duckling beloved of its maker.  Then came Novel number two, “The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle,” three years after the first:  an unequal book, best at its beginning and end, full of violence, not on the whole such good art-work as the earlier fiction, yet very fine in spots and containing such additional sea-dogs as Commodore Trunnion and Lieutenant Hatchway, whose presence makes one forgive much.  The original preface contained a scurrilous reference to Fielding, against whom he printed a diatribe in a pamphlet dated the next year.  The hero of the story, a handsome ne’er-do-well who has money and position to start the world with, encounters plenty of adventure in England and out of it, by land and sea.  There is an episodic book, “Memoirs, supposed to be written by a lady of quality,” and really giving the checkered career of Lady Vane, a fast gentlewoman of the time, done for pay at her request, which is illustrative of the loose state of fictional art in its unrelated, lugged-in character:  and as well of eighteenth century morals in its drastic details.  We have seen that Fielding was frankly episodic in handling a story; Smollett goes him one better:  as may most notoriously be seen also in the unmentionable Miss Williams’ story in “Roderick Random”—­in fact, throughout his novels.  Pickle, to put it mildly, is not an admirable young man.  An author’s conception of his hero is always in some sort a give-away:  it expresses his ideals; that Smollett’s are sufficiently low-pitched, may be seen here.  Plainly, to, he likes Peregrine, and not so much excuses his failings as overlooks them entirely.

After a two years’ interval came “The Adventures of Ferdinand, Count Fathom,” which was not liked by his contemporaries and is now seen to be definitely the poorest of the quartette.  It is enough to say of it that Fathom is an unmitigable scoundrel and the story, mixed romance and melodrama, offers the reader dust and ashes instead of good red blood.  It lacks the comic verve of Smollett’s typical fiction and manipulates virtue and vice in the cut-and-dried style of the penny-dreadful.  Even its attempts at the sensational leave the modern reader, bred on such heavenly fare as is proffered by Stevenson and others, indifferent-cold.

It is a pleasure to turn from it to what is generally conceded to be the best novel he wrote, as it is his last:  “The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker,” which appeared nearly twenty years later, when the author was fifty years old.  “The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Graves,” written in prison a decade earlier, and a poor satire in the vein of Cervantes, can be ignored, it falls so much below Smollett’s main fiction.  He had gone for his health’s sake to Italy and wrote “Humphrey Clinker” at Leghorn, completing it only within a few weeks of his death.  For years he had been degenerating as a writer, his physical condition was of the worst:  it looked as if his life was quite over.  Yet, by a sort of leaping-up of the creative flame out of the dying embers of the hearth, he wrought his masterpiece.