"Smollett" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... light that one would in vain look for in regular books of history'—that Pickwick, Roderick Random, and Tom Jones, 'give us a better idea of the state and ways of the people than one could gather from any pompous or authentic histories.' Whether Fielding and Smollett's contemporaries would have endorsed this opinion is the real question; for on such a point the judgment of Thackeray, who lived a century after them, cannot be conclusive. It is probable that to an Englishman of that day the novels of these two authors appeared to be extraordinary caricatures ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... and poet, born in Roxburghshire, practised medicine in London; friend of poet Thomson, as well as of Wilkes and Smollett, and author of "The Art ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... British, with the exception of LeSage. The choice, or at least the arrangement, seems more or less haphazard. Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett naturally began the group, and Sterne followed after an interval. Johnson and Goldsmith were treated briefly, for the prefaces were to be proportioned to the amount of work by each author included in the text. Horace Walpole, ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... himself that he would spend no more money foolishly, delighted him. Speaking one day of Gray, the author of the Elegy, he said: "No poet ever came walking down to posterity with so small a book under his arm." He preferred Smollett to Fielding, putting "Peregrine Pickle" above "Tom Jones." Of the best novels by his contemporaries he always spoke with warm commendation, and "Griffith Gaunt" he thought a production of very high merit. He was "hospitable to the thought" of all writers who were really in earnest, but ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... been admired while it was ascribed to men of letters long conversant with the world, and accustomed to composition. But when it was known that a reserved, silent young woman had produced the best work of fiction that had appeared since the death of Smollett, the acclamations were redoubled. What she had done was, indeed, extraordinary. But, as usual, various reports improved the story till it became miraculous. Evelina, it was said, was the work of a girl of seventeen. Incredible as this tale was, it continued to ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Appendix The English Humourists Of The Eighteenth Century Lecture The First. Swift Lecture The Second. Congreve And Addison Lecture The Third. Steele Lecture The Fourth. Prior, Gay, And Pope Lecture The Fifth. Hogarth, Smollett, And Fielding Lecture The Sixth. Sterne And Goldsmith The Georges The Poems Sketches Of Manners, Morals, Court And Town Life George The First George The Second George The ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... sea-romance of Smollett, Marryat, Melville, Dana, Clark Russell, Stevenson, Becke, Kipling, and for its well-worn situations has substituted not only many novel nuances, but invaded new territory, revealed obscure atavisms and the psychology lurking behind the ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... inventiveness, which can be paralleled in all letters only by the period of Marlowe and Shakespeare, masterpiece after masterpiece poured from the press. Within two generations, besides Richardson and Fielding came Sterne and Goldsmith and Smollett and Fanny Burney in naturalism, and Horace Walpole and Mrs. Radcliffe in the new way of romance. Novels by minor authors were published in thousands as well. The novel, in fact, besides being the occasion ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... were, on everybody's tongue and on many a sign-board in nearly every thoroughfare. As a historian, who would have made an unexceptionable literary critic, has said: Beer overflows in almost every volume of Fielding and Smollett. Goldsmith was not averse to the "parson's black champagne;" Hogarth immortalized its domestic use, and Gilray its political history; and the "pot of porter" and "mug of bitter" will go down in the annals of the literature, art, and history of London, and ...
— Dickens' London • Francis Miltoun
... although some may think it strange how the pursuit of medicine should commend itself instead to a genial and poetic mind. Yet let us remember that some eminent poets have been students or practisers of the art of medicine. Such—to name only a few—were Armstrong, Smollett, Crabbe, Darwin, Delta, Keats, and the two Thomas Browns, the Knight of the "Religio Medici," and the Philosopher of the "Lectures," both genuine poets, although their best poetry is in prose. There are, besides, connected with medicine, some departments of thought and study ...
