One Evening An Edinburgh
Bailie (Who Was A Tallow Chandler) Paid Her A Visit.
"Come awa',
bailie," said she, "and tak' a trick at the cards." "Troth madam,
I hae nae siller!" "Then let us play for a pound of candles."]
His was certainly a nervous, irritable, and rather censorious
temper.
Like Mr. Brattle, in The Vicar of Bulhampton, he was
thinking always of the evil things that had been done to him.
With the pawky and philosophic Scots of his own day (Robertson,
Hume, Adam Smith, and "Jupiter" Carlyle) he had little in common,
but with the sour and mistrustful James Mill or the cross and
querulous Carlyle of a later date he had, it seems to me, a good
deal. What, however, we attribute in their case to bile or liver,
a consecrated usage prescribes that we must, in the case of
Smollett, accredit more particularly to the spleen. Whether
dyspeptic or "splenetic," this was not the sort of man to see
things through a veil of pleasant self-generated illusion. He
felt under no obligation whatever to regard the Grand Tour as a
privilege of social distinction, or its discomforts as things to
be discreetly ignored in relating his experience to the stay-at-home
public. He was not the sort of man that the Tourist Agencies
of to-day would select to frame their advertisements. As an
advocatus diaboli on the subject of Travel he would have done
well enough. And yet we must not infer that the magic of travel
is altogether eliminated from his pages. This is by no means the
case: witness his intense enthusiasm at Nimes, on sight of the
Maison Carree or the Pont du Gard; the passage describing his
entry into the Eternal City; [Ours "was the road by which so many
heroes returned with conquest to their country, by which so many
kings were led captive to Rome, and by which the ambassadors of
so many kingdoms and States approached the seat of Empire, to
deprecate the wrath, to sollicit the friendship, or sue for the
protection of the Roman people."] or the enviable account of the
alfresco meals which the party discussed in their coach as
described in Letter VIII.
As to whether Smollett and his party of five were exceptionally
unfortunate in their road-faring experiences must be left an open
question at the tribunal of public opinion. In cold blood, in one
of his later letters, he summarised his Continental experience
after this wise: inns, cold, damp, dark, dismal, dirty; landlords
equally disobliging and rapacious; servants awkward, sluttish,
and slothful; postillions lazy, lounging, greedy, and
impertinent. With this last class of delinquents after much
experience he was bound to admit the following dilemma: - If you
chide them for lingering, they will contrive to delay you the
longer. If you chastise them with sword, cane, cudgel, or
horsewhip (he defines the correctives, you may perceive, but
leaves the expletives to our imagination) they will either
disappear entirely, and leave you without resource, or they will
find means to take vengeance by overturning your carriage.
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