On The Force Of This Claim The Reader Is
Invited To Constitute Himself Judge After A Fair Perusal Of The
Following Pages.
I shall attempt only to point the way to a
satisfactory verdict, no longer in the spirit of an advocate, but
by means of a few illustrations and, more occasionally,
amplifications of what Smollett has to tell us.
III
As was the case with Fielding many years earlier, Smollett was
almost broken down with sedentary toil, when early in June 1763
with his wife, two young ladies ("the two girls") to whom she
acted as chaperon, and a faithful servant of twelve years'
standing, who in the spirit of a Scots retainer of the olden time
refused to leave his master (a good testimonial this, by the way,
to a temper usually accredited with such a splenetic sourness),
he crossed the straits of Dover to see what a change of climate
and surroundings could do for him.
On other grounds than those of health he was glad to shake the
dust of Britain from his feet. He speaks himself of being
traduced by malice, persecuted by faction, abandoned by false
patrons, complaints which will remind the reader, perhaps, of
George Borrow's "Jeremiad," to the effect that he had been
beslavered by the venomous foam of every sycophantic lacquey and
unscrupulous renegade in the three kingdoms. But Smollett's
griefs were more serious than what an unkind reviewer could
inflict. He had been fined and imprisoned for defamation. He had
been grossly caricatured as a creature of Bute, the North British
favourite of George III., whose tenure of the premiership
occasioned riots and almost excited a revolution in the
metropolis. Yet after incurring all this unpopularity at a time
when the populace of London was more inflamed against Scotsmen
than it has ever been before or since, and having laboured
severely at a paper in the ministerial interest and thereby
aroused the enmity of his old friend John Wilkes, Smollett had
been unceremoniously thrown over by his own chief, Lord Bute, on
the ground that his paper did more to invite attack than to repel
it. Lastly, he and his wife had suffered a cruel bereavement in
the loss of their only child, and it was partly to supply a
change from the scene of this abiding sorrow, that the present
journey was undertaken.
The first stages and incidents of the expedition were not exactly
propitious. The Dover Road was a byword for its charges; the Via
Alba might have been paved with the silver wrung from reluctant
and indignant passengers. Smollett characterized the chambers as
cold and comfortless, the beds as "paultry" (with "frowsy," a
favourite word), the cookery as execrable, wine poison,
attendance bad, publicans insolent, and bills extortion,
concluding with the grand climax that there was not a drop of
tolerable malt liquor to be had from London to Dover. Smollett
finds a good deal to be said for the designation of "a den of
thieves" as applied to that famous port (where, as a German lady
of much later date once complained, they "boot ze Bible in ze
bedroom, but ze devil in ze bill", and he grizzles lamentably
over the seven guineas, apart from extras, which he had to pay
for transport in a Folkestone cutter to Boulogne Mouth.
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