— Poetical Works of Akenside - [Edited by George Gilfillan] • Mark Akenside
... "Cockayne" must be a very large country indeed. Still, the fact remains, that of book-learning of any kind Dickens remained, to the end of his days, perhaps more utterly innocent than any other famous English writer since Shakespeare. His biographer labours to prove that he had read Fielding and Smollett, Don Quixote and Gil Blas, The Spectator, and Robinson Crusoe. Perhaps he had, like most men who have learned to read. But, no doubt, this utter severance from books, which we feel in his tales, will ultimately tell against ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... example of the use of a wooden pipe I have met with is dated 1765—but this was not in England. Many years ago the late Mr. A.J. Munby pointed out that Smollett, in one of his letters dated March 18, 1765, giving an account of his journey from Nice to Turin, describes how he ascended "the mountain Brovis," and on the top thereof met a Quixotic figure, whom he thus pictures: "He was very tall, meagre, and yellow, ...
— The Social History of Smoking • G. L. Apperson
... like them, sir," returned Captain Smollett. "And I think I should have had the choosing of my own hands, if you go ...
— Treasure Island • Robert Louis Stevenson
... I read Locke, Say's Political Economy, Smith's Wealth of Nations, Plutarch, Josephus, Herodotus, Lingard, Hume and Smollett, Cicero, Demosthenes, Homer, Pope, Byron, Shakespeare, Boswell's Johnson, Junius, The Tattler, The Rambler, the English Reviews, French from text-books without a teacher and Rhetoric (Blair's full edition). Much of Blair's Rhetoric I studied carefully and with great benefit. Some of my ...
— Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs, Vol. 1 • George Boutwell
... each, of first-rate importance, so that by the mastery of nine books one might claim to have a fairly broad view of this most important and distinctive branch of English literature. The three men are, of course, Fielding, Richardson, and Smollett. The books are: Richardson's "Clarissa Harlowe," "Pamela," and "Sir Charles Grandison"; Fielding's "Tom Jones", "Joseph Andrews," and "Amelia"; Smollett's "Peregrine Pickle," "Humphrey Clinker," and "Roderick ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Dickens, what writer of prose fiction has created a greater number of characters such as stamp themselves upon the memory so that an allusion to them is well understood in cultivated society? Fielding has drawn country squires, and Smollett has drawn sailors; but neither has intruded upon the domain of the other, nor could he have made the attempt without failure. Some of our living novelists have a limited list of characters; they have half a dozen types which we recognize as inevitably as we do the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... Sterne exceeded Smollett[10] in indelicacy as much as in humorous talent. He calls him Smelfungus, because he had written a fastidious book of travels. But he profited by his works, and the character of Uncle Toby reminds us considerably ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... more happily is he inspired. We could scarcely cite anything more Stevensonian, alike in its humour and its philosophy, than the dialogue between Captain Smollett and Long John Silver, entitled The Persons of the Tale. After chapter xxxii. of Treasure Island, these two puppets "strolled out to have a pipe before business should begin again, and met in an open space not far from the ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... the moralist. Once, when a miserable-looking dyspeptic called upon a leading physician, and laid his case before him, "Oh!" said the doctor, "you only want a good hearty laugh: go and see Grimaldi." "Alas!" said the miserable patient, "I am Grimaldi!" So, when Smollett, oppressed by disease, traveled over Europe in the hope of finding health, he saw everything through his own ...
— How to Get on in the World - A Ladder to Practical Success • Major A.R. Calhoon
... not concerned with children in those days, and I had strange adventures. I remember, in the catalogue, being impressed by the title, "The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle." I filled an application blank and the librarian handed me the collected and entirely unexpurgated works of Smollett in one huge volume. I read everything, but principally history and adventure, and all the old travels and voyages. I read mornings, afternoons, and nights. I read in bed, I read at table, I read as I walked to and from school, ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... what Wieland said of Schiller, that by his first historical attempt he 'has discovered a decided capability of rising to a level with Hume, Robertson and Gibbon.' He will rather rise to a level with Belsham or Smollett. ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... ground not heaved up so irregularly and tossed about, the imperfect cultivation was the more to be lamented, particularly as there were so many houses near the river. In a small enclosure by the wayside is a pillar erected to the memory of Dr. Smollett, who was born in a village at a little distance, which we could see at the same time, and where, I believe, some of the family still reside. There is a long Latin inscription, which Coleridge translated for my benefit. The ...
— Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland A.D. 1803 • Dorothy Wordsworth
... failed to discern a certain law of periodicity which governs the formal variations of fiction. This periodicity is natural to the human mind, and it also has relations to profound social movements. The popularity of the novels of Fielding, Richardson, and Smollett, whose characters were mainly drawn from humble life, was due to the rise of the same spirit of democracy that produced the American and French Revolutions. The reaction to the romantic and historical novel, under Scott and his followers, was a revival of the aristocratic ...
— Days Off - And Other Digressions • Henry Van Dyke
... the same period, in France and in England, where it is most extensively used, the romance, a sort of mirror everywhere transportable, the best adapted to reflect all phrases of nature and of life. After reading the series of English novelists, Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, Sterne, and Goldsmith down to Miss Burney and Miss Austen, I have become familiar with England in the eighteenth century; I have encountered clergymen, country gentlemen, farmers, innkeepers, sailors, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... stood on the north side of Lordship Yard. Here Dr. Smollett once lived and wrote many of his works; one of the scenes of "Humphrey Clinker" is actually laid in Monmouth House. The old parish church stands at the corner of Church Street. The exterior is very quaint, with the ...
— Chelsea - The Fascination of London • G. E. (Geraldine Edith) Mitton
... Like his contemporary Smollett, Henry Fielding came of an ancient family, and might, in his Horatian moods, have traced his origin to Inachus. The lineage of the house of Denbigh, as given in Burke, fully justifies the splendid but sufficiently ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... Mr Laidlaw, "in going through all the books belonging to my father; and learning from me that Mr Elder, bookseller, Peebles, had a large collection of books which he used as a circulating library, he forthwith became a subscriber, and by that means read Smollett's and Fielding's novels, and those voyages and travels which were published at the time, including those of Cook, ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... tiresome. I abhor books of religion, though I reverence and love my God without the blasphemous notions of sectaries." Lastly, under the head of "Miscellanies" we have Spectator, Rambler, World, &c., &c; among novels, the works of Cervantes, Fielding, Smollett, Richardson, Mackenzie, Sterne, Rabelais, and Rousseau. He recommends Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy as the best storehouse for second-hand quotations, as Sterne and others have found it, and tells us that the great part of the books named were perused before the age of ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... essays; now is the time to listen to the honied voice of Leigh Hunt discoursing daintily of men and books. So you will pass from Charles Lamb and Leigh Hunt to the books they loved to praise. Exult in the full-blooded, bracing life which pulses in the pages of Fielding; and if Smollett's mirth is occasionally too riotous and his taste too coarse, yet confess that all faults must be pardoned to the author of "Humphry Clinker." Many a long evening you will spend pleasantly with Defoe; and then, perchance, after ...
— Life And Adventures Of Peter Wilkins, Vol. I. (of II.) • Robert Paltock
... of English fiction his indebtedness was equally large, exception made perhaps for Fielding and Smollett; and one American author should be included in the acknowledgment. Goldsmith, Sterne, Walter Scott, and Fenimore Cooper were his delight. The first and last of Richardson's productions he read only when his own talent was formed. Pamela and Sir Charles Grandison he chanced ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... cycloramas, which bring home to John Bull the wonders of the habitable globe, and annihilate time and space for his delectation. We see the Paris of the Huguenots to the sound of Meyerbeer's blood-stirring trumpets; or gain companionship with Hogarth, Fielding, or Smollett as we listen to Thackeray; or, after paying our shilling in the Chinese Junk, are, to all intents and purposes, afloat ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 443 - Volume 17, New Series, June 26, 1852 • Various
... a Mr. Dyson. His talents brought him a good deal of consideration in society, but the solemn and pompous manner which he affected laid him open to some ridicule, and he is said to have been satirised by Smollett (q.v.) in his Peregrine Pickle. He endeavoured to reconstruct his poem, but the result was a failure. His collected poems were pub. 1772. His works, however, are now little read. Mr. Gosse has described him as "a sort of ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... hundred years ago since Smollett wrote, but his men and women were taken from real life, his sailors from the navy, his attorneys from the jails and criminal courts, and his fops and fine ladies from the herd of such cattle that he daily met with. Well, they ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... Nights, all travels, or histories, or books upon the East I could meet with, I had read, as well