been intended as a satirical contrast to Smollett's Travels,' makes an express allusion to him as a traveller of a peculiar genus. "The learned Smelfungus,' he says, 'travelled from Boulogne to Paris, from Paris to Rome, and so on; but he set out with the spleen and the jaundice, and every object he passed by was decoloured and distorted. He thought he wrote an account of them, but it was nothing but an account of his miserable feelings. I met Smelfungus in the grand portico of the Pantheon; he was just coming out of it. "It is nothing but a huge cockpit," said he. I popped upon Smelfungus again at Turin, in his return home, with a sad tale of sorrowful adventures he had to tell, wherein he spoke of "moving accidents by flood and field," and of the cannibals which each other eat-the Anthropophagi. He had been flayed alive, and bedevilled, and worse used than St. Bartholomew at every stage he had come at. "I'll tell it," said Smelfungus, "to the world." "You had better tell it," said I, "to your physician." As Sterne's visit to Italy was made in 1764, when Smollett was also there, this may be the record of an actual meeting of the two novelists.

Poor Smelfungus had been consulting physicians. One of the most interesting biographical passages in his 'Travels' is that in which he tells a characteristic story of his adventure with a physician at Montpellier. This physician had immense local celebrity; but Smollett suspected him to be nothing better than a quack. To put the matter to the test, he consulted him by letter, sending him a detailed statement in Latin of his case, and accompanying the statement with a handsome fee. Cough, never unaccompanied by fever, anxiety, and difficulty of breathing,' is one of the sentences of this long catalogue of his symptoms. A slight increase of coldness or dampness in the air,' he proceeds, the putting on of a disused garment, the least excess of exercise, walking, riding, or shaking in any vehicle," all bring on new evils. The nervous system extremely irritable,' &c. And again, farther on, by way of history of his illness, 'Some years ago, youthful exercises being suddenly left off, the patient lapsed into a sedentary life. His mind being turned to rather hard studies, his fibres were gradually relaxed. By the bending of the body in writing and reading a malady seized the chest. A scorbutic affection aided the onset of the disease. The first attack was too much neglected. Delay did not mend matters. The stomach refused fitting remedies. The difficulty of breathing increasing, bleeding was tried in vain. The pulse became weaker, the breathing more difficult; all got worse.' After further details, there is this passage. 'Last spring a terrible misfortune brought on dreadful mental

agony; the patient

patient was convulsed in body and mind. After leaving his country, grief, anxiety, indignation, and savage recollections followed him.' Poor Smelfungus! Luckily, or unluckily, however, for the French physician, he did not understand one word of the Latin document, a portion of which we have thus translated. He sent Smollett an opinion and prescription in French, which clearly proved his ignorance. Smollett replied in French, politely insinuating that the physician was an ass and a quack, and so the affair ended.

On the whole, however, the southern climate and the excitement of travelling had done Smollett good; and when he returned, in June, 1765, he considered his health as nearly reestablished. A few months in London undeceived him; his consumptive symptoms returned, with the aggravation of rheumatism and an ugly sore in the arm; and, after the publication of his 'Travels,' he resolved on a summer journey to Scotland by way of change. He reached Edinburgh in June, 1766, and spent a week or two as pleasantly as the state of his health would permit him in the society of that place, receiving due attention from Hume, Home, Robertson, Adam Smith, Dr. Blair, and Dr. Carlyle of Inveresk, as well as from Cullen, the two Monros, and others of the magnates of the Edinburgh medical school. The house in which he resided is still pointed out in Edinburgh. It was in St. John-street, then a new and somewhat aristocratic street, going out of the Canongate. His sister, Mrs. Telfer, a widow in easy circumstances, and with grown-up sons and daughters, had a 'flat' in this street; and it was with her that Smollett resided. His mother was living with her daughter at the time; and as Smollett had his wife with him, they formed quite a family party. Mr. Robert Chambers, in preparing his 'Traditions of Edinburgh,' was able to collect authentic reminiscences of this visit of Smollett, and of the members of the household. Mrs. Telfer was remembered as a 'somewhat stern-looking specimen of her sex, with a high cast of features, but in reality a good-natured woman, extremely shrewd and intelligent,' and with an inordinate passion for whist. Smollett himself was recollected as 'dressed in black clothes, tall, and extremely handsome, quite unlike the portraits at the front of his works, all of which were disclaimed by his relations.' His wife was described as rather pretty, with a dark complexion,' but with no great reputation for sense-out of her element perhaps among her Scotch relatives. The tradition also was, that Smollett's daughter, had she lived, was to have married her cousin Major Telfer, then a sprightly young fellow, and a great favourite with his uncle. When Smollett and

his wife left Edinburgh for Glasgow, Major Telfer and his mother accompanied them. At Glasgow they stayed with Dr. Moore, now a married man, and with several children, one of whom, then a boy of five years of age, was the future General Sir John Moore. It is pleasant to think that the author of 'Roderick Random' must have patted the head of the future hero of Corunna. He was so ill while in Glasgow, however, that he could not see many of his old friends. When a little better, he and his party continued their journey as far as the Vale of Leven, and spent some time at Cameron, the new mansion of his cousin Commissary Smollett, on the banks of Lochlomond. Here, as he looked for the last time on the scenes of his boyhood, something of his old spirit returned; and, with the beautiful lake which he loved so well at his feet, the Leven, along which he had so often strayed, flowing clear as ever over its pebbly bed, the Highland hills looming around in the same sky of alternate mist and blue, and the mingled sounds of Scotch and Gaelic in his ears from homely native voices, it was as if he had never left this sequestered spot, or as if all the intervening years of pain and toil had been a mere waking dream.

