himself a member of one of the less predominant partners of the British and Irish partnership, perhaps for that reason hit on utilising the difference of these partners (after a fashion which had never been seen since Shakespeare) in the Welshman Morgan.  As far as mere plot goes, he enters into no competition whatever with either Fielding or Richardson:  the picaresque model did not require that he should.  When Roderick has made use of his friends, knocked down his enemies, and generally elbowed and shoved his way through the crowd of adventures long enough, Narcissa and her fortune are not so much the reward of his exertions as a stock and convenient method of putting an end to the account of them.  The customer has been served with a sufficient amount of the commodity he demands:  and the scissors are applied, the canister shut up, the tap turned off.  It almost results—­it certainly coincides—­that some of the minor characters, and some of the minor scenes, are much more vivid than the hero (the heroine is almost an absolute nonentity) and the whole story.  The curate and the exciseman in the ninth chapter are, by common consent, among Smollett’s greatest triumphs; but the curate might be excommunicated and the exciseman excised without anybody who read the book perceiving the slightest gap or missing link, as far as the story is concerned.

Smollett’s second venture, Peregrine Pickle (1751), was more ambitious, perhaps rose higher in parts, but undoubtedly contained even more doubtful and inferior matter.  No one can justly blame him, though any one may most justly refrain from praising, from the general point of view, as regards the “insets” of Miss Williams’s story in Roderick and of that of Lady Vane here.  From that point of view they range with the “Man of the Hill” in Tom Jones, and in the first case at least, though most certainly not in the second, have more justification of connection with the central story.  He may so far underlie the charge of error of judgment, but nothing worse.  Unluckily the “Lady Vane” insertion was, to a practical certainty, a commercial not an artistic transaction:  and both here and elsewhere Smollett carried his already large licence to the extent of something like positive pornography.  He is in fact one of the few writers of real eminence who have been forced to Bowdlerise themselves.  Further, there would be more excuse for the most offensive part of Peregrine if it were not half plagiarism of the main situations of Pamela and Clarissa:  if Smollett had not deprived his hero of all the excuses which, even in the view of some of the most respectable characters of Pamela, attached to the conduct of Mr. B.; and if he had not vulgarised Lovelace out of any possible attribution of “regality,” except of being what the time would have called King of the Black Guard.  As for Tom Jones, he does not come into comparison with “Perry” at all, and he would doubtless have been most willing and able—­competent physically as well as morally—­to administer the proper punishment to that young ruffian by drubbing him within an inch of his life.