day when, if Smollett is within hailing distance of the facts, it was terribly corrupt. Too much credit can hardly be given him for first using, so effectively too, the professional sea-life of his country: a motive so richly productive since through Marryat down to Dana, Herman Melville, Clark Russell and many other favorite writers, both British and American. In Smollett's hands, it is a strange muddle of religion, farce and smut, but set forth with a vivid particularity and a gusto f high spirits which carry the reader along, willy-nilly. Such a book might be described by the advertisement of an old inn: "Here is entertainment for man and beast." As to characterization, if a genius for it means the creation of figures which linger in the familiar memory of mankind, Smollett must perforce be granted the faculty; here in his first book are Tom Bowling and Strap--to name two--the one (like Richardson's Lovelace) naming a type: the other standing for the country innocent, the meek fidus Achates, both as good as anything of the same class in Fielding. The Welsh mate, Mr. Morgan, for another of the sailor sort, is also excellent. The judgment may be eccentric, but for myself the character parts in Smollett's dramas seem for variety and vividness often superior to those of Fielding. The humor at its best is very telling. The portraits, or caricatures, of living folk added to the story's immediate vogue, but injure it as a permanent contribution to fiction. A fair idea of the nature of the attractions offered (and at the same time a clear indication of the sort of fiction manufactured by the doughty doctor) may be gleaned from the following precis--Smollett's own--of Chapter XXXVIII: "I get up and crawl into a barn where I am in danger of perishing through the fear of the country people. Their inhumanity. I am succored by a reputed witch. Her story. Her advice. She recommends me as a valet to a single lady whose character she explains." This promises pretty fair reading: of course, we wish to read on and to learn more of that single lady and the hero's relation to her. Such a motive, which might be called, "The Mistakes of a Night," with details too crude and physical to allow of discussion, is often overworked by Smollett (as, in truth, it is by Fielding, to modern taste): the eighteenth century had not yet given up the call of the Beast in its fiction--an element of bawdry was still welcome in the print offered reputable folk.