Smollett’s “Humphrey Clinker” (1771) is the last of his novels and the only one in which there is effective use of Nature. Smollett was born and brought up in the valley of the Leven; and he spent some months there before the final trip to Italy for his health. He was in Leghorn about a year before he died, and during this year he wrote “Humphrey Clinker.” It recounts the travels of Matthew Bramble in search of health. The love of Nature comes out chiefly in the letters supposed to be written from Scotland. He speaks with pleasure of the “huge dusky mountains of the West Highlands, piled one over another,” and of Loch Lomond, that “surprising body of pure, transparent water, unfathomably deep in many places,” with its green, wooded islands. His delight in the wild scenery of Scotland is thus expressed: I have seen the Lago di Gardi, Albano, De Vico, Bolsena, and Geneva, and upon my honor, I prefer Loch Lomond to them all; a preference which is certainly owing to the verdant islands that seem to float upon its surface, affording the most enchanting objects of repose to the excursive view. Nor are the banks destitute of beauties, which even partake of the sublime. On this side they display a sweet variety of woodland, cornfield, and pasture, with several agreeable villas emerging as it were out of the lake, till at some distance the prospect terminates in huge mountains, covered with heath, which being in the bloom, affords a very rich covering of purple. Everything here is romantic beyond imagination.... Above the house is a romantic glen or cleft of a mountain covered with hanging woods, having at bottom a stream of fine water that forms a number of cascades in its descent to form the Leven; so that the scene is quite enchanting.... This country is amazingly wild, especially towards the mountains, which are heaped upon the backs of one another, making a most stupendous appearance of savage nature, with hardly any signs of cultivation, or even of population. All is sublimity, silence, and solitude (pp. 261–65). On the country of Ossian he says: These are the lonely hills of Morven, where Fingal and his heroes enjoyed the same pastime. I feel an enthusiastic pleasure when I survey the brown heath that Ossian was wont to tread; and hear the wind whistle through the bending grass.... The poems of Ossian are in every mouth. Smollett’s love for the Leven, that “charming stream ... transparent, pastoral, delightful,” is further evidenced by this “Ode to the Leven,” a single stanza of which may be quoted here: Pure stream in whose transparent wave My youthful limbs I wont to lave; No torrents stain thy limpid source, No rocks impede thy dimpling course, That sweetly warbles o’er its bed, With white round polished pebbles spread (p. 262).