As to persons whom he chose to regard as his enemies, he was beyond measure rancorous and dangerous.  From his first patron, Lord Lyttelton, to his last, he pursued them with unscrupulous animosity.  If he did not mean actually to draw portraits of his grandfather, his cousins, his school-master, and the apothecary whose gallipots he attended—­in “Roderick Random,”—­yet he left the originals who suggested his characters in a very awkward situation.  For assuredly he did entertain a spite against his grandfather:  and as many of the incidents in “Roderick Random” were autobiographical, the public readily inferred that others were founded on fact.

The outlines of Smollett’s career are familiar, though gaps in our knowledge occur.  Perhaps they may partly be filled up by the aid of passages in his novels, plays, and poems:  in these, at all events, he describes conditions and situations through which he himself may, or must, have passed.

Born in 1721, he was a younger son of Archibald, a younger son of Sir James Smollett of Bonhill, a house on the now polluted Leven, between Loch Lomond and the estuary of the Clyde.  Smollett’s father made an imprudent marriage:  the grandfather provided a small, but competent provision for him and his family, during his own life.  The father, Archibald, died; the grandfather left nothing to the mother of Tobias and her children, but they were assisted with scrimp decency by the heirs.  Hence the attacks on the grandfather and cousins of Roderick Random:  but, later, Smollett returned to kinder feelings.

In some ways Tobias resembled his old grandsire.  About 1710 that gentleman wrote a Memoir of his own life.  Hence we learn that he, in childhood, like Roderick Random, was regarded as “a clog and burden,” and was neglected by his father, ill-used by his step-mother.  Thus Tobias had not only his own early poverty to resent, but had a hereditary grudge against fortune, and “the base indifference of mankind.”  The old gentleman was lodged “with very hard and penurious people,” at Glasgow University.  He rose in the world, and was a good Presbyterian Whig, but “had no liberty” to help to forfeit James II.  “The puir child, his son” (James III. and VIII.), “if he was really such, was innocent, and it were hard to do anything that would touch the son for the father’s fault.”  The old gentleman, therefore, though a Member of Parliament, evaded attending the first Parliament after the Union:  “I had no freedom to do it, because I understood that the great business to be agitated therein was to make laws for abjuring the Pretender . . . which I could not go in with, being always of opinion that it was hard to impose oaths on people who had not freedom to take them.”