Although there was, under these conditions, inevitable imitation of the new model, there was a deeper reason for the rapid development.  The time was ripe for this kind of fiction:  it was in the air, as we have already tried to suggest.  Hence, other fiction-makers began to experiment with the form, this being especially true of Smollett.  Out of many novelists, feeble or truly called, a few of the most important must be mentioned.

I

The Scotch-born Tobias Smollett published his first fiction, “Roderick Random,” eight years after “Pamela” had appeared, and the year before “Tom Jones”; it was exactly contemporaneous with “Clarissa Harlowe,” A strict contemporary, then, with Richardson and Fielding, he was also the ablest novelist aside from them, a man whose work was most influential in the later development.  It is not unusual to dismiss him in a sentence as a coarser Fielding.  The characterization hits nearer the bull’s eye than is the rule with such sayings, and more vulgar than the greater writer he certainly is, brutal where Fielding is vigorous:  and he exhibits and exaggerates the latter’s tendencies to the picaresque, the burlesque and the episodic.  His fiction is of the elder school in its loose fiber, its external method of dealing with incident and character.  There is little or nothing in Smollett of the firm-knit texture and subjective analysis of the moderns.  Thus the resemblances are superficial, the differences deeper-going and palpable.  Smollett is often violent, Fielding never:  there is an impression of cosmopolitanism in the former—­a wider survey of life, if only on the surface, is given in his books.  By birth, Smollett was of the gentry; but by the time he was twenty he had seen service as Surgeon’s Mate in the British navy, and his after career as Tory Editor, at times in prison, literary man and traveler who visited many lands and finally, like Fielding, died abroad in Italy, was checkered enough to give him material and to spare for the changeful bustle, so rife with action and excitement, of his four principal stories.  Like the American Cooper, he drew upon his own experiences for his picture of the navy; and like a later American, Dr. Holmes, was a physician who could speak by the card of that side of life.

Far more closely than Fielding he followed the “Gil Blas” model, depending for interest primarily upon adventures by the way, moving accidents by flood and field.  He declares, in fact, his intention to use Le Sage as a literary father and he translated “Gil Blas.”  In striking contrast, too, with Fielding is the interpretation of life one gets from his books; with the author of “Tom Jones” we feel, what we do in greater degree with Shakespeare and Balzac, that the personality of the fiction-maker is healthily merged in his characters, in the picture of life.  But in the case of Dr. Smollett, there is a strongly individual satiric bias: