The works of Tobias Smollett ... Edited ... with ... historical notes and a life of the author, by David Herbert

Front matter

< l> H E jf&ORKS ; of i v,i» i A >> m v ir Ar A i i CAREFULLY SELECTED FROM THE MOST AUTHENTIC SOURCES WITH A LIFE OF THE AUTHOR &C EDINB UESH WILLIAM _?. KIM M0. THE WORKS OF TOBIAS SMOLLETT CAREFULLY SELECTED AND EDITED FROM THE BEST AUTHORITIES, WITH NUMEROUS ORIGINAL HISTORICAL NOTES AND A LIFE OF THE AUTHOR, By DAVID HERBERT, M.A. EDINBURGH: WILLIAM P. NIMMO. 1870. EDINBURGH : T. CONSTABLE, TOINTET. TO THE QUEEN, AND TO THE UNITEKSITT. CONTENTS. PAOE PREFACE, ; 5 LIFE OF TOBIAS GEORGE SMOLLETT, ...... 7 Nobels. THE ADVENTURES OF RODERICK RANDOM, 41 THE ADVENTURES OF PEREGRINE PICKLE, 197 THE EXPEDITION OF HUMPHRY CLINKER, 467 flags. THE REGICIDE : A TRAGEDY, 589 THE REPRISAL : A COMEDY, 606 $ atms. ADVICE : A SATIRE, 616 REPROOF : A SATIRE, 618 THE TEARS OF SCOTLAND, 620 SONG : To nx her— 'twere a task as vain, ...... 620 BURLESQUE ODE : A Parody on Loud Lyttleton's Monody on the early Death of his Wife, .......... 621 ODE TO MIRTH, C21 ODE TO SLEEP, 621 ODE TO BLUE-EYED ANN, 621 ODE TO INDEPENDENCE, 622 A FEW OTHER POEMS, including the Ode to Leven Water, are to be found in their i'roper places as parts of the Story in one or other of the Novels contained in this volume.

Preface

. Smollett was the first of the great Scottish novelists whose works have been read and admired by an English, not to mention any Continental, public ; and the publica tion of the first collected edition of his Novels was by a Scotchman. His Plays and Poems had, indeed, been issued in one duodecimo volume, in 1784, by Thomas Evans, bookseller in the Strand, -with prefixed Memoirs of the Life and Writings of the Author ; but what have been called his Miscellaneous Works — his Novels, Plays, and Poems — were first collected by Mr. David Ramsay, printer of the Edinburgh Evening Courant, and published in six vols. 8vo, in Edinburgh, in the year 1790. To this edition there ■was prefixed a very meagre Life of Smollett ; it had humorous frontispieces by Row landson, and it did not contain The A dventures of an Atom.

It was another Scotchman in Scotland who made a collected edition of Smollett's Miscellaneous Works a demand in the Scottish and English bookselling market. This was Robert Anderson, M.D. ; and his edition is still the best that has been published, if attention to spelling, punctuation, and all the little things which are the only things in which an editor can respect the combined interests of the author and his readers, counts for much. Dr. Anderson had included Smollett's poetry in the Works of the British Poets, in thirteen vols. 8vo, published in 1795 ; and he edited, in 1796, the Miscel laneous Works, comprehending all Smollett's plays, poems, and novels, ■with Memoirs of his Life and Writings, and this edition was published by James Mundell, printer to the University of Glasgow, in six vols. 8vo.

A second edition being found necessary, there was added to the collection, Smollett's Account of the Expedition to Carthagena in 1741. The sixth edition was published in 1820. At the time when Mr. Mundell published his edition under Dr. Anderson's direction, the love between Scottish and English booksellers was even less than usual. There had been heartrburnings about the law of copy right between the two countries. The depredations of Alexander Donaldson — of hos pital fame — were hard to put up with ; and the one class were supposed to be Eng lishmen, and the others were certainly Scotchmen : so a London edition was inevitable. And Dr. Moore — the good friend of Smollett, the father of the buried but never-dead hero of Corunna and other illustrious places, a novelist of some fame as the author of Zeluco, etc. — was both able and willing to supply a name that would buoy up the new edition.

