t to abandon all professions for this one, to consider
well the calamities in which he will most probably participate.

Among "Authors by Profession" who has displayed a more fruitful
genius, and exercised more intense industry, with a loftier sense of
his independence, than SMOLLETT? But look into his life and enter into
his feelings, and you will be shocked at the disparity of his
situation with the genius of the man. His life was a succession of
struggles, vexations, and disappointments, yet of success in his
writings. Smollett, who is a great poet, though he has written little
in verse, and whose rich genius composed the most original pictures of
human life, was compelled by his wants to debase his name by selling
it to voyages and translations, which he never could have read. When
he had worn himself down in the service of the public or the
booksellers, there remained not, of all his slender remunerations, in
the last stage of life, sufficient to convey him to a cheap country
and a restorative air on the Continent. The father may have thought
himself fortunate, that the daughter whom he loved with more than
common affection was no more to share in his wants; but the husband
had by his side the faithful companion of his life, left without a
wreck of fortune. Smollett, gradually perishing in a foreign land,[8]
neglected by an admiring public, and without fresh resources from the
booksellers, who were receiving the income of his works, threw out his
injured feelings in the character of _Bramble_; the warm generosity of
his temper, but not his genius, seemed fleeting with his breath. In a
foreign land his widow marked by a plain monument the spot of his
burial, and she perished in solitude! Yet Smollett dead--soon an
ornamented column is raised at the place of his birth,[9] while the
grave of the author seemed to multiply the editions of his works.
There are indeed grateful feelings in the public at large for a
favourite author; but the awful testimony of those feelings, by its
gradual progress, must appear beyond the grave! They visit the column
consecrated by his name, and his features are most loved, most
venerated, in the bust.

Smollett himself shall be the historian of his own heart; this most
successful "Author by Profession," who, for his subsistence, composed
masterworks of genius, and drudged in the toils of slavery, shall
himself tell us what happened, and describe that state between life
and death, partak