the time about twenty, and having burdened a nobleman with his impossible play, “The Regicide,” “resolved to punish his barbarous indifference, and actually discarded my Patron.” He was not given to “booing” (in the sense of bowing), but had, of all known Scots, the most “canty conceit o’ himsel’.”  These qualities, with a violence of temper which took the form of beating people when on his travels, cannot have made Smollett a popular character.  He knew his faults, as he shows in the dedication of “Ferdinand, Count Fathom,” to himself.  “I have known you trifling, superficial, and obstinate in dispute; meanly jealous and awkwardly reserved; rash and haughty in your resentment; and coarse and lowly in your connections.”

He could, it is true, on occasion, forgive (even where he had not been wronged), and could compensate, in milder moods, for the fierce attacks made in hours when he was “meanly jealous.”  Yet, in early life at least, he regarded his own Roderick Random as “modest and meritorious,” struggling nobly with the difficulties which beset a “friendless orphan,” especially from the “selfishness, envy, malice, and base indifference of mankind.”  Roderick himself is, in fact, the incarnation of the basest selfishness.  In one of his adventures he is guilty of that extreme infamy which the d’Artagnan of “The Three Musketeers” and of the “Memoirs” committed, and for which the d’Artagnan of Le Vicomte de Bragelonne took shame to himself.  While engaged in a virtuous passion, Roderick not only behaves like a vulgar debauchee, but pursues the meanest arts of the fortune-hunter who is ready to marry any woman for her money.  Such is the modest and meritorious orphan, and mankind now carries its “base indifference” so far, that Smollett’s biographer, Mr. Hannay, says, “if Roderick had been hanged, I, for my part, should have heard the tidings unmoved . . .  Smollett obviously died without realising how nearly the hero, who was in some sort a portrait of himself, came to being a ruffian.”

Dr. Carlyle, in 1758, being in London, found Smollett “much of a humorist, and not to be put out of his way.”  A “humorist,” here, means an overbearingly eccentric person, such as Smollett, who lived much in a society of literary dependants, was apt to become.  But Dr. Carlyle also found that, though Smollett “described so well the characters of ruffians and profligates,” he did not resemble them.  Dr. Robertson, the historian, “expressed great surprise at his polished and agreeable manners, and the great urbanity of his conversation.”  He was handsome in person, as his portrait shows, but his “nervous system was exceedingly irritable and subject to passion,” as he says in the Latin account of his health which, in 1763, he drew up for the physician at Montpellier.  Though, when he chose, he could behave like a man of breeding, and though he undeniably had a warm heart for his wife and daughter, he did not always choose to behave well.  Except Dr. Moore, his biographer, he seems to have had few real friends during most of his career.