

It is a pleasure to turn from it to what is generally conceded
to be the best novel he wrote, as it is his last: "The
Expedition of Humphrey Clinker," which appeared nearly twenty
years later, when the author was fifty years old. "The
Adventures of Sir Launcelot Graves," written in prison a decade
earlier, and a poor satire in the vein of Cervantes, can be
ignored, it falls so much below Smollett's main fiction. He had
gone for his health's sake to Italy and wrote "Humphrey Clinker"
at Leghorn, completing it only within a few weeks of his death.
For years he had been degenerating as a writer, his physical
condition was of the worst: it looked as if his life was quite
over. Yet, by a sort of leaping-up of the creative flame out of
the dying embers of the hearth, he wrought his masterpiece.

It was thrown into letter form, Richardson's framework, and has
all of Smollett's earlier power of characterization and brusque
wit, together with a more genial, mellower tone, that of an
older man not soured but ripened by the years. Some of its main
scenes are enacted in his native Scotland and possibly this
meant strength for another Scot, as it did for Sir Walter and
Stevenson. The kinder interpretation of humanity in itself makes
the novel better reading to later taste; so much can not
honestly be said for its plain speaking, for as Henley says in
language which sounds as if it were borrowed from the writer he
is describing, "the stinks and nastinesses are done with
peculiar gusto." The idea of the story, as usual a pivot around
which to revolve a series of adventures, is to narrate how a
certain bachelor, country gentleman, Matthew Bramble, a malade
imaginaire, yet good-hearted and capable of big laughter--"the
most risible misanthrope ever met with," as he is limned by one
of the persons of the story--travels in England, Wales and
Scotland in pursuit of health, taking with him his family, of
whom the main members include his sister, Tabitha (and her maid,
Jenkins), and his nephew, not overlooking the dog, Chowder.
Clinker, who names the book, is a subsidiary character, merely a
servant in Bra