Accordingly there was no time lost. In 1797 appeared " The Works of Tobias Smollett, M.D., with Memoirs of his Life ; to which is prefixed a View of the Commencement and Progress of Romance, by John Moore, M.D. ; in eight vols. 8vo." " This edition," says Dr. Anderson, " is valuable, as it has been the means of procuring for the public a short but faithful account of Smollett from the pen of Dr. Moore, who knew him well, and wrote from personal knowledge." The book was well got up in the matter of printing and binding ; but beyond this, it was a very careless piece of editorial work. The volume now offered to the public contains all of Smollett's works that have become classical, and more. The three novels are certainly English classics, but not the Plays,

PREFACE.

. nor all the Poems. It will be observed that there are a good many notes appended to the Memoirs of a Lady of Quality in Peregrine Pickle, and that the blanks left by Smollett are filled up, but still indicated by means of brackets. These notes have been brought together for the first time since the blanks left by Smollett awakened curiosity about them. Regarding the most important of them, there can be no doubt left in the mind after the evidence supplied in the notes. Where conjecture has been necessary, great care has been observed. Sometimes the editor has conjectured, but has left the name still blank as he found it. A few times he has ventured to fill up the blank upon conjecture ; the most obvious case being Dr. and Mrs. S — . The editor gives his reasons in a note. Should any one think that Dr. Smollett was himself the Dr. S — , it is sufficient to remark that there was no Mrs. Smollett for six or seven years after the events in which the editor supposes Dr. Smellie to have taken part.

In the story of Mr. Mackercher, the blanks have been all filled up but one. And in Humphry Clinker, most of the blanks have been filled up, but, although the effort after accuracy has been no less diligent, very few notes are given. To the poems the present editor has not appended any notes. He has come under many obligations of gratitude during his researches. The heads and assistants of the Advocates', the Signet, the Philosophical Institution, and the University Libraries, deserve from him and many others more thanks than it is easy to put into words, for ungrudging and invariable kindness to constant visitors and ques tioners who have no other claim on them than their own kindness and good-nature supply. The editor thanks them very earnestly. Several gentlemen of eminence whom the editor has been under a sort of necessity of putting to trouble in various ways, would be cordially thanked by name, if it were not for a fear, that their names would be of more credit to him than his work could be to them, and that such printed intimations of gratitude might be regarded as so many ad vertisements.

But one gentleman has been so unwearying in his kindness — simply from literary public spirit, for the editor was previously, and is, beyond the present work, quite un known to him, — and has supplied so much information and so many valuable hints, that it would lessen the pleasure with which he offers the results of his labour to the public, if he were not allowed to mention his name. It is the learned and venerable James Maid ment, Esq., Advocate. The editor had no clue to Mr. C— , Mr. Christie, till Mr. Maid ment supplied him with the note, to be read where he is first referred to. And in many other instances he was put upon the proper track of research byjthe information and suggestions which only such erudition, seeming boundless to a novice, and altogether excep tional in its kind and extent, as the editor of Pasguils could supply.

The results of the research expended on the notes certainly do not bulk large, and the editor hopes he will not bo supposed in any way to overvalue them, but the labour has been such that he has often felt the wish that Horace Walpole, in his leisure as Lord Orford, had jotted down a few more of the names he could have remembered of people more or less mixed up with his notorious sister-in-law, Lady Orford. There would then have been fewer blanks still left to excite curiosity — not any deeper feeling than the editor is sorry to count in the list of names he has not succeeded in identifying. "When, in the year 1721, Archibald Smollett's wife, Barbara, gave birth to the infant afterwards baptized Tobias George, Alexander Pope was thirtythree years of age ; Samuel Richardson, thirty-two ; Henry Fielding, fourteen ; Samuel Johnson, twelve ; and Laurence Sterne was eight.

Oliver Goldsmith was born seven years later. Pope died in 1744, while Smollett, in his twenty fourth year, was abroad, and two years before he published Advice, a Satire, in quarto. This first formal publication is usually called the beginning of a literary career. But a literary career rather trying to the temper of willing or unwilling listeners, has generally been impetuously run by such youths, before they get the tremendously coveted opportunity of taking this final as well as first step. It was so with Smollett. He had quite recently written The Tears of Scotland — shed for the disasters occasioned by one member of the house of Stuart ; and he had written, years before this, The Regicide, a tragedy about the murder of another member of the same plague-stricken house. But he mounted his literary platform too late to enjoy or resent the influence of Alexander Pope in the flesh.

