“Then Pug, aghast, fled faster than the wind,
   Nor deign’d, in three-score miles, to look behind;
   While every band for orders bleat in vain,
   And fall in slaughtered heaps upon the plain,”—­

of Preston Pans.

Nothing could be more remote from the truth, or more unjustly cruel.  Smollett had not here even the excuse of patriotism.  Sir John Cope was no Butcher Cumberland.  In fact the poet’s friend is not wrong, when, in “Reproof,” he calls Smollett “a flagrant misanthrope.”  The world was out of joint for the cadet of Bonhill:  both before and after his very trying experiences as a ship surgeon the managers would not accept “The Regicide.”  This was reason good why Smollett should try to make a little money and notoriety by penning satires.  They are fierce, foul-mouthed, and pointless.  But Smollett was poor, and he was angry; he had the examples of Pope and Swift before him; which, as far as truculence went, he could imitate.  Above all, it was then the fixed belief of men of letters that some peer or other ought to aid and support them; and, as no peer did support Smollett, obviously they were “varnished ruffians.”  He erred as he would not err now, for times, and ways of going wrong, are changed.  But, at best, how different are his angry couplets from the lofty melancholy of Johnson’s satires!

Smollett’s “small sum of money” did not permit him long to push the fortunes of his tragedy, in 1739; and as for his “very large assortment of letters of recommendation,” they only procured for him the post of surgeon’s mate in the Cumberland of the line.  Here he saw enough of the horrors of naval life, enough of misery, brutality, and mismanagement, at Carthagena (1741), to supply materials for the salutary and sickening pages on that theme in “Roderick Random.”  He also saw and appreciated the sterling qualities of courage, simplicity, and generosity, which he has made immortal in his Bowlings and Trunnions.

It is part of a novelist’s business to make one half of the world know how the other half lives; and in this province Smollett anticipated Dickens.  He left the service as soon as he could, when the beaten fleet was refitting at Jamaica.  In that isle he seems to have practised as a doctor; and he married, or was betrothed to, a Miss Lascelles, who had a small and far from valuable property.  The real date of his marriage is obscure:  more obscure are Smollett’s resources on his return to London, in 1744.  Houses in Downing Street can never have been cheap, but we find “Mr. Smollett, surgeon in Downing Street, Westminster,” and, in 1746, he was living in May Fair, not a region for slender purses.  His tragedy was now bringing in nothing but trouble, to himself and others.  His satires cannot have been lucrative.  As a dweller in May Fair he could not support himself, like his Mr. Melopoyn, by writing ballads for street singers.  Probably he practised in his profession.