the information which the eighteenth century has given us as to its justly beloved place of pilgrimage, Bath, there is nothing livelier than the Bath scenes here, from Chesterfield to Miss Austen, and few things, if any, so vivid and detailed.  So it is with Clifton earlier, with London later, with Scotland last of all, and with the journeys connecting them.  Yet these things are mere hors d’oeuvre, pickles, sauces, condiments, beside the solid character-food of the Brambles and Melfords, of Winifred Jenkins and of the redoubtable Lismahago.  That there is no exaggeration or caricature cannot, of course, be said.  It was not Smollett’s notion of art to present the elaborate academies of Richardson, or the almost uncanny duplications of Nature which Fielding could achieve.  He must embolden, in fact grotesque, the line; heighten, in fact splash and plaster, the colour.  But he has not left Nature behind here:  he has only put her in a higher light.

One means of doing so has been condemned in him, as in others, as in its great earlier master, Swift, and its greatest later one, Thackeray, by some purists.  They call it cheap and inartistic:  but this is mere pedantry and prudery.  Mis-spelling is not a thing to be employed every day or for every purpose:  if you do that, you get into the ineffably dreary monotony which distinguishes the common comic journalist.  But thrown in occasionally, and in the proper place, it gives an excellent zest:  and it has seldom been employed—­never, except in the two instances quoted—­better than in the cases of Tabitha Bramble and her maid.  For it is employed in the only legitimate way, that of zest, not substance.  Tabitha and Winifred would still be triumphs of characterisation of a certain kind if they wrote as correctly as Uncle Matthew or Nephew Jery.  Further, Lismahago is a bolder and a much less caricatured utilising of the “national” resource than Morgan.  If Smollett had not been a perfectly undaunted, as well as a not very amiable, person he would hardly have dared to “lacess the thistle” in this fashion.  But there are few sensible Scotsmen nowadays who would not agree with that most sensible, as well as greatest, of their compatriots, Sir Walter Scott, in acknowledging the justice (comic emphasis granted) of the twitch, and the truth of the grip, at that formidable plant.  The way in which Smollett mixes up actual living persons, by their own names, with his fictitious characters may strike us as odd:  but there is, for the most part, nothing offensive in it, and in fact, except a little of his apparently inevitable indulgence in nasty detail, there is nothing at all offensive in the book.  The contrast of its general tone with that especially of his first two; the softening and mellowing of the general presentation—­is very remarkable in a man of undoubtedly not very gentle disposition who had long suffered from extremely bad health, and whose chief original works recently—­the