Travels through France Italy | Page 9

one
interested in Smollett's personality it supplies an unrivalled key. It is,
moreover, the work of a scholar, an observer of human nature, and, by
election, a satirist of no mean order. It gives us some characteristic
social vignettes, some portraits of the road of an unsurpassed freshness
and clearness. It contains some historical and geographical observations
worthy of one of the shrewdest and most sagacious publicists of the day.
It is interesting to the etymologist for the important share it has taken in
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