These, no doubt, are grave drawbacks:  but the racy fun of the book almost atones for them:  and the exaltation of the naval element of Roderick which one finds here in Trunnion and Hatchway and Pipes carries the balance quite to the other side.  This is the case even without, but much more with, the taking into account of Smollett’s usual irregular and almost irrelevant bonuses, such as the dinner after the fashion of the ancients and the rest.  No:  Peregrine Pickle can never be thrown to the wolves, even to the most respectable and moral of these animals in the most imposing as well as ravening of attitudes.  English Literature cannot do without it.

Without Ferdinand Count Fathom (1753) many people have thought that English Literature could do perfectly well:  and without going quite so far, one may acknowledge that perhaps a shift could be made.  The idea of re-transferring the method (in the first place at any rate) to foreign parts was not a bad one, and it may be observed that by far the best portion of Fathom is thus occupied.  Not a few of these opening passages are excellent:  and Fathom’s mother, if not a person, is an excellent type:  it is probable that the writer knew the kind well.  But his unhappy tendency to enter for the same stakes as his great forerunners makes it almost impossible not to compare Ferdinand Fathom with Jonathan Wild:  and the effect is very damaging to the Count.  Much of the book is dull:  and Fathom’s conversation is (to adopt a cant word) extremely unconvincing.  The fact seems to be that Smollett had run his picaresque vein dry, as far as it connected itself with mere rascality of various kinds, and he did well to close it.  He had published three novels in five years:  he waited seven before his next, and then eleven more before his last.

A qualified apology has been hinted above for Sir Launcelot Greaves.  It is undoubtedly evidence of the greatness of Don Quixote that there should have been so many direct imitations of it by persons of genius and talent:  but this particular instance is unfortunate to the verge of the preposterous, if not over it.  The eighteenth century was indeed almost the capital time of English eccentricity:  and it was also a time of licence which sometimes looked very like lawlessness.  But its eccentricities were not at this special period romantic:  and its lawlessness was rather abuse of law than wholesale neglect of it.  A rascally attorney or a stony-hearted creditor might inflict great hardship under the laws affecting money:  and a brutal or tyrannical squire might do the same under those affecting the tenure or the enjoyment of house or land.  “Persons of quality” might go very far.  But even a person of quality, if he took to riding about the country in complete steel, assaulting the lieges, and setting up a sort of cadi-justice of his own in opposition to the king’s, would probably have