The “Tears” are better than the “Ode to Blue-Eyed Ann,” probably Mrs. Smollett.  But the courageous author of “The Tears of Scotland,” had manifestly broken with patrons.  He also broke with Rich, the manager at Covent Garden, for whom he had written an opera libretto.  He had failed as doctor, and as dramatist; nor, as satirist, had he succeeded.  Yet he managed to wear wig and sword, and to be seen in good men’s company.  Perhaps his wife’s little fortune supported him, till, in 1748, he produced “Roderick Random.”  It is certain that we never find Smollett in the deep distresses of Dr. Johnson and Goldsmith.  Novels were now in vogue; “Pamela” was recent, “Joseph Andrews” was yet more recent, “Clarissa Harlowe” had just appeared, and Fielding was publishing “Tom Jones.”  Smollett, too, tried his hand, and, at last, he succeeded.

His ideas of the novel are offered in his preface.  The Novel, for him, is a department of Satire; “the most entertaining and universally improving.”  To Smollett, “Roderick Random” seemed an “improving” work! Ou le didacticisme va t’il se nicher?  Romance, he declares, “arose in ignorance, vanity, and superstition,” and declined into “the ludicrous and unnatural.”  Then Cervantes “converted romance to purposes far more useful and entertaining, by making it assume the sock, and point out the follies of ordinary life.”  Romance was to revive again some twenty years after its funeral oration was thus delivered.  As for Smollett himself, he professedly “follows the plan” of Le Sage, in “Gil Blas” (a plan as old as Petronius Arbiter, and the “Golden Ass” of Apuleius); but he gives more place to “compassion,” so as not to interfere with “generous indignation, which ought to animate the reader against the sordid and vicious disposition of the world.”  As a contrast to sordid vice, we are to admire “modest merit” in that exemplary orphan, Mr. Random.  This gentleman is a North Briton, because only in North Britain can a poor orphan get such an education as Roderick’s “birth and character require,” and for other reasons.  Now, as for Roderick, the schoolmaster “gave himself no concern about the progress I made,” but, “should endeavour, with God’s help, to prevent my future improvement.”  It must have been at Glasgow University, then, that Roderick learned “Greek very well, and was pretty far advanced in the mathematics,” and here he must have used his genius for the belles lettres, in the interest of his “amorous complexion,” by “lampooning the rivals” of the young ladies who admired him.

Such are the happy beginnings, accompanied by practical jokes, of this interesting model.  Smollett’s heroes, one conceives, were intended to be fine, though not faultless young fellows; men, not plaster images; brave, generous, free-living, but, as Roderick finds once, when examining his conscience, pure from serious stains on that important faculty.  To us these heroes often appear no better than ruffians; Peregrine