Returning from Scotland in August, 1766, the invalid went to spend the winter at Bath. He suffered a serious relapse; the sore in his arm assumed a dangerous appearance, and for a time it was supposed that he could not recover. To his own surprise, however, and that of all about him, he rallied suddenly. My cure,' he writes to Moore, 'is looked upon as something supernatural; and I must own that I find myself now better in health and spirits than I have been at any time these seven years. Had I been as well in summer, I should have exquisitely enjoyed my expedition to Scotland. Between friends, I am now convinced that my brain was in some measure affected, for I had a kind of coma vigil upon me from April to November without intermission.' Although Smollett attributed his cure to a course of treatment which he had himself proposed to his physicians, he seems to have retained a high idea of the efficacy of the Bath waters. As has been already mentioned, however, he was something of a hydropathist in his medical views; and he appears to have fancied that, had the Bath waters been the simple natural element, their efficacy would have been quite as great. His views respecting the virtues of cold water included its internal as well as external use, and the author of Roderick Random' was theoretically a teetotaller. The longer I live,' he says in one of his letters from abroad, the more I am convinced that wine and all fermented liquors are pernicious to the

human

human constitution, and that for the preservation of health and exhilaration of spirits there is no beverage comparable to simple water.'

Smollett did not carry his theory into rigid practice. Almost the only thing we know of him for the three years between 1767 and 1770 is, that during those parts of the year when he was able to be in London, he resumed his old Sunday dinners at Chelsea, and we have his own certificate that his hospitality was

generous :

'He carried me to dine with S-, whom you and I have long known by his writings. He lives in the skirts of the town, and every Sunday his house is open to all unfortunate brothers of the quill, whom he treats with beef, pudding, and potatoes, port, punch, and Calvert's entire butt-beer. He has fixed upon the first day of the week for the exercise of his hospitality, because some of his guests could not enjoy it on any other, for reasons that I need not explain. I was civilly received, in a plain yet decent habitation, which opened backwards into a very pleasant garden, kept in excellent order; and, indeed, I saw none of the outward signs of authorship either in the house or the landlord, who is one of those few writers of the age that stand upon their own foundation, without patronage and above dependence. At two in the afternoon I found myself one of ten messmates seated at table, and I question if the whole kingdom could produce such another assemblage of originals. [Here follows a rather questionable description of the appearance and talk of the said "originals," some of them Scotch, some Irish, some English, with one Piedmontese among them, all literary men, "who had at different times laboured in the service of their landlord, but had now set up for themselves in various departments."] After dinner we adjourned into the garden, where I observed Mr. S gave a short separate audience to every individual in a small remote filbert walk, whence most of them dropped off one after another without farther ceremony; but they were replaced by fresh recruits of the same clan, who came to make an afternoon's visit."

This description, which occurs in the last book that Smollett wrote, was evidently written with the deliberate purpose of leaving a portrait of himself in his relations to certain of his meaner literary contemporaries. When he wrote it, he was once more sick of the world, and cared little whom he hit. Whatever money Smollett may have saved, the stock must have now been waning. It can hardly, however, have been in the spirit of money-making that he wrote his next work, 'The History and Adventures of an Atom.' This work, which was published in 1769, is never read now, and probably seldom was read when it was new. It is a kind of Rabelaisian satire on the whole history of public affairs in Britain from the year 1754 to the close of the Chatham or second Pitt ministry in October,

October, 1768. The satire is in the form of an apologue. The ultimate atoms of matter being indestructible, one Atom, which had existed for ages in the empire of Japan, comes at last, by a series of adventures, to be lodged in the brain of Nathaniel Peacock, of the parish of St. Giles, haberdasher and author,' to whom it reveals all its recollections of Japanese history. These Peacock writes down from dictation, and hence the book. Japan is, of course, Britain; and, in carrying out the clumsy conception, all the political personages of Britain during the period embraced in the satire, as well as foreign potentates related to Britain during that period, are introduced under imaginary Japanese names. George II., the Prince of Wales, George III., the Duke of Cumberland, the Duke of Newcastle, Pitt, Lord Mansfield, the Earl of Bute, the French king, Frederick the Great of Prussia, Jack Wilkes, and a score or so of others, come in duly; and a key to the names would have to be prefixed to the book to make it intelligible to modern readers. The purport of the book is that all these personages had been knaves or blockheads, that the British people was a blatant beast,' and only had its deserts in being ruled by such a pack; that all that had been done in Britain for fourteen years was matter of laughter to the gods; that Whiggism and Toryism were both alike nonsense; and that, in fact, humanity in general was a bungle, the sky black, the sun a flaming hypocrite, and the moon green cheese. There are powerful passages in it, however, comparable for coarse wildness of fancy to some in Rabelais, and biographically the book is interesting, as Smollett's philosophical retrospect of the History which he had already penned as a narrator, and helped in as a party-writer. There are no symptoms in the book of feebler powers, but there are symptoms of something like insanity.

Smollett in truth was slowly dying, and, in his progress to death, he had reached a state of mind in which he thought he had no terms to keep with Pitt, or Bute, or George III., or 'the blatant beast,' or even his own past life and conduct. One little favour he might have looked for from the Grafton ministry, then in office. It was decided that he should again go to Italy, and his friends thought that it might be a graceful thing in Government to make this arrangement easier for him by appointing him British consul at Nice, Leghorn, or Naples. No such favour could be obtained for the author of the Adventures of an Atom,' and early in 1770 Smollett set out again as a private British invalid, and took up his residence at Monte Novo, near Leghorn. Letters sent over by him to English friends in the course of that and the following year exhibit him as in a state

of