“I am much mortified to find it is believed in America that I have lent my name to Booksellers:  that is a species of prostitution of which I am altogether incapable.  I had engaged with Mr. Rivington, and made some progress in a work exhibiting the present state of the world; which work I shall finish, if I recover my health.  If you should see Mr. Rivington, please give my kindest compliments to him.  Tell him I wish him all manner of happiness, tho’ I have little to expect for my own share; having lost my only child, a fine girl of fifteen, whose death has overwhelmed myself and my wife with unutterable sorrow.

“I have now complied with your request, and beg, in my turn, you will commend me to all my friends in America.  I have endeavoured more than once to do the Colonies some service; and am, Sir, your very humble servant,

“Ts.  SMOLLETT.

“London, May 8, 1763.”

* * * * *

The foregoing letter, though by no means confidential, must possess considerable value to any future biographer of the writer.  It very clearly shows the light in which Smollett was willing to be viewed by the public.  It explains the share he took in more than one literary enterprise, and establishes his paternity of the translation of “Gil Blas,” which has been questioned by Scott and ignored by other critics.  The travels in France, which, according to the letter, could not have been posterior to 1749, seem unknown even to the Quarterly Reviewer; but it is possible that here Smollett’s memory may have played him false, and that he confounded 1749 with the following year, when, as is well known, he visited that kingdom.  The reference to his own share in furnishing the original for the story of “Roderick Random” is curious; nevertheless it can no longer be doubted that very many of the persons and scenes of that work, as well as of “Peregrine Pickle,” were drawn, with more or less exaggeration, from his actual experience of men and manners.  And the despondency with which he contemplates his shattered health and the prospect of finding a grave in a foreign land explains completely the governing motives that produced, in the concluding pages of the history of the reign of George II., so calm and impartial a testimony to the various worth of his literary compeers that it almost assumes the tone of the voice of posterity.  This is the suggestion of the article in the “Quarterly Review,” and the language of the letter confirms it.  Despairing of ever again returning to his accustomed avocations, and with a frame shattered by sickness and grief, he passes from the field of busy life to a distant land, where he thinks to leave his bones; but ere he bids a last farewell to his own soil, he passes in review the names of those with whom he has for years been on relations of amity or of ill-will, in his own profession, and, while he makes their respective merits, so far as in him lies, a part of the history of their country, he seems to breathe the parting formula of the gladiator of old,—­Moriturus vos saluto.