As regards plot, “Roderick Random” is a mere string of picturesque adventures.  It is at the opposite pole from “Tom Jones” in the matter of construction.  There is no reason why it should ever stop except the convenience of printers and binders.  Perhaps we lay too much stress on the somewhat mechanical art of plot-building.  Fielding was then setting the first and best English example of a craft in which the very greatest authors have been weak, or of which they were careless.  Smollett was always rather more incapable, or rather more indifferent, in plot-weaving, than greater men.

In our day of royalties, and gossip about the gains of authors, it would be interesting to know what manner and size of a cheque Smollett received from his publisher, the celebrated Mr. Osborne.  We do not know, but Smollett published his next novel “on commission,” “printed for the Author”; so probably he was not well satisfied with the pecuniary result of “Roderick Random.”  Thereby, says Dr. Moore, he “acquired much more reputation than money.”  So he now published “The Regicide” “by subscription, that method of publication being then more reputable than it has been thought since” (1797).  Of “The Regicide,” and its unlucky preface, enough, or more, has been said.  The public sided with the managers, not with the meritorious orphan.

For the sake of pleasure, or of new experiences, or of economy, Smollett went to Paris in 1750, where he met Dr. Moore, later his biographer, the poetical Dr. Akenside, and an affected painter.  He introduced the poet and painter into “Peregrine Pickle”; and makes slight use of a group of exiled Jacobites, including Mr. Hunter of Burnside.  In 1750, there were Jacobites enough in the French capital, all wondering very much where Prince Charles might be, and quite unconscious that he was their neighbour in a convent in the Rue St. Dominique.  Though Moore does not say so (he is provokingly economical of detail), we may presume that Smollett went wandering in Flanders, as does Peregrine Pickle.  It is curious that he should introduce a Capucin, a Jew, and a black-eyed damsel, all in the Ghent diligence, when we know that Prince Charles did live in Ghent, with the black-eyed Miss Walkenshaw, did go about disguised as a Capucin, and was tracked by a Jewish spy, while the other spy, Young Glengarry, styled himself “Pickle.”  But all those events occurred about a year after the novel was published in 1751.

Before that date Smollett had got an M.D. degree from Aberdeen University, and, after returning from France, he practised for a year or two at Bath.  But he could not expect to be successful among fashionable invalids, and, in “Humphrey Clinker,” he make Matthew Bramble give such an account of the Bath waters as M. Zola might envy.  He was still trying to gain ground in his profession, when, in March 1751, Mr. D. Wilson published the first edition of “Peregrine Pickle” “for the Author,” unnamed.