Of Smollett’s works, “Humphrey Clinker” is the most humorous, “Roderick Random” the simplest and most natural, “Perigrine Pickle,” the most elaborate and brilliant.  The reader is conducted from adventure to adventure with an unfailing interest, sustained by the distinctness of the picture and the brightness of the coloring.  The characters met with are natural and well studied.  Trunnion, Hatchway, Pipes, Lieutenant Bowling, and Jack Rattlin are all distinctly seamen, and yet each has a marked individuality of his own.  Matthew Bramble and Winifred Jenkins are among the best-drawn and most entertaining of fictitious personages.  Smollett’s humor is usually of the broadest and most elementary kind.  It consists largely of hard blows, a-propos knockdowns, and practical jokes.  More than any novelist, he illustrates the coarseness of his time.  His pages are filled with cruelties and blackguardism.  Many of his principal characters are dissolute without enjoyment, and brutal without good nature.  Modern taste is shocked by the succession of repulsive scenes and degrading representations of vice which are often intended to amuse, and always to entertain.  But it is because life in the eighteenth century had so many repulsive features, that the novels of the time often repel the modern reader, There is nothing strained or uncommon in the experiences of Miss Williams while in prison: 

There I saw nothing but rage, anguish, and impiety; and heard nothing but groans, curses, and blasphemy.  In the midst of this hellish crew, I was subjected in the tyranny of a barbarian, who imposed upon me tasks that I could not possibly perform, and then punished my incapacity with the utmost rigor and inhumanity.  I was often whipped into a swoon, and lashed out of it, during which miserable intervals I was robbed by my fellow-prisoners of every thing about me, even to my cap, shoes, and stockings; I was not only destitute of necessaries, but even of food, so that my wretchedness was extreme.  Not one of my acquaintance, to whom I imparted my situation, would grant me the least succor or regard, on pretence of my being committed for theft; and my landlord refused to part with some of my own clothes, which I sent for, because I was indebted to him for a week’s lodging.  Overwhelmed with calamity, I grew desperate, and resolved to put an end to my grievances and life together; for this purpose I got up in the middle of the night, when I thought everybody around me asleep, and fixing one end of my handkerchief to a large hook in the ceiling that supported the scales on which the hemp is weighed, I stood upon a chair, and making a noose on the other end, put my neck into it with an intention to hang myself; but before I could adjust the knot, I was surprised and prevented by two women who had been awake all the while, and suspected my design.  In the morning my attempt was published among the prisoners, and punished with thirty stripes, the pain of which co-operating