A Thoughtless Fragment Suffices To Show The
Writer In His True Colours As One Of The Most Delightful Fellows
In Our Literature, And To Convey Just Unmistakably To All Good
Men And True The Rare And Priceless Sense Of Human Fellowship.
There remain the Travels through France and Italy, by T.
Smollett, M.D., and though these may not exhibit
The marmoreal
glamour of Johnson, or the intimate fascination of Fielding, or
the essential literary quality which permeates the subtle
dialogue and artful vignette of Sterne, yet I shall endeavour to
show, not without some hope of success among the fair-minded,
that the Travels before us are fully deserving of a place, and
that not the least significant, in the quartette.
The temporary eclipse of their fame I attribute, first to the
studious depreciation of Sterne and Walpole, and secondly to a
refinement of snobbishness on the part of the travelling crowd,
who have an uneasy consciousness that to listen to common sense,
such as Smollett's, in matters of connoisseurship, is tantamount
to confessing oneself a Galilean of the outermost court. In this
connection, too, the itinerant divine gave the travelling doctor
a very nasty fall. Meeting the latter at Turin, just as Smollett
was about to turn his face homewards, in March 1765, Sterne wrote
of him, in the famous Journey of 1768, thus:
"The learned Smelfungus travelled from Boulogne to Paris, from
Paris to Rome, and so on, but he set out with the spleen and
jaundice, and every object he passed by was discoloured or
distorted.
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