Smollett writes of Johnson as " that great Cham of literature," when he is using his good offices with John Wilkes to get Francis Barber, Johnson's negro servant, discharged from the navy — at the same time intimating of Johnson, that " He and I were never Cater-cousins." And Johnson lent the last touches to the Latin inscription on the memorial column erected in 1774, near the house in which Smollett was born. This inscription is styled by Sir Walter Scott "nervous and classical;" but most of us are content to read it in some " Life of Smollett." If any adventurous stickler is determines! to read it on its original table of stone, he had better be careful to look to his feet. The filthy surroundings of this column, erected in honour of a man who would be an honour to any age or country, were, at least the other day, a reproach to the local authorities.

Sterne calls Smollett " the learned Smelfungus," and informs us, " I met Smelfungus in the grand portico of the Pantheon, — he was just coming out of it. ' 'Tis nothing but a huge cock-pit,' said he. I wish you had said nothing worse of the Venus of Medicis, replied I ; for in passing through Florence, I had heard he had fallen foul upon the goddess, and used her worse than a common strumpet, without the least provo cation in nature. I popp'd upon Smelfungus again at Turin, in his return home, and a sad tale of sorrowful adventures he had to tell." But it is the other two stars of the first magnitude who complete the triad usually constellated as Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett. It is not at all likely that Richardson and Smollett would have much personal intercourse. Richardson was a much older man than Smollett ; and Smollett, listen elsewhere and also to Matthew Bramble, would not readily affect the company on the only terms on which the other would probably afford it, of a man in business, who was one of the many sons of an honest Derbyshire joiner.

Dumbartonshire and other lairds, and their sons, and their grandsons, entertain some very foolish notions about things of this sort. So do a great many other people who are neither lairds nor lords. Smollett was one of them. Fielding is the foil traditionally used to set off the brilliancy of Smollett, or to hit off his de ficiencies. Just as in our own day people who read to talk, or who talk and do not read, or who, if they read, certainly do not understand, set up Thackeray and Dickens for comparison, so it has always been one of the accomplishments of polite society to confuse the spheres of kindred stars. Thackeray and Dickens are as unlike as are the eras of Anne and Victoria. And almost as little are Fielding and Smollett to be compared to the advantage or disparage ment of either. But Dr. Moore, Dr. Anderson, and Sir Walter Scott, three of Smollett's biographers in chief, have indulged in this species of adumbration, to the considerable confusion of both themselves and any of their readers who may happen to be in earnest.

Thomas Roscoe seems to have felt the guidance of a surer instinct of wisdom in biography. He does not compare Smollett and Fielding, nor does he contrast them,— which, by the way, is just another name for the same sort of thing in literature, — even though he hints a preference for this process. He says that Smollett " fills up the space in prose fiction which Fielding left unoccupied ; for, widely opposed in genius as in their style, and their selection of characters, it has occurred to us that the preceding biographers of these two delightful writers — without excepting in some degree Sir Walter Scott — have not shown a just discrimination in attempting to draw comparisons between minds and productions so differently constructed, .... having frequently introduced the names of these facile principes of their own order in juxtaposition, and with the view of comparison rather than contrast."

Thomas Roscoe is here, it is to be feared, raising a gentlemanly protest against one of those weaknesses of the human mind which have been anointed and enthroned as first principles, regulative canons, and primary laws of thought. One at a time for first-rate eminence, is the consecrated frailty in question. There is something conical in the mind of man. A broad base, narrowing upwards, and ending in a single point, is its ideal of all things. One supreme — whether crowned head or first-fiddler. Our grand theories of causation, and our casual theories framed out of fancies believed to be facts, are all under the same con trol. The sugar-loaf head of Thersites was symbolic of the ultimate shape of the supposed inside of heads, round enough or long enough in outward seeming. One at a time — be he Castor or Pollux, Fielding or Smollett, Thackeray or Dickens.