as Rycaut, before I was ten years old. I think the Arabian Nights first. After these, I preferred the history of naval actions, Don Quixote, and Smollett's novels, particularly Roderick Random, and I was passionate for the Roman History. When a boy, I could never bear to read any Poetry whatever ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... and which "Society" will not hear mentioned. Grate, the historian, and Thackeray, the novelist, both lamented that the begueulerie of their countrymen condemned them to keep silence where publicity was required; and that they could not even claim the partial licence of a Fielding and a Smollett. Hence a score of years ago I lent my best help to the late Dr. James Hunt in founding the Anthropological Society, whose presidential chair I first occupied (pp. 2-4 Anthropologia; London, Balliere, vol. i., No. I, 1873). My motive was to supply travellers ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... verandah, as well as another door into the little hall. The drawing-room had a bow window looking over the fields towards the South, and this way too looked the dining-room, in which Magdalen bestowed whatever was least interesting, such as the "Hume and Smollett" and "Gibbon" of her grandfather's library and her own school books, from which she ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... young gentleman who had just learnt to talk about Domenichinos and Guidos, and to buy ancient bronzes, when plunged into the coarse society of these mountains of roast beef. As he grew up manners became a trifle more refined, and the customs described so faithfully by Fielding and Smollett belonged to a lower social stratum. Yet we can fancy Walpole's occasional visit to his constituents, and imagine him forced to preside at one of those election feasts which still survive on Hogarth's canvas. Substitute ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... be said to have revealed in "The Pilot," came to be considered more and more as his property; and no one can read such tales as "Press On" (Gaa Paa) and "Rutland" without agreeing that the title is well merited. I know of no English novelist since Smollett, who produces so deep a sense of reality in his descriptions of maritime life. Mr. Clark Russell, who knows his ship from masthead to keel as thoroughly as Jonas Lie, and writes fully as clever a story, seems to me to have a lower aim, in so far as the novel of adventure, caeteris ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... in Treasure Island, and From Spy Glass Hill we've viewed the land; Through thickets dense we've followed Jim And shared the doubts that came to him. We've heard Cap. Smollett arguing there With Long John Silver, gaunt and spare, And mastering our many fears ...
— The Path to Home • Edgar A. Guest
... themselves right with the public or their own consciences; these have no motive for concealment or half-truths; these call for no more confidence than I can cheerfully give, and do not force me to tax my credulity or to fortify it by evidence. I take up a volume of Dr. Smollett, or a volume of the Spectator, and say the fiction carries a greater amount of truth in solution than the volume which purports to be all true. Out of the fictitious book I get the expression of the life of the time; of the manners, of the movement, ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... destruction in 1717, when the Rgent Philippe d'Orlans had ordered its demolition, by the spirited remonstrance of St. Simon.... The great pavilion itself only contained, as we have seen, a very small number of chambers. The querulous Smollett, who visited Marly in 1763, speaks of it as "No more than a pigeon-house in respect to a palace." But it was only intended as the ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... unwashed and unsavory England of Hogarth, Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne; of Tom Jones, Squire Western, Lady Bellaston, and Parson Adams; of the "Rake's Progress" and "Marriage a la Mode;" of the lords and ladies who yet live in the undying gossip of Horace Walpole, be-powdered, be-patched, and be-rouged, flirting at masked balls, playing cards till ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... a degree that before it his faults or failings seem very trifling, is his absolutely vigorous, marvellously varied originality, based on direct familiarity with Nature, but guided and cultured by the study of natural, simple writers, such as Defoe and Smollett. I think that the "interest" in or rather sympathy for gypsies, in his case as in mine, came not from their being curious or dramatic beings, but because they are so much a part of free life, of out-of-doors Nature; so associated with sheltered nooks among rocks and trees, the hedgerow and birds, ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... directly oppose them. Don Juan will be known by and by, for what it is intended,—a Satire on abuses of the present states of society, and not an eulogy of vice. It may be now and then voluptuous: I can't help that. Ariosto is worse; Smollett (see Lord Strutwell in vol. 2d of Roderick Random) ten times worse; and Fielding no better. No girl will ever be seduced by reading Don Juan:—no, no; she will go to Little's poems and Rousseau's romans for that, or even to the immaculate ...
— Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters And Journals, Vol. 5 (of 6) • (Lord Byron) George Gordon Byron
... Charlotte Bronte of glorifying passion they praise her unaware. Her glory is that she did glorify it. Until she came, passion between man and woman had meant animal passion. Fielding and Smollett had dealt with it solely on that footing. A woman's gentle, legalized affection for her husband was one thing, and passion was another. Thackeray and Dickens, on the whole, followed Fielding. To all three of them passion is an affair wholly of the senses, temporary, ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... Otranto, came down over nose and chin. Maddened with the insult, Chandos dashed the contents of the goblet into what he thought was the Squire's face, but which was indeed the white cravat and waistcoat of his opposite neighbor; and then began a scene that Smollett alone could have described or Hogarth painted. It was as though a concerted signal had been given for a free fight among all the Squire's guests. The one art that was practiced among them was that of boxing, and almost every man present had a neat way of hitting out with one ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn
... natural to farm out paupers to the master of a workhouse, and prisoners to the proprietor of a gaol. The state of prisoners may be inferred not only from Howard's authentic record but from the fictions of Fielding, Smollett and Goldsmith; and the last echoes of the same complaints may be found in Pickwick and Little Dorrit. The Marshalsea described in the last was also a proprietary concern. We shall hereafter see how Bentham proposed to treat ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... at the beginning of the nineteenth century the relations between parents and children were still far from satisfactory. The violent type of father, as described by Fielding, Richardson, Smollett and Sheridan, is now hardly more likely to find a place in literature than the original advertisement of Messrs. Fairlie & Pontifex's "Pious Country Parishioner," but the type was much too persistent not ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... typical examples; and it may be taken to include Goldsmith also. Then comes the class of those whom the ordinarily well-educated public, whatever they may pretend, read really very little or not at all; and in this class we may couple Sterne with Addison, with Smollett, and, except, of course, as to Robinson Crusoe—unless, indeed, our blase boys have outgrown him among other pleasures of boyhood—with Defoe. But below this there is yet a third class of writers, who are not only read by none but the critic, the connoisseur, or the historian of ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... picturesque portions of the inhabitants; and the promenade is an arid beach, anything but soothing to the respiratory organs. The English cemetery is a touching spectacle, with its numerous monuments of brilliant marble; among which stands conspicuous the tomb of Smollett. ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 444 - Volume 18, New Series, July 3, 1852 • Various
... and telling stories; of which the doctor had as many as a half-pay captain in the army. Sometimes we chatted, as well as we could, with the natives; and, one day—joy to us!—Po-Po brought in three volumes of Smollett's novels, which had been found in the chest of a sailor, who some time previous had died ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... Smollett's pictures of the service in Roderick Random, written forty years after Dampier's time, give us some idea of life on board ship, for in the forty years between the two dates it differed in no essential particulars. Pepys ...
— The Naval Pioneers of Australia • Louis Becke and Walter Jeffery
... are Smith's "Wealth of Nations," "The Federalist," and Rousseau's "Social Compact," and, as the latter was in French, it could not have been read. In lighter literature Homer, Shakespeare, and Burns, Lord Chesterfield, Swift, Smollett, Fielding, and Sterne, and "Don Quixote," are the only ones deserving notice. It is worthy of mention that Washington's favorite quotation was Addison's "'Tis not in mortals to command success," but he also utilized ...
