his disorder assumed was not of long continuance. A letter written to him by David Hume, on the 18th of July following, shows that either the state of his health, or the narrowness of his means, or perhaps both these causes together, made him desirous of obtaining the consulship of Nice or Leghorn. But neither the solicitations of Hume, nor those of the Duch ess of Hamilton, could prevail on the Minister, Lord Shelburne, to confer on him either of these appointments. In the next year, September 21, 1768, the following paragraph in a letter from Hume convinced him that he had nothing to expect from any consideration for his necessities in that quarter. "What is this you tell me of your perpetual exile and of your never returning to this country? I hope that, as this idea arose from the bad state of your health, it will vanish on your recovery, which, from your past experience, you may expect from those happier climates, to which you are retiring; after which, the desire of revisiting your native country will probably return upon you, unless the superior cheapness of foreign countries prove an obstacle, and detain you there. I could wish that means had been fallen on to remove this objection, and that at least it might be equal to you to live any where, except when the consideration of your health gave the preference to one climate above another. But the indifference of ministers towards lite rature, which has been long, and indeed almost always is the case in England, gives little prospect of any alteration in this particular."

If ministers would in no other way conduce to his support, he was determined to levy on them at least an involuntary contribution, and accordingly (in 1769,) he published the Adventures of an Atom, in which he laid about him to right and left, and with a random humour, somewhat resembling that of Rabelais and Swift, made those whom he had defended and those whom he had attacked alike the subject of very gross merriment.

But his sport and his suffering were now coming to a close. The increased debility under which he felt himself sinking induced him again to try the influence of a more genial sky. Early in 1770, he set

out with his wife for Italy; and after staying a short time at Leghorn, settled himself at Monte Nero, near that port. In a letter to Caleb Whitefoord, dated the 18th of May, he describes himself rusticated on the side of a mountain that overlooks the sea, a most romantic and salutary situation. One other flash broke from him in this retirement. His novel, called the Expedition of Humphry Clinker, which he sent to England to be printed in 1770, though abounding in portraitures of exquisite drollery, and in situations highly comical, has not the full zest and flavour of his earlier works. The story does not move on with the same impetuosity. The characters have more the appearance of being broad caricatures from real life, than the creatures of a rich and teeming invention. They seem rather the representation of individuals grotesquely designed and extravagantly coloured, than of classes of men.

His bodily strength now giving way by degrees, while that of his mind remained unimpaired, he expired at his residence near Leghorn on the 21st of October, 1771, in the 51st year of his age.

His mother died a little before him. His widow lived twelve years longer, which she passed at Leghorn in a state of unhappy dependence on the bounty of the merchants at that place, and of a few friends in England. Out of her slender means she contrived to erect a monument to her deceased husband, on which the following inscription from the pen of his friend Armstrong was inscribed:

Hic ossa conduntur
TOBIÆ SMOLLETT, Scoti;
Qui prosapia generosâ et antiquâ natus,
Prisca virtutis exemplar emicuit;
Aspectu ingenuo,
Corpore valido,
Pectore animoso,
Indole apprime benigna,
Et fere supra facultates munifică
Insignis.

Ingenio feraci, faceto, versatili,
Omnigenæ fere doctrinæ mire capaci,
Varia fabularum dulcedine

Vitam moresque hominum,
Ubertate summâ ludens depinxit.

Adverso, interim, nefas! tali tantoque alumno,
Nisi quo satyræ opipare supplebat,
Seculo impio, ignavo, fatuo,

Quo Musi vix nisi nothæ
Mærenatulis Britannicis

A column with a Latin inscription was also placed to commemorate him on the banks of his favourite Leven, near the house in which he was born, by his kinsman Mr. Smollett of Bonhill.

The person of Smollett is described by his friend Dr. Moore as stout and well-proportioned, his countenance engaging, and his manner reserved, with a certain air of dignity that seemed to indicate a consciousness of his own powers.

In his disposition, he appears to have been careless, improvident, and sanguine; easily swayed both in his commendation and censures of others by the reigning humour of the moment, yet warm, and (when not influenced by the baneful spirit of faction) steady in his attachments. On his independence he particularly prided himself. But that this was sometimes in danger from slight causes is apparent, from an anecdote related by Dr. Wooll, in his Life of Joseph Warton. When Huggins* had finished his translation of Ariosto, he sent a fat buck to Smollett, who at that time managed the Critical Review; consequently the work was highly applauded; but the history of the venison becoming public, Smollett was much abused, and in a future number of the Review retracted his applause. Perpetual employment of his pen left him little time for reflection or study. Hence, though he acquired a greater readimess in the use of words, his judgment was not proportionably improved; nor did his manhood bear fruits that fully answered to the vigorous promise of his youth. Yet it may be questioned whether any other writer of English prose had before his time produced so great a number of works of invention. When, in addition to his novels, we consider his various productions, his histories, his travels, his two dramatic pieces, his poems, his translations, his critical labours, and other occasional publications, we are surprised that so much should have been done in a life of no longer continuance.

Excepting Congreve, I do not remember that any of the poets, whose lives have been written by Johnson, is said to have produced any thing in the shape of a novel. Of the Incognita of Congreve, that biographer observes, not very satisfactorily, that he would rather praise it than read it. In the present series, Goldsmith, Smollett, and Johnson himself, if his Rasselas entitle him to rank in the number, are among the most distinguished in this species of writing, of whom modern Europe can boast. To these, if there be added the names of De Foe, Richardson, Fielding, and Sterne, not to mention living authors, we may produce such a phalanx as scarcely any other nation can equal. Indeed no other could afford a writer so wide a field for the exercise of this talent as ours, where the fullest scope and encouragement are given to the human mind to expand itself in every direction, and assume every shape and hue, by the freedom of the government, and by the complexity of civil and commercial interests. No one has portrayed the whimsical varieties of character, particularly in lower life, with a happier vein of burlesque than Smollett. He delights, indeed, chiefly by his strong delineation of ludicrous incidents and grotesque manners derived from this source. He does not hold our curiosity entangled by the involution of his story, nor suspend it by any artful protraction of the main event. He turns aside for no digression that may serve to display his own ingenuity or learning. From the beginning to the end, one adventure commonly rises up and follows upon another, like so many waves of the sea, which cease only because they have reached the shore. The billows float in order to the shore, The wave behind rolls on the wave before.

