Voltaire Was The Only
Figure In The Eighteenth Century Even To Approach Such A
Flattering Position, And He Was For Many Years A Refugee From His
Own Land.
Smollett was energetic and ambitious enough to start in
rather a grand way, with a large house, a carriage, menservants,
and the rest.
His wife was a fine lady, a "Creole" beauty who had
a small dot of her own; but, on the other hand, her income was
very precarious, and she herself somewhat of a silly and an
incapable in the eyes of Smollett's old Scotch friends. But to
maintain such a position - to keep the bailiffs from the door from
year's end to year's end - was a truly Herculean task in days when
a newspaper "rate" of remuneration or a well-wearing copyright
did not so much as exist, and when Reviews sweated their writers
at the rate of a guinea per sheet of thirty-two pages. Smollett
was continually having recourse to loans. He produced the eight
(or six or seven) hundred a year he required by sheer hard
writing, turning out his History of England, his Voltaire, and
his Universal History by means of long spells of almost incessant
labour at ruinous cost to his health. On the top of all this
cruel compiling he undertook to run a Review (The Critical), a
magazine (The British), and a weekly political organ (The
Briton). A charge of defamation for a paragraph in the nature of
what would now be considered a very mild and pertinent piece of
public criticism against a faineant admiral led to imprisonment
in the King's Bench Prison, plus a fine of £100.
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