Two at a time, equally brilliant, and each shining his own unbor rowed light, is a possibility foreclosed by certain innate ideas, aborigines of the. reason, the final security of the understanding of man. Differing, therefore, as Thomas Roscoe does from a great fashion of the universe, it is not to b© expected that he has finally disposed of the comparative merits of Fielding and Smollett. Smollett was of a Dumbartonshire family to be proud of — as such pride is wont to be warranted ; and he was very proud of the fact. We are told that " from genealogical records preserved in the town archives, it appears that an ancestor ofthe Hame — also a Tobias, — so early as the fifteenth century, contracted marriage with a daughter of Sir Patrick Houston, who was master of a handsome property in the county of Renfrew."

This Dumbartonshire laird and his Renfrewshire lady seem to have had more than one descendant of the explosive turn of temper so notorious in the conduct of the novelist. An exploit of one ofthe Smollett family in the sixteenth century — 1588 — is thus recorded by Matthew Bramble : — " Mull affords several bays, where there is safe anchorage, in one of which the Florida, a ship of the Spanish Armada, was blown up by one of Mr. Smollett's ancestors. About forty years ago, John, Duke of Argyle, is said to have consulted the Spanish registers, by which it appeared that this ship had the military chest on board. He employed ex perienced divers to examine the wreck, and they found the hull of the vessel still entire, but so covered with sand, that they could not make their way between decks ; however, they picked up several pieces of plate that were scattered about in the bay, and a couple of fine brass cannon."

As in the two preceding centuries we have found something to mention of a Smollett, so also in the seventeenth century we have the name of Sir James Smollett of Bonhill. This was the grandfather of the poet and novelist. He was one of the Scottish patriots who, in 1G88, risked his all for the Revolu tion, and all its concomitants and consequences. " So prominent was he," Dr. Robert Chambers tells us, " among those who promoted the Revolution, that the restored Earl of Argyle made him a deputy-lieutenant of his county, and _i__g William knighted him ; although we learn from his own statement that he had, ast'T all, some scruples about the new settlement, because, while King James had certainly done illegal things, ' the puir chylde, his son, was innocent : ' rather an unexpected trait of softness in the old Whig, though probably of little practical result."

Sir James was a learned member of the Scottish bar. He was appointed one of the Commissaries or Consistorial Judges of Edin burgh. And later on in life, he was tied — unless, of course, during holidays — to Edinburgh, in the discharge of the duties of this office, in which he had to exercise judicial functions regarding all manner of doubts and difficulties of a matrimonial sort. He had represented since 1685 the burgh of Dumbarton in the Scottish Parliament, and he was one of the Commissioners for framing the Treaty of Union, and as such he assisted in demolishing for ever one of the most formidable of the Border boundaries between England and Scotland. Sir James Smollett's first wife, a daughter of Mr. Aulay Macaulay of Ardin caple, " heritable bailie of the Lennox," presented him with four sons and two daughters.

Of the sons we are told that, according to a custom of the Scottish gentry of that period, Sir James sent them all to the University of Leyden. This is an ascertained fact regarding the three youngest at all events. The eldest, Tobias, died a young man, but had lived to be a captain in Lord Strathmore's regiment, provost of Dumbarton, and sheriff of Dumbartonshire. The next two, James and George, having been educated at Leyden, qualified for the Scotch bar. James succeeded his father in the Commissary judgeship, and George succeeded James in the same office. The fourth son, Archibald, was, partly from delicate health, and partly from the waywardness of elegant tastes, bred to no profession ; and he was the father of Tobias George, the Smollett of the eighteenth century. This Archibald seems to have been such a youth as is often to be encountered in families similarly circumstanced in point of social position and wealth with that of Sir James Smollett.

He, delicate in health, but by no means disabled, seems to have preferred elegance to industry, and, as such young gentlemen are wont, to have had little or no just estimate of the only reliable source of the supply of certain grossly material results of such a plebeian thing as industry. Compelled by an ague to return from Leyden, he forthwith married, without his father's consent, Barbara Cunning ham, a daughter of Mr. Cunningham of Gilbertfield, in the county of Lanark, and near Glasgow. This was not the first alliance between those two families. They had met in matrimonial contact a century before. Dr. Anderson, with his usual care, informs us in a note that Gilbertfield was " the celebrated residence of Lieutenant William Hamilton, the poetical friend and correspondent of Allan Ramsay."

