In one chapter we find ourselves in a stage-coach, with such a company as Smollett loved to introduce to his readers. He was about this time prosecuted in the King's Bench, on a charge of having intended to assassinate one of his countrymen, whose name was Peter Gordon. A few blows of the cane, which, after being provoked by repeated insolence, he had laid across the shoulders of this man, appeared to be the sole grounds for the accusation, and he was, therefore, honourably acquitted by the jury. A letter, addressed to the prosecutor's counsel, who, in Smollett's opinion, by the intemperance of his invective had abused the freedom of speech allowed on such occasions, remains to attest the irritability and vehemence of his own temper. The letter was either not sent, or the lawyer had too much moderation to make it the subject of another action, the consequences of which he could have ill borne; for the expense, incurred by the former suit, was already more than he was able to defray, at a time when pecuniary losses and disappointments in other quarters were pressing heavily upon him. A person, for whom he had given security in the sum of one hundred and eighty pounds, had become a bankrupt, and one remittance which he looked for from the East Indies, and another of more than a thousand pounds from Jamaica, failed him. From the extremity to which these accidents reduced him, he was extricated by the kindness of his friend, Doctor Macaulay, to which he had been before indebted; and by the liberality of Provost Drummond, who paid him a hundred pounds for revising the manuscript of his brother Alexander Drummond's travels through Germany, Italy, Greece, &c. which were printed in a folio volume in 1754. He had long anticipated the profits of his next work. This was a translation of Don Quixote, published at the beginning of 1755. Lord Woodhouselee, in his Essay on Translation, has observed, that it is little else than an improvement of the version by Jarvis. On comparing a few passages with the original, I perceive that he fails alike in representing the dignity of Cervantes in the mock-heroic, and the familiarity of his lighter manner. These are faults that might have been easily avoided by many a writer of much less natural abilities than Smollett, who wanted both the leisure and the command of style that were requisite for such an undertaking. The time, however, which he gave to that great master, was not thrown away. He must have come back from the study with his mind refreshed, and its powers invigorated by contemplating so nearly the most skilful delineation that had ever been made of human nature, according to that view in which it most suited his own genius to look at it.