He Would Have Meat Upon Maigre Days, Yet
Objected To Paying Double For It.
He held aloof from the thirty-sou
table d'hote, and would have been content to pay three francs
a head for a dinner a part, but his worst passions were roused
when he was asked to pay not three, but four.
Now Smollett
himself was acutely conscious of the false position. He was by
nature anything but a curmudgeon. On the contrary, he was, if I
interpret him at all aright, a high-minded, open-hearted,
generous type of man. Like a majority, perhaps, of the really
open-handed he shared one trait with the closefisted and even
with the very mean rich. He would rather give away a crown than
be cheated of a farthing. Smollett himself had little of the
traditional Scottish thriftiness about him, but the people among
whom he was going - the Languedocians and Ligurians - were
notorious for their nearness in money matters. The result of all
this could hardly fail to exacerbate Smollett's mood and to
aggravate the testiness which was due primarily to the bitterness
of his struggle with the world, and, secondarily, to the
complaints which that struggle engendered. One capital
consequence, however, and one which specially concerns us, was
that we get this unrivalled picture of the seamy side of foreign
travel - a side rarely presented with anything like Smollett's
skill to the student of the grand siecle of the Grand Tour. The
rubs, the rods, the crosses of the road could, in fact, hardly be
presented to us more graphically or magisterially than they are
in some of these chapters.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 15 of 535
Words from 3835 to 4107
of 143308