This marriage seems to have been a case of like drawing to like a little too much. The lady, like the gentleman, possessed wit, taste, and a sense of elegance in general ; and, unfortunately, like him, negatively as well as positively, she was not at all oppressed with hard cash. Sir James Smollett, however, was a sensible man. Although it is not improbable that he felt annoyed, and looked offended, yet he behaved on this occasion, so trying to a stern parent's temper — not like Roderick Random's grandfather. There were, of course, redeeming circumstances. There was the position of the lady's family. There were her acknowledged abilities and accomplishments. So the worthy knight settled on his son the liferent of the house and farm of Dalquhurn, on the banks of the Leven. The vicinity of this house to his own house of Bonhill seems to indicate that the veteran lawyer and Whig had no objections to their company; and the settlement so made, together with a moderate annuity, supplied the lovers in their wedlock with a yearly income of about three hundred pounds.

The first chdd of Archibald Smollett and his wife. Barbara was James, named after his paternal grandfather. This son took to the army by and bye, attained the rank of captain, and was lost off the coast of America, along with a number of his men, when the transport in wliich they were being conveyed abroad went down. Dr. Moore says, "I have often heard him spoken of as a young man of distinguished spirit, and of an excellent character ; the Doctor never mentioned him but in the most affectionate terms." The second child was a daughter, named Jane after her paternal grandmother, Sir James's first wife. The third child was our literary hero ; and shortly after his birth, Archibald Smollett died, and left a widow and three children — not impotently soliciting our pity. The grandfather was reasonably kind while he lived.

The widow seems to have been a clever, managing woman ; and there was nothing in the subsequent lot of the children greatly to be commiserated. Captain James Smollett died on duty like a soldier. Jane, the daughter, was one of the most fortunate ladies of her day — as such things are measured even by people much given to pitying widows and orphans. She "married in 1739 " — Dr. Anderson is now being emoted — "Alexander Telfer, Esq., a man of considerable fortune. He was at that time lessee of the mines at Wanlockhead, and resided many years at Leadhills in Lanarkshire. He afterwards purchased the estates of Scotston in Peebles shire, and Symington in Lanarkshire, and died in 1760, leaving three sons, Alexander, James, and Archibald, and one daughter, Jane. Mrs. Telfer was a woman of admirable good sense, and highly esteemed.

Upon the death of her cousin, James Smollett, Esq. of Bonhill, one of the Commissaries of Edin burgh, in 1776, she succeeded to the family estate of Bonhill, of about one thousand pounds a year ; for which it was necessary for her to resume her maiden name of Smollett, and died in 1789, in the seventieth year of her age. Her eldest son, Alexander Telfer, Esq. of Symington, succeeded to the estate at Bonhill, and assumed the name of Smollett. He married Miss Renton, daughter of John Renton, Esq. of Blackadder, in Berwickshire, and niece of the late Earl of Eglinton, and died in 1799, leaving two sons, Alexander and Jolin, and six daughters. His eldest son, Alexander, a lieutenant-colonel in the army, and member of Parliament for the county of Dumbarton, succeeded to the family estates of Symington and Bonhill (his father had sold the estate of Scotston some time before), of about sixteen hundred pounds a year, and was killed at the battle of Alkmaar, in Holland, in 1799.

His brother, John Smollett, Esq., is the representative of the family." Such was the full state ment of the case when Dr. Anderson wrote. It needs only to be added that the John last mentioned was a rear-admiral in the royal navy ; and that he married, in 1800, as his second wife, Elizabeth, the second daughter of the Hon. Patrick Boyle, second son of John, second Earl of Glasgow; and he having died in 1842, that their eldest son, Alexander Smollett, Esq. of Bon hill, at present represents the family in the direct line from Archibald, the fourth son of the doughty Sir James. This ultimate possession of his property by Archibald's family was more than even the sagacious Revolution patriot either foresaw or provided for. To quote Dr. Robert Chambers — "In 1721, having occasion to arrange his family affairs, he settled his estate in entail on James Smollett, the son of his now deceased second son James ; failing this young person and his direct heirs, it was destined to go, not to Sir James's third son, George, who survived under pecuniary difficulties (he had at one time possessed the estate of Ingliston in Midlothian, but had fallen into hopeless embarrass ments), but to George's son, another James ; and these two Jameses, cousins german, actually inherited in succession — the second succeeding to the first in 1738, and enjoying it till his death in 1775.

