We must now hastily pass to the third so-called classic writer in English fiction, Tobias Smollett, who, after being educated as a surgeon, and having experiences of life as surgeon's mate on a ship of the line in the expedition to Carthagena, spent some time in the West Indies, returned to London, wrote some satire, an opera, &c., and presently when he was still only twenty-seven years old captivated England with his first novel, _Roderick Random_, which appeared, in 1748, the same year with _Clarissa Harlowe_. In 1751 came Smollett's _Peregrine Pickle_, famous for its bright fun and the caricature it contains of Akenside--_Pleasures of Imagination._ Akenside, who is represented as the host in a very absurd entertainment after the ancient fashion. In 1752 Smollett's _Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom_ gave the world a new and very complete study in human depravity. In 1769, appeared his _Adventures of an Atom_; a theme which one might suppose it difficult to make indecorous; and which was really a political satire; but the unfortunate liberty of locating his atom as an organic particle in various parts of various successive human bodies gave Smollett a field for indecency which he cultivated to its utmost yield. A few months before his death in 1771 appeared his _Expedition of Humphrey Clinker_, certainly his best novel. It is worth while noticing that in Humphrey Clinker the veritable British woman, poorly-educated and poor-spelling, begins to express herself in the actual dialect of the species; and in the letters of Mrs. Winifred Jenkins to her fellow-maid-servant Mrs. Mary Jones at Brambleton Hall, during a journey made by the family to the North we have some very worthy and strongly-marked originals not only of Mrs. Malaprop and Mrs. Partington, but of the immortal Sairey Gamp and of scores of other descendants in Thackeray and Dickens, here and there. I can quote but a few lines from the last letter of Mrs. Winifred Jenkins concluding the _Expedition of Humphrey Clinker_, which by the way is told entirely through letters from one character to another, like Richardson's. "To Mrs. Mary Jones at Brambleton Hall, Mrs. Jones,:-- Providence has bin pleased to make great halteration in the pasture of our affairs. We were yesterday three kiple chined by the grease of God in the holy bands of matter-money."