As used by him it has singular merits, and communicates to at least three of his five books (The Adventures of an Atom is deliberately excluded as not really a novel at all) a certain “liveliness” which, though it is not the life_like_ness of Fielding, is a great attraction.  He showed it first in Roderick Random (1748), which appeared a little before Tom Jones, and was actually taken by some as the work of the same author.  It would be not much more just to take Roderick as Smollett’s deliberate presentment of himself than to apply the same construction to Marryat’s not very dissimilar, but more unlucky, coup d’essai of Frank Mildmay.  But it is certain that there was something, though exactly how much has never been determined, of the author’s family history in the earliest part, a great deal of his experiences on board ship in the middle, and probably not a little, though less, of his fortunes in Bath and London towards the end.  As a single source of interest and popularity, no doubt, the principal place must be given to the naval part of the book.  Important as the English navy had been, for nearly two centuries if not for much longer, it had never played any great part in literature, though it had furnished some caricatured and rather conventional sketches.  There is something more in a play, The Fair Quaker of Deal, by Charles Shadwell, nephew or son of Dryden’s victim, but this was only of third or fourth rate literary value, and an isolated example to boot.  The causes of the neglect have been set forth by many writers from Macaulay downwards, and need not be discussed here; the fact is certain.  Smollett’s employment of “the service” as a subject may have been, consciously and intentionally, only one of those utilisings of personal experience of which we have spoken.  But really it was an instance of the great fact that the novelist, on the instigation mainly of Fielding himself, was beginning to take all actual life to be his province.

Smollett brought to his work peculiar powers, the chief of which was a very remarkable one, and almost as much “improved on” Fielding as Fielding’s exercise of it was improved on Richardson—­that of providing his characters and scenes with accessories.  Roderick is not only a much more disagreeable person than Tom, but he is much less of a person:  and Strap, though (vice versa) rather a better fellow than Partridge, is a much fainter and more washed-out character.  But in mere interest of story and accessories the journey of Roderick and Strap to London is quite the equal, and perhaps the superior, of that of Tom and his hanger-on after we once leave Upton, where the interest is of a kind that Smollett could not reach.  It is probable that Fielding might, if he had chosen, have made the prison in Amelia as horribly and disgustingly realistic (to use a horrible and disgusting word) as the ship in Roderick, but he at any rate did not choose.  Moreover Smollett,