1763-1766. Travelling in France and Italy; published his Travels.
1769. Published Adventures of an Atom.
1770. Set out for Italy; died at Leghorn 21st of Oct., 1771, in the fifty-first year of his age.
A good specimen of the old “slashing” style of writing is presented by the paragraph on Admiral Knowles, which subjected Smollett to prosecution and imprisonment. The admiral's defence on the occasion of the failure of the Rochfort expedition came to be examined before the tribunal of the Critical Review.
“He is,” said our author, “an admiral without conduct, an engineer without knowledge, an officer without resolution, and a man without veracity!”
Three months imprisonment in the King's Bench avenged this stinging paragraph.
But the Critical was to Smollett a perpetual fountain of “hot water”. Among less important controversies may be mentioned that with Grainger, the translator of Tibullus. Grainger replied in a pamphlet; and in the next number of the Review we find him threatened with “castigation”, as an “owl that has broken from his mew”!
In Dr. Moore's biography of him is a pleasant anecdote. After publishing the Don Quixote, he returned to Scotland to pay a visit to his mother:—
“On Smollett's arrival, he was introduced to his mother with the connivance of Mrs. Telfer (her daughter), as a gentleman from the West Indies, who was intimately acquainted with her son. The better to support his assumed character, he endeavoured to preserve a serious countenance, approaching to a frown; but while his mother's eyes were riveted on his countenance, he could not refrain from smiling: she immediately sprung from her chair, and throwing her arms round his neck, exclaimed, ‘Ah, my son! my son! I have found you at last!’
“She afterwards told him, that if he had kept his austere looks and continued to gloom, he might have escaped detection some time longer, but ‘your old roguish smile’, added she, ‘betrayed you at once.’ ”