Quixotism in Sir Launcelot Greaves is flat. It is a
drawback to the book rather than an aid. The plot could have developed
itself just as well, the high-minded young baronet might have had just as
entertaining adventures, without his imitation of the fine old Spanish
Don.

I have remarked on the old Smollett touch in Sir Launcelot Greaves,--the
individual touch of which we are continually sensible in Roderick Random
and Peregrine Pickle, but seldom in Count Fathom. With it is a new
Smollett touch, indicative of a kindlier feeling towards the world. It
is commonly said that the only one of the writer's novels which contains
a sufficient amount of charity and sweetness is Humphry Clinker. The
statement is not quite true. Greaves is not so strikingly amiable as
Smollett's masterpiece only because it is not so striking in any of its
excellences; their lines are always a little blurred. Still, it shows
that ten years before Clinker, Smollett had learned to combine the
contradictory elements of life in something like their right proportions.
If obscenity and ferocity are found in his fourth novel, they are no
longer found in a disproportionate degree.

There is little more to say of Sir Launcelot Greaves, except in the way
of literary history. The given name of the hero may or may not be
significant. It is safe to say that if a Sir Launcelot had appeared in
fiction one or two generations earlier, had the fact been recognised
(which is not indubitable) that he bore the name of the most celebrated
knight of later Arthurian romance, he would have been nothing but a
burlesque figure. But in 1760, literary taste was changing. Romanticism
in literature had begun to come to the front again, as Smollett had
already shown by his romantic leanings in Count Fathom. With it there
came interest in the Middle Ages and in the most popular fiction of the
Middle Ages, the "greatest of all poetic subjects," according to
Tennyson, the stories of Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table,
which, for the better part of a century, had been deposed from their
old-time place of honour. These stories, however, were as yet so
imperfectly known--and only to a few--that the most to be said is that
some connection between their reviving popularity and the name of
Smollett's knight-errant hero is not impossible.

Apart from this, Sir Launcelot Greaves is interesting historically as
ending Smollett's comparatively long silence in novel-writi