I am a little ungracious to Smollett in saying so loud that he was an artist inferior to Fielding. Inferior he was, but when I set their best books side by side, I remember that there is little to choose between the pleasures they have given me, and am compelled to admit that the less scrupulous Smollett had the wider range. I read _Tom Jones_ in one sitting of twenty-four hours, and should like to write an essay on it, but can find no excuse for discussing here that epic of good-heartedness, since its characteristics are not different from those already noticed in _Joseph Andrews_. But _Humphry Clinker_ would have held me for as long if it had had as many pages, and in the history of the art, has, as an example of the novel in letters, an interest wholly separate from that of _Roderick Random_, which is a specimen of the picaresque. When Smollett came to write that book he was fifty years old and just about to die. He seems to have forgotten his old feud with life, and to look at things with a kindlier eye as one just ready to depart. His late-won detachment helped him to a scheme as clear as one of Fielding's, although even in this he is sometimes submerged in human nature. His notion was to describe the same scenes and events simultaneously from several points of view, in letters from different persons, so as to keep a story moving gently forward, with half a dozen personalities revolving round it, able to realise themselves or be realised in their own letters or those of their friends. In none of his other books are the characters so rounded and complete. There is Matthew Bramble, the old knight, outwardly morose and secretly generous; his sister, an old maid determined not to remain one, for ever grumbling at her brother's generosities; Lyddy, their romantic niece, and Jerry, their young blood of a nephew; and, as persons of the counterplot, Mistress Winifred Jenkins and Mary Jones; not to speak of the ubiquitous Clinker. The letters tell the whole story, and yet, written long after Richardson's, they have an older manner. Richardson's letters, with all their passionate reiteration of detail, do not concern themselves with foibles. They do not make you smile at their writers, and if you had laughed, as Fielding did, he would have been prodigiously annoyed. Smollett's letters have the same aim as the letters of the _Spectator_ or the _Tatler_. They are different only in less brilliant polish, and in their grouping round a story. The Humphry Clinker correspondence is as important as the letters of Clarissa in forming the most delicate and humorous epistolary style employed by Miss Evelina Anville. [The motives of the masculine novel.]