In the same year was published a Compendium of Authentic and Entertaining Voyages, in seven volumes, which was said to have been made under his superintendence. We have his own word [3], that he had written a very small part of it. In 1757, his Reprisal, or the Tars of Old England, an entertainment in two acts, in which the scene throughout is laid on board ship, and which describes seamen in his usual happy vein, was acted at Drury-lane with tolerable success. In 1758, he published his History of England from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748, four volumes. Of this work, hasty as it was, having been compiled in fourteen months, ten thousand copies were speedily sold.
Some strictures in the Critical Review, which, in order to screen the printer of it, he generously avowed himself to have written, once more exposed him to a legal prosecution. The offensive passages were occasioned by a pamphlet, in which Admiral Knowles had vindicated himself from some reflections that were incidentally cast on him in the course of Sir John Mordaunt's trial for the failure of a secret expedition on the coast of France, near Rochefort. In his comments on the pamphlet, Smollett had stigmatized Knowles, the author of it, as "an admiral without conduct, an engineer without knowledge, an officer without resolution, and a man without veracity." It can scarcely be wondered, if, after such provocation, the party injured was not deterred by menaces, or diverted by proposals of agreement, from seeking such reparation as the law would afford him. This reparation the law did not fail to give; and Smollett was sentenced to pay a penalty of one hundred pounds, and to be confined for three months in the prison of the King's Bench. Cervantes wrote his Don Quixote in a gaol; and Smollett resolved, since he was now in one, that he would write a Don Quixote too. It maybe said of the Spaniard, according to Falstaff's boast, "that he is not only witty in himself, but the cause that wit is in other men;" and among the many attempts at imitation, to which the admirable original has given rise, Sir Launcelot Greaves is not one of the worst. That a young man, whose brain had been slightly affected by a disappointment in love, should turn knight-errant, at a time when books of chivalry were no longer in vogue, is not, indeed, in the first instance, very probable. But we are contented to overlook this defect in favour of the many original touches of character, and striking views of life, particularly in the mad-house, and the prison into which he leads his hero, and which he has depicted with the force of Hogarth. If my recollection does not mislead me, he will be found in some parts of this novel to have had before him the Pharsamond of Marivaux, another copy of Cervantes. But it does not anywhere like Count Fathom, betray symptoms of being a mere translation. Sir Launcelot Greaves was first printed piecemeal in the British Magazine, or Monthly Repository, a miscellany to which Goldsmith was also a contributor. It has the recommendation of being much less gross and indelicate than any other of his novels.
During the same period, 1761 and 1762, he published, in numbers, four volumes of a Continuation of his History of England; and in 1765, a fifth, which brought it down to that time.
Not contented with occupation under which an ordinary man would have sunk, he undertook, on the 29th of May, 1762, to publish the Briton, a weekly paper, in defence of the Earl of Bute, on that day appointed first commissioner of the treasury; and continued it till the 12th of February in the ensuing year, about two months before the retirement of that nobleman from office. By his patron he complained that he was not properly supported; and he incurred the hostility of Wilkes, who had before been his staunch friend, but who espoused the party in opposition to the Minister, by an attack, the malignance of which no provocation could have justified.
In 1763, his name was prefixed, in conjunction with that of Francklin, the Greek professor at Cambridge, and translator of Sophocles and Lucian, to a version of the works of Voltaire, in twenty-seven volumes. To this he contributed, according to his own account, a small part, including all the notes historical and critical. To the Modern Universal History, which was published about the same time, he also acknowledged himself to be a contributor, though of no very large portion.
His life had hitherto been subjected to the toil and anxiety of one doomed to earn a precarious subsistence by his pen. Though designed by nature for the light and pleasant task of painting the humours and follies of men, he had been compelled to undergo the work of a literary drudge. Though formed to enjoy the endearments of friendship, his criticisms had made those who were before indifferent to him his enemies; and his polities, those whom he had loved, the objects of his hatred. The smile, which the presence of his mother for a moment recalled, had almost deserted his features. Still we may suppose it to have lightened them up occasionally, in those hours of leisure when he was allowed to unbend himself in the society of a wife, with whom he seems always to have lived happily, and of an only daughter, who was growing up to share with her his caresses, and to whom both looked as the future support of their age.
[Greek:
Tautae, gegaetha, kapilaethomai kakon'
Haed anti pollon esti moi parapsychae,
Aeolis, tithaenae, baktron, haegemon hodou]
In her, rejoicing, I forgot mine ills.
I have lost much; but she remains, my comfort,
My city and my nurse, my staff and guide.
