HOGARTH, SMOLLETT, AND FIELDING.
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endless literary battles; and braved and wielded for years the cudgels of controversy. It was a hard and savage fight in those days, and a niggard pay. He was oppressed by illness, age, narrow fortune; but his spirit was still resolute, and his courage steady; the battle over, he could do justice to the enemy with whom he had been so fiercely engaged, and give a not unfriendly grasp to the hand that had mauled him. He is like one of those Scotch cadets, of whom history gives us so many examples, and who, with a national fidelity, the great Scotch novelist has painted so charmingly. Of gentle birth[1] and narrow means, going out from his
- ↑ Smollett of Bonhill, in Dumbartonshire. Arms, az. "a bend, or between a lion rampant, ppr, holding in his paw a banner, arg. . . . . . and a bugle-horn, also ppr. Crest, an oak-tree, ppr. Motto, Viresco."
Smollett's father, Archibald, was the fourth son of Sir James Smollett of Bonhill, a Scotch judge and member of Parliament, and one of the commissioners for framing the Union with England. Archibald married, without the old gentleman's consent, and died early, leaving his children dependent on their grandfather. Tobias, the second son, was born in 1721, in the old house of Dalquharn in the valley of Leven; and all his life loved and admired that valley and Loch Lomond beyond all the valleys and lakes in Europe. He learned the "rudiments" at Dumbarton Grammar-school, and studied at Glasgow.
But when he was only eighteen, his grandfather died, and left him without provision (figuring as the old judge in "Roderick Random" in consequence, according to Sir Walter). Tobias, armed with the "Regicide," a tragedy—a provision precisely similar to that with which Dr. Johnson had started, just before—came up to London. The "Regicide" came to no good, though at first patronised by Lord Lyttleton ("one of those little fellows who are sometimes called great men," Smollett says); and Smollett embarked as "surgeon's mate" on
