ABSTRACT
The world has heard all about the journey to London, the adventures as surgeon’s mate, and much else in Smollett’s brief but stormy career, for no novelist has made better use of his own experiences, and Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, and Humphry Clinker are three of the most widely read books in the English language. In Scotland, down to Scott’s day or later, romances were as severely banned by the godly as stage-plays; the literati were engrossed in historical, poetic, critical, or speculative work; the country folk had their ballads, songs, tales, and vigorous local gossip. The Scots element in Smollett, apart from his suppressed Jacobitism, was that tart, subacid, petulant quality which easily rises into the fantastic. Scott had a share of it, but in Scott it expresses itself only in certain of his humorous characters and in occasional passages of his letters.