He had bemoaned his distresses as an author; but was now to feel calamity of a different kind. This only daughter was taken from him by death, in her fifteenth year. Henceforward he was, with some short intervals, a prey to querulousness and disease. Soon after this loss (in June, 1763,) being resolved to try what change of climate would do for him, he set out with his disconsolate partner on a journey through France and Italy. On quitting his own country, he describes himself "traduced by malice, persecuted by faction, abandoned by false patrons, and overwhelmed by the sense of a private calamity, which it was not in the power of fortune to repair." The account which he published of this expedition on his return, shews that he did not derive from it the relief which he had expected. The spleen with which he contemplated every object that presented itself to him, was ridiculed by Sterne, who gave him the name of Smelfungus. With this abatement, the narration has much to interest and amuse, and conveys some information by which a traveller might perhaps still profit. When he brings before us the driver pointing to the gibbeted criminal whom he had himself betrayed, and unconsciously discovering his own infamy to Smollett, we might suppose ourselves to be reading a highly wrought incident in one of his own fictions. His prognostics of the approaching Revolution in France are so remarkable, that I am tempted to transcribe them. "The King of France, in order to give strength and stability to his administration, ought to have sense to adopt a sage plan of economy, and vigour of mind sufficient to execute it in all its parts with the most rigorous exactness. He ought to have courage enough to find fault, and even to punish the delinquents, of what quality soever they may be; and the first act of reformation ought to be a total abolition of all the farms. There are undoubtedly many marks of relaxation in the reins of the French government; and in all probability, the subjects of France will be the first to take the advantage of it. There is at present a violent fermentation of different principles among them, which under the reign of a very weak prince, or during a long minority, may produce a great change in the constitution. In proportion to the progress of reason and philosophy, which have made great advances in this kingdom [**kingfrom in original], superstition loses ground; ancient prejudices give way; a spirit of freedom takes the ascendant. All the learned laity of France, detest the hierarchy as a plan of despotism, founded on imposture and usurpation. The protestants, who are very numerous in the southern parts, abhor it with all the rancour of religious fanaticism. Many of the Commons, enriched by commerce and manufacture, grow impatient of those odious distinctions, which exclude them from the honours and privileges due to their importance in the commonwealth; and all the parliaments or tribunals of justice in the kingdom seem bent upon asserting their rights and independence in the face of the king's prerogative, and even at the expense of his power and authority. Should any prince, therefore, be seduced, by evil counsellors, or misled by his own bigotry, to take some arbitrary step that may be extremely disagreable to all those communities, without having spirit to exert the violence of his power for the support of his measures, he will become equally detested and despised, and the influence of the Commons will insensibly encroach upon the pretensions of the crown." (Travels through France and Italy, c. xxxvi. Smollett's Works, vol. v. p. 536.) This presentiment deserves to be classed with that prophecy of Harrington in his Oceana, of which some were fond enough to hope the speedy fulfilment at the beginning of the revolution. Smollett passed the greater part of his time abroad at Nice, but proceeded also to Rome and Florence.
About a year after he had returned from the continent (in June, 1766,) he again visited his native country, where he had the satisfaction to find his mother and sister still living. At Edinburgh he met with the two Humes, Robertson, Adam Smith, Blair, and Ferguson; but the bodily ailments, under which he was labouring, left him little power of enjoying the society of men who had newly raised their country to so much eminence in literature. To his friend, Dr. Moore, then a chirurgeon at Glasgow, who accompanied him from that place, to the banks of Loch Lomond, he wrote, in the February following, that his expedition into Scotland had been productive of nothing but misery and disgust, adding, that he was convinced his brain had been in some measure affected; for that he had had a kind of coma vigil upon him from April to November, without intermission. He was at this time at Bath, where two chirurgeons, whom he calls the most eminent in England, and whose names were Middleton and Sharp, had so far relieved him from some of the most painful symptoms of his malady, particularly an inveterate ulcer in the arm, that he pronounced himself to be better in health and spirits than during any part of the seven preceding years. But the flattering appearance which his disorder assumed was not of long continuance. A letter written to him by David Hume, on the 18th of July following, shews that either the state of his health, or the narrowness of his means, or perhaps both these causes together, made him desirous of obtaining the consulship of Nice or Leghorn. But neither the solicitations of Hume, nor those of the Duchess of Hamilton, could prevail on the Minister, Lord Shelburne, to confer on him either of these appointments. In the next year, September 21, 1768, the following paragraph in a letter from Hume convinced him that he had nothing to expect from any consideration for his necessities in that quarter. "What is this you tell me of your perpetual exile and of your never returning to this country? I hope that, as this idea arose from the bad state of your health, it will vanish on your recovery, which, from your past experience, you may expect from those happier climates to which you are retiring; after which, the desire of revisiting your native country will probably return upon you, unless the superior cheapness of foreign countries prove an obstacle, and detain you there. I could wish that means had been fallen on to remove this objection, and that at least it might be equal to you to live anywhere, except when the consideration of your health gave the preference to one climate above another. But the indifference of ministers towards literature, which has been long, and indeed almost always is the case in England, gives little prospect of any alteration in this particular."