Of the unfortunate Archibald and his progeny Sir James took no notice in this deed ; neither did he ever make any formal arrangement in their behalf. The three orphans remained in dependency, first upon his bounty, and afterwards upon that of his heirs," — till the whole of the property fell into the hands of the one girl, the least likely inheritor, as such wisdom as guided Sir James's will would hold as an axiom. Thus did the imprudent love-marriage provide for the continuance of the estates in the family, and for the inheritance of the honours of the name Smollett. The offspring of that marriage not only preserved the name from extinction, and its honours from irredeemable dimness, but it rumoured the name away up among the stars, where it was listened to, and received and retained with ingenuous regard ; and whence it has been echoed with earnest admiration, and will be echoed again till ages of ages.

It is true, Sir James Smollett died without making any provision for the children of his son Archi bald ; but this was when Archibald's second son, and youngest child, was ten years of age, and after, we have no reason to doubt, a reasonable amount of kindness had been shown the family. It seems to be, therefore, equally true that there was nothing in the conduct of the old gentleman to warrant us to believe that anything but a grievous wrong was done to him, when he was pilloried to posterity by his irritable grandson as guilty of all the enormities of the ungenerous old judge in Roderick Random. It was in the old house of Dalquhurn, in the parish of Cardross, near the village of Renton, erected since then on part of the farm liferented by gift to his father, and in the year 1721, that the subject of this slight narrative was born.

The birthday is not on any record that is known ; but the day of his baptism is thus to be read on the jjarish register of Cardross : — "March 19, 1721, Tobias George, son to Mr. Ard. Smollett and Barbara Cunningham, was baptized." On this, Dr. Robert Chambers makes the remark, not more shrewd than interesting in the light of this infant's subsequent career in England, that "the 19th March 1721 being a Sunday, it may be inferred that the baptism took place, in the old Scottish fashion, in the parish church." Where else should the very dependent grandson of Sir James Smollett — worldly and other worldly, strict in his attention to all the proprieties, religious and revolutionary, of the time, an elder of the Kirk and a member of the Assembly — be baptized? The surroundings of the old house of Dalquhurn seem to have been very romantic in the first quarter of the eighteenth century, when George I. was king.

They supplied the earlier biographers — especially Dr. Moore, whose life, at this stage, is about Dr. Smollett, and as many other people and places as he could find and find room for — with some rather superfine padding, to relieve the tedium of stating facts. The passage in praise of the Vale of Leven quoted hereabouts by Anderson, Scott, and Roscoe (Dr. Moore quotes lines of his own in praise of the Clyde), can be read in its proper con nexion in Humphry Clinker. As we look at the place in our own day, we can only feel what a wonderful thing is the progress of civilisation ! and how effectually it can improve all sorts of beauty into " extensive bleacheries," and other less romantic sounds, and sights, and smells ! Innumerable drudges in the dirt and tourists through the smoke can testify, that now at length civilisation has — short only of pulling down Ben Lomond to fill up the Loch and utilize the quondam bed of the consequently obsolete Leven — done its best and wisest to leave the old romance and beauty " Fallen, and diffused into a shapeless heap."

The Dumbarton Grammar School was taught by a mighty schoolmaster of great renown when Smollett was a boy. Mr. John Love, eminent teacher good scholar, and excellent man, was a native of the burgh. Born in Dum barton in 1695, and an alumnus of Glasgow University, he was appointed master of the Grammar School of his native town in 1720 — the year before Smollett was born. He went to the High School of Edinburgh in 1735, and thence to the Grammar School of Dalkeith in 1739. He died at Dalkeith in 1 7-30. He wrote " Animadversions on the Latin Grammar lately published by Mr. Robert Trotter, schoolmaster at Dumfries ;" and to this work the colossal Ruddiman, whose shadow enlarges as it recedes, appended " A Dissertation upon the way of Teaching of the Latin Language." Mr. Love wrote also " A Vindication of Mr. George Buchanan," against his friend Ruddiman, whose political principles seemed to involve certain prejudices against that earlier and greater Latinist than himself.