Smollett (1721-1771) differed from his two predecessors in being a Scotsman:  but in family was very much nearer to Fielding than to Richardson, being the grandson of a judge who was a Commissioner of the Union, and a gentleman of birth and property—­which last would, had he lived long enough, have come to Smollett himself.  But he suffered in his youth from some indistinctly known family jars, was apprenticed to a Glasgow surgeon, and escaping thence to London with a tragedy in his pocket, was in undoubted difficulties till (and after) he obtained the post of surgeon’s mate on board a man-of-war, and took part in the Carthagena expedition.  After coming home he made at least some attempts to practise:  but was once more drawn off to literature, though fortunately not to tragedy.  For the rest of his life he was a hard-worked but by no means ill-paid journalist, novelist, and miscellanist, making as much as L2000 by his History of England, not ill-written, though now never read.  Like Fielding (though, unlike him, more than once) he went abroad in search of health and died in the quest at Leghorn.  Smollett was not ignorant, but he seems to have known modern languages better than ancient:  though there is doubt about his direct share in the translations to which he gave his name.  Moreover he had some though no great skill in verse.

Lastly Sterne (1713-1768), though hardly, as it is the custom to call him, “an Irishman,” yet vindicated the claims of the third constituent of the United Kingdom by being born in Ireland, from which country his mother came.  But the Sternes were pure English, of a gentle family which had migrated from East Anglia through Nottingham to Yorkshire, and was much connected with Cambridge.  Thither Laurence, the novelist, after a very roving childhood (his father was a soldier), and a rather irregular education, duly went:  and, receiving preferment in the Church from his Yorkshire relations, lived for more than twenty years in that county without a history, till he took the literary world—­hardly by storm, but by a sort of fantastic capful of wind—­with Tristram Shandy in 1760.  Seven or eight years of fame, some profit, not hard work (for his books shrink into no great solid bulk), and constant travelling, ended by a sudden death at his Bond Street lodgings, after a long course of ill-health very carelessly attended to.

One or two more traits are relevant.  All the four were married, and married pretty early; two of them married twice.  Richardson’s first wife was, in orthodox fashion, his master’s daughter:  of his second little is known.  Fielding’s first (he had made a vain attempt earlier to abduct an heiress who was a relation) was, by universal consent, the model both of Sophia and Amelia, almost as charming as either, and as amiable; his second was her maid.  Of Mrs. Smollett, who was a Miss Lascelles and a West Indian heiress in a small way, we know very little—­the habit of identifying her with the “Narcissa”