It was thrown into letter form, Richardson’s framework, and has all of Smollett’s earlier power of characterization and brusque wit, together with a more genial, mellower tone, that of an older man not soured but ripened by the years.  Some of its main scenes are enacted in his native Scotland and possibly this meant strength for another Scot, as it did for Sir Walter and Stevenson.  The kinder interpretation of humanity in itself makes the novel better reading to later taste; so much can not honestly be said for its plain speaking, for as Henley says in language which sounds as if it were borrowed from the writer he is describing, “the stinks and nastinesses are done with peculiar gusto.”  The idea of the story, as usual a pivot around which to revolve a series of adventures, is to narrate how a certain bachelor, country gentleman, Matthew Bramble, a malade imaginaire, yet good-hearted and capable of big laughter—­“the most risible misanthrope ever met with,” as he is limned by one of the persons of the story—­travels in England, Wales and Scotland in pursuit of health, taking with him his family, of whom the main members include his sister, Tabitha (and her maid, Jenkins), and his nephew, not overlooking the dog, Chowder.  Clinker, who names the book, is a subsidiary character, merely a servant in Bramble’s establishment.  The crotchety Bramble and his acidulous sister, who is a forerunner of Mrs. Malaprop in the unreliability of her spelling, and Lieutenant Lishmahago, who has been complimented as the first successful Scotchman in fiction—­all these are sketched with a verity and in a vein of genuine comic invention which have made them remembered.  Violence, rage, filth—­Smollett’s besetting sins—­are forgotten or forgiven in a book which has so much of the flavor and movement of life, The author’s medical lore is made good use of in the humorous descriptions of poor Bramble’s ailments.  Incidentally, the story defends the Scotch against the English in such a pronounced way that Walpole calls it a “part novel”; and there is, moreover, a pleasant love story interwoven with the comedy and burlesque.  One feels in leaving this fiction that with all allowance for his defects, there is more danger of undervaluing the author’s powers and place in the modern Novel than the reverse.

Fielding and Smollett together set the pace for the Novel of blended incident and character:  both were, as sturdy realists, reactionary from the sentimental analysis of Richardson and express an instinct contrary to the self-conscious pathos of a Sterne or the idyllic romanticism of a Goldsmith.  Both were directly of influence upon the Novel’s growth in the nineteenth century:  Fielding especially upon Thackeray, Smollett upon Dickens.  If Smollett had served the cause in no other way than in his strong effect upon the author of “The Pickwick Papers,” he would deserve well of all critics:  how the little Copperfield delighted in that scant collection of books on his