“—­Next Smollet came.  What author dare resist
Historian, critic, bard, and novelist? 
‘To reach thy temple, honoured Fame,’ he cried,
’Where, where’s an avenue I have not tried? 
But since the glorious present of to-day
Is meant to grace alone the poet’s lay,
My claim I wave to every art beside,
And rest my plea upon the Regicide.
* * * * *
But if, to crown the labours of my Muse,
Thou, inauspicious, should’st the wreath refuse,
Whoe’er attempts it in this scribbling age
Shall feel the Scottish pow’rs of Crilic rage. 
Thus spurn’d, thus disappointed of my aim,
I’ll stand a bugbear in the road to Fame,
Each future author’s infant hopes undo,
And blast the budding honours of his brow.’ 
He said,—­and, grown with future vengeance big,
Grimly he shook his scientific wig. 
To clinch the cause, and fuel add to fire,
Behind came Hamilton, his trusty squire: 
Awhile he paus’d, revolving the disgrace,
And gath’ring all the honours of his face;
Then rais’d his head, and, turning to the crowd,
Burst into bellowing, terrible and loud:—­
’Hear my resolve; and first by—­I swear,
By Smollet, and his gods, whoe’er shall date
With him this day for glorious fame to vie,
Sous’d in the bottom of the ditch shall lie;
And know, the world no other shall confess,
While I have crab-tree, life, or letter-press.’ 
Scar’d at the menace, authors fearful grew,
Poor Virtue trembled, and e’en Vice look’d blue.”

It is unnecessary to pursue this vapid composition to its most lame and impotent conclusion; it is sufficient to cite it as a specimen-brick of the hostility which many literary characters entertained against the author of “Roderick Random.”  Despite his own birthplace being north of the Tweed, many Scots were aggrieved at the incidental ridicule with which characters from “the land o’ cakes” are sometimes treated in that and other works from the same hand; and the picture of Lismahago in “Humphrey Clinker” is said to have still more violently inflamed their ire.  It is to this feeling on the part of his countrymen that Charles Lamb alludes, in his essay upon “Imperfect Sympathies.”  “Speak of Smollett as a great genius,” he says, “and they [the Scots] will retort upon Hume’s History compared with his continuation of it.  What if the historian had continued ’Humphrey Clinker’?” In fact, there were a good many North Britons, a century ago, who seem to have felt, on the subject of English censure or ridicule, pretty much as some of our own people do to-day.  No matter how well-founded the objection may be, or how justly a local habit may be satirized, our sensitiveness is wounded and our indignation aroused.  That the portrait in Lismahago’s case was not altogether overcharged may be deduced from a passage in one of Walter Scott’s letters, in which he likens the behavior and appearance of one of his oldest and most