If
All The Admirers Of These Two Books Would But Bestir Themselves
And Look Into The Matter, I Am Sure That Sterne's Only Too Clever
Assault Would Be Relegated To Its Proper Place And Assessed At
Its Right Value As A Mere Boutade.
The borrowed contempt of
Horace Walpole and the coterie of superficial dilettanti, from
which Smollett's book has somehow never wholly recovered, could
then easily be outflanked and the Travels might well be in
reasonable expectation of coming by their own again.
II
In the meantime let us look a little more closely into the
special and somewhat exceptional conditions under which the
Travel Letters of Smollett were produced. Smollett, as we have
seen, was one of the first professional men of all work in
letters upon a considerable scale who subsisted entirely upon the
earnings of his own pen. He had no extraneous means of support.
He had neither patron, pension, property, nor endowment,
inherited or acquired. Yet he took upon himself the burden of a
large establishment, he spent money freely, and he prided himself
upon the fact that he, Tobias Smollett, who came up to London
without a stiver in his pocket, was in ten years' time in a
position to enact the part of patron upon a considerable scale to
the crowd of inferior denizens of Grub Street. Like most people
whose social ambitions are in advance of their time, Smollett
suffered considerably on account of these novel aspirations of
his. In the present day he would have had his motor car and his
house on Hindhead, a seat in Parliament and a brief from the
Nation to boot as a Member for Humanity.
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