been brought pretty rapidly, if not to the recovery of his senses, to the loss of his liberty.  Nor, with rare exceptions, are the subordinate or incidental humours of the first class.  But I have always thought that the opening passage more than entitles the book to an honourable place in the history of English fiction.  I do not know where to look, before it, for such an “interior”—­such a complete Dutch picture of room and furniture and accessories generally.  Even so learned a critic as the late M. Brunetiere thought that things of the kind were not older than Balzac.  I have known English readers, not ignorant, who thought they were scarcely older than Dickens.  Dickens, however, undoubtedly took them from Smollett, of whom we know that he was an early and enthusiastic admirer:  and Scott, who has them much earlier than Dickens, not improbably was in some degree indebted for them to his countryman.  At any rate in that countryman they are:  and you will not find a much better example of them anywhere than this of the inn-kitchen.  But apart from it, and from a few other things of the same or similar kinds, there is little to be said for the book.  The divine Aurelia especially is almost more shadowy than the divine Narcissa and the divine Emilia:  and can claim no sort of sistership in personality with Amelia or Sophia, even with Clarissa or Pamela.  In fact, up to this time Smollett’s women—­save in the case of Fathom’s hell-cat of a mother, and one or two more who are “minors”—­have done absolutely nothing for his books.  It was to be quite otherwise in the last and best, though even here the heroine en titre is hardly, even though we have her own letters to body her out, more substantial than her elder sisters.  But Lydia, though the ingenue, is not the real heroine of this book:  her aunt and her aunt’s maid divide that position between them.

A sufficiently ungracious critic may, if he chooses, see in Smollett’s falling back on the letter-plan for Humphry Clinker (1771) an additional proof of that deficiency in strictly inventive faculty which has been noticed.  The more generous “judge by results” will hardly care to consider so curiously in the case of such a masterpiece.  For a masterpiece it really is.  The comparative absence of “character” in the higher and literary sense as contrasted with “character-parts” in the technical meaning of the theatre has been admitted in the other books.  Here, with the aid of the letters, it is amply supplied, or perhaps (to speak with extreme critical closeness) the character-parts are turned into characters by this means.  There is no stint, because of the provision of this higher interest, of the miscellaneous fun and “business” which Smollett had always supplied so lavishly out of his experience, his observation, and, if not his invention, his combining faculty.  And there is the setting of interior and exterior “furniture” which has been also referred to.  Abundant as is