— The True George Washington [10th Ed.] • Paul Leicester Ford
... few years our prosecution of the Canadian war was marked by a weakness little short of imbecility. The conduct of the troops was indifferent, the tactics of the generals bad, and the schemes of the minister worse. The coarse but powerful wit of Smollett and Fielding, and the keen sarcasms of "Chrysal," convey to us no very exalted idea of the composition of the British army in those days. The service had sunk into contempt. The withering influence ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... his aid Bubb Doddington, who, during the lifetime of the preceding king, had done good service for the party of the Prince of Wales, in a journal styled the Remembrancer, and they, in conjunction with Smollett as editor, brought out the Briton in 1762. It was but a weakly specimen of a Briton from the very first. There were many causes which contributed to its downfall. Scotchmen were regarded throughout the nation with feelings of thorough detestation, and Smollett had ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... by a picture of complete vice, unrelieved by anything of human feeling. ..."]. Some other critics have been neither more friendly than Sir Walter, nor more discriminating, in speaking of Jonathan Wild and Smollett's Count Fathom in the same breath, as if they were similar either in purpose or in merit. Fathom is a romantic picaresque novel, with a possibly edifying, but most unnatural reformation of the villainous hero at the last; Jonathan ...
— The History of the Life of the Late Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great • Henry Fielding
... appropriated, I took no large amount of education, although I was fond of reading, and especially of novels, which are, I think, very instructive to the young, especially the novels of Smollett and Fielding. ...
— The Autobiography of a Quack And The Case Of George Dedlow • S. Weir Mitchell
... paper called The World, on the other hand, was by "our first writers." Who, then, were the first writers of England in the year 1750? Walpole has told us in a note. Our readers will probably guess that Hume, Fielding, Smollett, Richardson, Johnson, Warburton, Collins, Akenside, Gray, Dyer, Young, Warton, Mason, or some of those distinguished men, were in the list. Not one of them. Our first writers, it seems, were Lord Chesterfield, Lord Bath, Mr. W. Whithed, ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... well into a Scotch understanding. Their only idea of wit, which prevails occasionally in the north, and which, under the name of WUT, is so infinitely distressing to people of good taste, is laughing immoderately at stated intervals." Strange language to use of a country which has produced Smollett, Burns, Scott, Galt, and Wilson—all remarkable for the humour diffused through their writings! Indeed, we may fairly ask, have they equals in this respect amongst English writers? Charles Lamb had the same notion, or, I should rather say, the same prejudice, about Scottish ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay
... of this nature that have swarmed and are still swarming from the press, cannot realize the apparent peril which at that time existed in this undertaking. No work of the kind, such as he now projected, had ever yet been published. Sailors, indeed, had been introduced into fiction, notably by Smollett, but in no case had there been exhibited the handling and movements of vessels, and the details of naval operations. During the last half-century we have been so surfeited with the sea-story in every form, that most of us have forgotten the fact of its late ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury
... the eighteenth century the warrant is inseparably associated with the short, incurvated service sword commonly known as the cutlass or hanger; but in the press-gang prints of the period the gangsmen are generally armed with stout clubs answering to Smollett's "good oak plant." Apart from this artistic evidence, however, there is no valid reason for believing that the bludgeon ever came into general use as the ganger's weapon. As early as the reign of Anne he went armed with ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... was hailed the colossus of Literature by a generation who measured him against men of no common mould—against Hume, Robertson, Gibbon, Warburton, the Wartons, Fielding, Richardson, Smollett, Gray, Goldsmith, and Burke. Any one of these may have surpassed the great lexicographer in some branch of learning or domain of genius; but as a man of letters, in the highest sense of the term, he towered pre-eminent, ...
— Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale) (2nd ed.) (2 vols.) • Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi
... among whom they had arisen. It is a deeply interesting study to investigate all the evils that were the result. Nations, like individuals, cannot become desperate gamblers with impunity. Punishment is sure to overtake them sooner or later. A celebrated writer [Smollett.] is quite wrong, when he says, "that such an era as this is the most unfavourable for a historian; that no reader of sentiment and imagination can be entertained or interested by a detail of transactions such as these, which admit of no warmth, no colouring, no embellishment; ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... burying ground belonging to the English factory, which is interesting enough from the variety of tombs, monuments and inscriptions. Here all Protestants, to whatever nation they belong, are buried. I noticed Smollett's tomb. It is on the whole an interesting spot, tho' not quite so much so as the cemetery of ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... upon the incidents of Carlyle's student-life on the Continent. Soon after his return to Scotland he made acquaintance with Smollett, whose lively, agreeable manners rendered him universally popular. Thomson, the author of "The Seasons," and Armstrong the poet, were also at this time among his friends. In 1746 he preached his first sermon before the Presbytery of Haddington, ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... fashion. To be sure, your eyes might not stand that, Casaubon. But you must unbend, you know. Why, you might take to some light study: conchology, now: it always think that must be a light study. Or get Dorothea to read you light things, Smollett—'Roderick Random,' 'Humphrey Clinker:' they are a little broad, but she may read anything now she's married, you know. I remember they made me laugh uncommonly—there's a droll bit about a postilion's breeches. We have no such humor now. I have ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... of Smollett and Fielding were admirable pictures of society as it existed in their day; but we live in a more refined age, and few young people would feel any pleasure in the coarse pictures exhibited in those once celebrated works. The novels of Richardson, recommended by grave divines from the pulpit as perfect ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... significant to many that he was particularly fascinated by Hogarth's work, and that he copied and imitated it; and his father's well-stocked library, and his father's encouragement, had quickened his imagination and given it its enduring bias for literary activity.' Like Defoe, Smollett, Sterne, Borrow, Dickens, Eliot, 'G.C.' is, half involuntarily, ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... scene in Vanbrugh's Relapse, and the chapter (ch. li) in Smollett's Roderick Random describing Lord Strutwell, may also be mentioned as evidencing familiarity with inversion. "In our country," said Lord Strutwell to Rawdon, putting forward arguments familiar to modern champions ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... theatre to ask for two free passes. When he came back his bride was gone. He sought her with all the ardour of the bridegroom in the ballad of "The Mistletoe Bough," and with more success. Madame Ling was reading a novel at home. Mr. Carlyle has quoted Tobias Smollett as to the undesirability of giving the historical muse that latitude which is not uncommon in France, and we prefer to leave the tale of Ling's where Mr. Carlyle left that ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... Post-office Directory, were all he asked for his hours of leisure and meditation. In a handsome glazed bookcase, opposite his writing-table, appeared a richly-bound edition of the Waverley Novels, Knight's Shakespeare, Hume and Smollett, Fielding, Goldsmith, and Gibbon; but, except when Georgy dusted the sacred volumes with her own fair hands, the glass doors of the bookcase ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... my young ears heard these words without comprehending them! But while I was too young and thoughtless to share in an enthusiasm for Sterne or Fielding, and Smollett or Don Quixote, my mother and grandmother were leading me into the pleasant ways of "Pride and Prejudice," and "The Scenes of Clerical Life," and the delightful stories ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... the news, both foreign and domestic, that a considerable portion of the four small pages of the Chronicle was usually devoted to literature. Extracts were frequently given from the works of Johnson, Smollett, and other popular writers, and a column was often occupied by an essay from a contributor to the paper, generally treating of some social evil or peculiarity, but never intermeddling with local or general politics. These effusions displayed a very respectable ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 424, New Series, February 14, 1852 • Various
... by the merest chance, made a discovery that gladdened her heart: she lighted upon Soho. She had read and loved her Fielding and Smollett when at Brandenburg College; the sight of the stately old houses at once awoke memories of Tom Jones, Parson Adams, Roderick Random, and Lady Bellaston, She did not immediately remember that those walls had sheltered the originals of these creations; when she realised this fact she got ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... are at all points alike inferior to the real Shallow and the genuine Quickly of King Henry IV. It is true that Jonson's humour has sometimes less in common with Shakespeare's than with the humour of Swift, Smollett, and Carlyle. For all his admiration and even imitation of Rabelais, Shakespeare has hardly once or twice burnt but so much as a stray pinch of fugitive incense on the altar of Cloacina; the only Venus acknowledged and adored ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... of romance produced likewise the greatest of all satires upon romance. "Don Quixote," of course, was early translated and imitated in England; and the picaro romances had an important influence upon the evolution of English fiction in De Foe and Smollett; not only directly through books like "The Spanish Rogue," but by way of Le Sage.[7] But upon the whole, the relation between English and Spanish literature had been one of distant respect rather than of intimacy. There was never any such inrush of ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers |
