Without _Ferdinand Count Fathom_ (1753) many people have thought that English Literature could do perfectly well: and without going quite so far, one may acknowledge that perhaps a shift could be made. The idea of re-transferring the method (in the first place at any rate) to foreign parts was not a bad one, and it may be observed that by far the best portion of _Fathom_ is thus occupied. Not a few of these opening passages are excellent: and Fathom's mother, if not a person, is an excellent type: it is probable that the writer knew the kind well. But his unhappy tendency to enter for the same stakes as his great forerunners makes it almost impossible not to compare _Ferdinand Fathom_ with _Jonathan Wild_: and the effect is very damaging to the Count. Much of the book is dull: and Fathom's conversation is (to adopt a cant word) extremely unconvincing. The fact seems to be that Smollett had run his picaresque vein dry, as far as it connected itself with mere rascality of various kinds, and he did well to close it. He had published three novels in five years: he waited seven before his next, and then eleven more before his last. A qualified apology has been hinted above for _Sir Launcelot Greaves_. It is undoubtedly evidence of the greatness of _Don Quixote_ that there should have been so many direct imitations of it by persons of genius and talent: but this particular instance is unfortunate to the verge of the preposterous, if not over it. The eighteenth century was indeed almost the capital time of English eccentricity: and it was also a time of licence which sometimes looked very like lawlessness. But its eccentricities were not at this special period romantic: and its lawlessness was rather abuse of law than wholesale neglect of it. A rascally attorney or a stony-hearted creditor might inflict great hardship under the laws affecting money: and a brutal or tyrannical squire might do the same under those affecting the tenure or the enjoyment of house or land. "Persons of quality" might go very far. But even a person of quality, if he took to riding about the country in complete steel, assaulting the lieges, and setting up a sort of cadi-justice of his own in opposition to the king's, would probably have been brought pretty rapidly, if not to the recovery of his senses, to the loss of his liberty. Nor, with rare exceptions, are the subordinate or incidental humours of the first class. But I have always thought that the opening passage more than entitles the book to an honourable place in the history of English fiction. I do not know where to look, before it, for such an "interior"--such a complete Dutch picture of room and furniture and accessories generally. Even so learned a critic as the late M. Brunetière thought that things of the kind were not older than Balzac. I have known English readers, not ignorant, who thought they were scarcely older than Dickens. Dickens, however,