Because John Shebbeare was such a great hater, it is perhaps appropriate that the most vivid portrait of this sometime doctor, novelist, and political pamphleteer should come from the pen of Tobias Smollett, his bitterest enemy. In Sir Lancelot Greaves (1762), Smollett caricatures Shebbeare as the misanthropic Ferret, whose "eyes were small and red, and so deep set in the sockets, that each appeared like the unextinguished snuff of a farthing-candle, gleaming through the horn of a dark lanthorn. His nostrils were elevated in scorn, as if his sense of smelling had been perpetually offended by some unsavoury odour; and he looked as if he wanted to shrink within himself, from the impertinence of society." To his enemies (who were legion) Shebbeare was a figure of loathing--in the words of Smollett, "an old, rancorous, incorrigible instrument of sedition"--whose copious works seemed to spring like furious weeds from the...