Travels through France Italy | Page 9

naturalising useful foreign words into our speech. It includes (as we shall have occasion to observe) a respectable quantum of wisdom fit to become proverbial, and several passages of admirable literary quality. In point of date (1763-65) it is fortunate, for the writer just escaped being one of a crowd. On the whole, I maintain that it is more than equal in interest to the Journey to the Hebrides, and that it deserves a very considerable proportion of the praise that has hitherto been lavished too indiscriminately upon the Voyage to Lisbon. On the force of this claim the reader is invited to constitute himself judge after a fair perusal of the following pages. I shall attempt only to point the way to a satisfactory verdict, no longer in the spirit of an advocate, but by means of a few illustrations and, more occasionally, amplifications of what Smollett has to tell us.
III
As was the case with Fielding many years earlier, Smollett was almost broken down with sedentary toil, when early in June 1763 with his wife, two young ladies ("the two girls") to whom she acted as chaperon, and a faithful servant of twelve years' standing, who in the spirit of a Scots retainer of the olden time refused to leave his master (a good testimonial this, by the way, to a temper usually accredited with such a splenetic sourness), he crossed the straits of Dover to see what a change of climate and surroundings could do for him.
On other grounds than those of health he was glad to shake the dust of Britain from his feet. He speaks himself of being traduced by malice, persecuted by faction, abandoned by false patrons, complaints which will remind the reader, perhaps, of George Borrow's "Jeremiad," to the effect that he had been beslavered by the venomous foam of every sycophantic lacquey and unscrupulous renegade in the three kingdoms. But Smollett's griefs were more serious than what an unkind reviewer could inflict. He had been fined and imprisoned for defamation. He had been grossly caricatured as a creature of Bute, the North British favourite of George III., whose tenure of the premiership occasioned riots and almost excited a revolution in the metropolis. Yet after incurring all this unpopularity at a time when the populace of London was more inflamed against Scotsmen than it has ever been before or since, and having laboured severely at a paper in the ministerial interest and thereby aroused the enmity of his old friend John Wilkes, Smollett had been unceremoniously thrown over by his own chief, Lord Bute, on the ground that his paper did more to invite attack than to repel it. Lastly, he and his wife had suffered a cruel bereavement in the loss of their only child, and it was partly to supply a change from the scene of this abiding sorrow, that the present journey was undertaken.
The first stages and incidents of the expedition were not exactly propitious. The Dover Road was a byword for its charges; the Via Alba might have been paved with the silver wrung from reluctant and indignant passengers. Smollett characterized the chambers as cold and comfortless, the beds as "paultry" (with "frowsy," a favourite word), the cookery as execrable, wine poison, attendance bad, publicans insolent, and bills extortion, concluding with the grand climax that there was not a drop of tolerable malt liquor to be had from London to Dover. Smollett finds a good deal to be said for the designation of "a den of thieves" as applied to that famous port (where, as a German lady of much later date once complained, they "boot ze Bible in ze bedroom, but ze devil in ze bill", and he grizzles lamentably over the seven guineas, apart from extras, which he had to pay for transport in a Folkestone cutter to Boulogne Mouth.
Having once arrived at Boulogne, Smollett settled down regularly to his work as descriptive reporter, and the letters that he wrote to his friendly circle at home fall naturally into four groups. The first Letters from II. to V. describe with Hogarthian point, prejudice and pungency, the town and people of Boulogne. The second group, Letters VI.-XII., deal with the journey from Boulogne to Nice by way of Paris, Lyon, Nimes, and Montpellier. The third group, Letters XIII. -XXIV., is devoted to a more detailed and particular delineation of Nice and the Nicois. The fourth, Letters XXV.-XLI., describes the Italian expedition and the return journey to Boulogne en route for England, where the party arrive safe home in July 1765.
Smollett's account of Boulogne is excellent reading, it forms an apt introduction to the narrative of his journey, it familiarises us with the milieu, and reveals to us in Smollett a man of experience who is both resolute and capable