But the business of this article is not to dwell upon matters that are already in print, and to which the general reader can have easy access.  To such as are desirous of obtaining a full account of the life and genius of Smollett, prepared with all the aids that are to be derived from a thorough knowledge of the question, we would suggest the perusal of an exceedingly well-written article in the London Quarterly Review for January, 1858; and we will here heartily express a regret that the unpublished materials which have found a place in this magazine could not have been in the hands of the author of that paper.  It is certain he would have made a good use of them.  As it is, however, they will perhaps possess an additional interest to the public from the fact that they have never before seen the light.

It is something, says Washington Irving, to have seen the dust of Shakspeare.  It is assuredly not less true that one can hardly examine without a peculiar emotion the private letters of such a man as Smollett.  A strange sensation accompanies the unfolding of the faded sheets, that have hardly been disturbed during the greater part of a century.  And as one at least of the documents in question is of an almost autobiographical character, its tattered folds at once assume a value to the literary student far beyond the usual scope of an inedited autograph.

The first letter to which we shall call attention was written by Smollett in 1763.  It was in reply to one from Richard Smith, Esq., of Burlington, New Jersey, by whose family it has been carefully preserved, together with a copy of the letter which called it forth.  Mr. Smith was a highly respectable man, and in later years, when the Revolution broke out, a delegate from his Province to the first and second Continental Congress.  He had written to Smollett, expressing his hopes that the King had gratified with a pension the author of “Peregrine Pickle” and “Roderick Random,” and asking under what circumstances these books were composed, and whether they contained any traces of his correspondent’s real adventures.  He adverts to a report that, in the case of “Sir Launcelot Greaves,” Smollett had merely lent his name to “a mercenary bookseller.”  “The Voyages which go under your name Mr. Rivington (whom I consulted on the matter) tells me are only nominally your’s, or, at least, were chiefly collected by understrappers.  Mr. Rivington also gives me such an account of the shortness of time in which you wrote the History, as is hardly credible.”  A list of Smollett’s genuine publications is also requested.

The Mr. Rivington referred to in the foregoing extract was probably the well-known New York bookseller, whose press was so obnoxious to the Whigs a few years later.  To the letter itself Smollett thus replied:—­

DR. SMOLLETT TO MR. SMITH.