Pickle, for example, rather excels the infamy of Ferdinand, Count Fathom, in certain respects; though Ferdinand is professedly “often the object of our detestation and abhorrence,” and is left in a very bad, but, as “Humphrey Clinker” shows, in by no means a hopeless way.  Yet, throughout, Smollett regarded himself as a moralist, a writer of improving tendencies; one who “lashed the vices of the age.”  He was by no means wholly mistaken, but we should probably wrong the eighteenth century if we accepted all Smollett’s censures as entirely deserved.  The vices which he lashed are those which he detected, or fancied that he detected, in people who regarded a modest and meritorious Scottish orphan with base indifference.  Unluckily the greater part of mankind was guilty of this crime, and consequently was capable of everything.

Enough has probably been said about the utterly distasteful figure of Smollett’s hero.  In Chapter LX. we find him living on the resources of Strap, then losing all Strap’s money at play, and then “I bilk my taylor.”  That is, Roderick orders several suits of new clothes, and sells them for what they will fetch.  Meanwhile Strap can live honestly anywhere, while he has his ten fingers.  Roderick rescues himself from poverty by engaging, with his uncle, in the slave trade.  We are apt to consider this commerce infamous.  But, in 1763, the Evangelical director who helped to make Cowper “a castaway,” wrote, as to the slaver’s profession:  “It is, indeed, accounted a genteel employment, and is usually very profitable, though to me it did not prove so, the Lord seeing that a large increase of wealth could not be good for me.”  The reverend gentleman had, doubtless, often sung—­

      “Time for us to go,
      Time for us to go,
   And when we’d got the hatches down,
      ’Twas time for us to go!”

Roderick, apart from “black ivory,” is aided by his uncle and his long lost father.  The base world, in the persons of Strap, Thompson, the uncle, Mr. Sagely, and other people, treats him infinitely better than he deserves.  His very love (as always in Smollett) is only an animal appetite, vigorously insisted upon by the author.  By a natural reaction, Scott, much as he admired Smollett, introduced his own blameless heroes, and even Thackeray could only hint at the defects of youth, in “Esmond.”  Thackeray is accused of making his good people stupid, or too simple, or eccentric, and otherwise contemptible.  Smollett went further:  Strap, a model of benevolence, is ludicrous and a coward; even Bowling has the stage eccentricities of the sailor.  Mankind was certain, in the long run, to demand heroes more amiable and worthy of respect.  Our inclinations, as Scott says, are with “the open-hearted, good-humoured, and noble-minded Tom Jones, whose libertinism (one particular omitted) is perhaps rendered but too amiable by his good qualities.”  To be sure Roderick does befriend “a reclaimed street-walker” in her worst need, but why make her the confidante of the virginal Narcissa?  Why reward Strap with her hand?  Fielding decidedly, as Scott insists, “places before us heroes, and especially heroines, of a much higher as well as more pleasing character, than Smollett was able to present.”