His brain had been busied with a hundred different schemes; he had been reviewer and historian, critic, medical writer, poet, pamphleteer. He had fought
"The stutterer had almost finished his travels through Europe and part of Asia, without ever budging beyond the liberties of the King's-bench, except in term-time, with a tipstaff for his companion: and as for little Tim Cropdale, the most facetious member of the whole society, he had happily wound up the catastrophe of a virgin tragedy, from the exhibition of which he promised himself a large fund of profit and reputation. Tim had made shift to live many years by writing novels, at the rate of five pounds a volume; but that branch of business is now engrossed by female authors, who publish merely for the propagation of virtue, with so much ease, and spirit, and delicacy, and knowledge of the human heart, and all in the serene tranquillity of high life, that the reader is not only enchanted by their genius, but reformed by their morality.
"After dinner, we adjourned into the garden, where I observed Mr. S——— give a short separate audience to every individual in a small remote filbert-walk, from whence most of them dropped off one after another, without further ceremony."
Smollett's house was in Lawrence-lane, Chelsea, and is now destroyed. See Handbook of London, p. 115.
"The person of Smollett was eminently handsome, his features prepossessing, and, by the joint testimony of all his surviving friends, his conversation, in the highest degree, instructive and amusing. Of his disposition, those who have read his works (and who has not?) may form a very accurate estimate; for in each of them he has presented, and sometimes, under various points of view, the leading features of his own character without disguising the most unfavourable of them. . . . . . . When unseduced by his satirical propensities, he was kind, generous, and humane to others; bold, upright, and independent in his own character; stooped to no patron, sued for no favour, but honestly and honourably maintained himself on his literary labours. . . . . . . He was a doating father, and an affectionate husband; and the warm zeal with which his memory was cherished by his surviving friends, showed clearly the reliance which they placed upon his regard,"—Sir Walter Scott.
