I have never seen this first edition, which was “very curious and disgusting.”  Smollett, in his preface to the second edition, talks of “the art and industry that were used to stifle him in the birth, by certain booksellers and others.”  He now “reformed the manners, and corrected the expressions,” removed or modified some passages of personal satire, and held himself exempt from “the numerous shafts of envy, rancour, and revenge, that have lately, both in private and public, been levelled at his reputation.”  Who were these base and pitiless dastards?  Probably every one who did not write favourably about the book.  Perhaps Smollett suspected Fielding, whom he attacks in several parts of his works, treating him as a kind of Jonathan Wild, a thief-taker, and an associate with thieves.  Why Smollett thus misconducted himself is a problem, unless he was either “meanly jealous,” or had taken offence at some remarks in Fielding’s newspaper.  Smollett certainly began the war, in the first edition of “Peregrine Pickle.”  He made a kind of palinode to the “trading justice” later, as other people of his kind have done.

A point in “Peregrine Pickle” easily assailed was the long episode about a Lady of Quality:  the beautiful Lady Vane, whose memoirs Smollett introduced into his tale.  Horace Walpole found that she had omitted the only feature in her career of which she had just reason to be proud:  the number of her lovers.  Nobody doubted that Smollett was paid for casting his mantle over Lady Vane:  moreover, he might expect a success of scandal.  The roman a clef is always popular with scandal-mongers, but its authors can hardly hope to escape rebuke.

It was not till 1752 that Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, in Italy, received “Peregrine,” with other fashionable romances—­“Pompey the Little,” “The Parish Girl,” “Eleanora’s Adventures,” “The Life of Mrs. Theresa Constantia Phipps,” “The Adventures of Mrs. Loveil,” and so on.  Most of them contained portraits of real people, and, no doubt, most of them were therefore successful.  But where are they now?  Lady Mary thought Lady Vane’s part of “Peregrine” “more instructive to young women than any sermon that I know.”  She regarded Fielding as with Congreve, the only “original” of her age, but Fielding had to write for bread, and that is “the most contemptible way of getting bread.”  She did not, at this time, even know Smollett’s name, but she admired him, and, later, calls him “my dear Smollett.”  This lady thought that Fielding did not know what sorry fellows his Tom Jones and Captain Booth were.  Not near so sorry as Peregine Pickle were they, for this gentleman is a far more atrocious ruffian than Roderick Random.