"Admirable as the art of the novelist is, we ought not to confound it with that of the poet; nor to conclude, because the characters of Parson Adams, Colonel Bath, and Squire Western, in Fielding; and of Strap, Morgan, and Pipes, in Smollett, im

press themselves as strongly on the memory, and seem to be as really individuals whom we have seen and conversed with, as many of those which are the most decidedly marked in Shakspeare himself; that therefore the powers requisite for producing such descriptions are as rare and extraordinary in one instance as in the other. For the poet has this peculiar to himself; that he communicates something from his own mind, which, at the same time that it does not prevent his personages from being kept equally distinct from one another, raises them all above the level of our common nature. Shakspeare, whom we appear not only to know, personally, but to admire and love as one superior to the cast of his kind,

Sweetest Shakspeare, fancy's child, has left some trick of his own linea ments and features discoverable in

the whole brood.

Igneus est ollis vigor et cœlestis origo
Seminibus.

It is this which makes us willing to have our remembrance of his characters refreshed by constant repetition, which gives us such a pleasure in summoning them before us, as "age cannot wither, nor custom stale." This is a quality which we do not find in Fielding, with all that consummate skill which he employs in de

Of Smollett's poems much does not remain to be said. The Regicide is such a tragedy as might be expected from a clever youth of eighteen. The language is declamatory, the thoughts inflated, and the limits of nature and verisimilitude transgressed in describing the characters and passions. Yet there are passages not wanting in poetical vigour.

His two satires have so much of the rough flavour of Juvenal, as to retain some relish, now that the occasion which produced them has passed away.

The Ode to Independence, which was not published till after his decease, amid much of common place, has some very nervous lines. The ward one. The term is scarcely abspersonification itself is but an awktract and general enough to be invested with the attributes of an ideal being.

In the Tears of Scotland, patriotism has made him eloquent and pathetic; and the Ode to Leven Water is sweet and natural. None of the other pieces, except the Ode to Mirth, which has some sprightliness of fancy, deserve to be particularly noticed.

POETRY, and indeed literature in general, runs the same course as painting and music; the fresh and masculine vigour of the first models is gradually improved upon; the graces of variety, the brilliancy of heightened effect, the surprise of contrast, are attained, and great results are effected by a complication of means and resources unknown to the early professors; but there is a diminution of that grandeur without effort and that truth of feeling which adhere to the noble simplicity of nature. At length this refinement degenerates into its extreme, affected exaggeration; and we have the tragedies of Dryden and the pictures of Fuseli. Yet it is a mistake to reject, with a peremptory and unqualified sentence of reprobation, those who pamper the craving of satiety by thus contributing to flatter and titillate a fastidious and capricious taste: it is not always, perhaps not often, by blockheads that these innovations are made. These fantastical pranks in literature and art are played by men of genius; by men who perhaps know better, or who at least ought to know better. The painter who dislocates the human joints, and moulds his countenances into a gorgon-stricken expression of marble, may yet throw out shadowy intimations of a daring though eccentric fancy; the musician who astounds the regularly trained ear by interspersed discords, that seem to violate the known analogies of science, may "snatch a grace beyond the reach of art," while confounding rules by the mastery of uncontrollable genius. Kehama burst through the twelve opposite gates of Padalon, in twelve chariots and in his own person, at the same individual point of time: the small critics rubbed their hands and cast their gibes on the poet, who yet passed on his way, with serene disdain, in the consciousness of power. The innovators on the severity of ancient models are neither without their use nor without their merits; they serve as beacons against the wanton departure from true taste which has

always nature for its basis; and if they have great faults, (the greater because these very faults are fondled like spoiled children) they have usually some striking qualities: sweetness, and brilliancy of touch, as well as subtlety of invention, seem to mark the decline of classical taste.

A very extraordinary instance of unchastised judgment and vivacious imagination is afforded by Nonnus, of Panopolis, an Egyptian poet of the 5th century; who, it seems, went among the Saracens on some embassy, and whose Greek (for in that language he chose to write) is certainly less Attic than Saracenic; I mean such as we might imagine Saracenic Greek would be. The Dionysiacs were first printed in 1569, from a MS. in the library of John Sambuch, at Antwerp; but he wrote also a poetic paraphrase of the gospel of John, first printed at Venice, by Aldus, in 1501. Some writers, who fall foul on the mythological poem for the excellent reason that it has not the Homeric purity, are wonderfully complaisant to the evangelical paraphrase; the one, they say, is the "most irregular poem extant with regard to style, sentiments, method, and constitution;" the style of the other they find out to be "perspicuous, neat, elegant, and proper for the subject." Now the most indulgent conclusion which can be drawn from the decision of these critics, is, that they are wholly unacquainted both with the one poem and the other; a conclusion which derives some confirmation from the piece of intelligence that one of these poems is written in heroic verse; the plain case being that the measure of the two poems is the same, and is nothing more nor less than the Homerical hexameter. The style of each bears exactly that affinity to the other which might be expected in two works of one and the same author: all the faults of redundancy, tawdriness, and refinement, which they exclaim against in the Dionysiacs, exist, without the slightest disparity, in the Evangelion. In a heap