with my disappointment and disgrace, bereft me of my senses, and threw me into an ecstasy of madness, during which I tore the flesh from my bones with my teeth, and dashed my head against the pavement.[179]

While Smollett mingled such scenes of misery with coarse adventures and coarse humor, he is yet always true to nature and always picturesque.  He keeps the reader’s attention even when he offends his taste.  He impaired the literary merit of “Perigrine Pickle,” but at the same time added to its dissolute character and its immediate popularity by the forced insertion of the licentious “Memoirs of a Lady of Quality.”  Now a serious blemish, these memoirs formed at the time an added attraction to the book.  They were eagerly read as the authentic account of Lady Vane, a notorious woman of rank, and were furnished to Smollett by herself, in the hope, fully gratified, that her infamous career might be known to future generations.[180]

That the standard of public taste was rising, would appear from the fact that in the second edition of “Perigrine Pickle,” Smollett found it advisable to “reform the manners and correct the expression” of the first; but when “he flatters himself that he has expunged every adventure, phrase, and insinuation that could be construed by the most delicate reader into a trespass upon the rules of decorum,” he does not give a high idea of the standard of the “most delicate reader.”  But Smollett has left an account of his own views regarding the moral effect of the pictures of vice and degradation which his works contain, and that account is a striking statement of contemporary feeling upon the subject: 

The same principle by which we rejoice at the remuneration of merit, will teach us to relish the disgrace and discomfiture of vice, which is always an example of extensive use and influence, because it leaves a deep impression of terror upon the minds of those who were not confirmed in the pursuit of morality and virtue, and, while the balance wavers, enables the right scale to preponderate. * * * The impulses of fear, which is the most violent and interesting of all the passions, remain longer than any other upon the memory; and for one that is allured to virtue by the contemplation of that peace and happiness which it bestows, an hundred are deterred from the practice of vice, by the infamy and punishment to which it is liable from the laws and regulations of mankind.  Let me not, therefore, be condemned for having chosen my principal character from the purlieus of treachery and fraud, when I declare that my purpose is to set him up as a beacon for the benefit of the inexperienced and the unwary, who, from the perusal of these memoirs, may learn to avoid the manifold snares with which they are continually surrounded in the paths of life; while those who hesitate on the brink of iniquity may he terrified from plunging into that irremediable gulph, by surveying the deplorable