"Smollett" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... can with difficulty imagine a journey in the Hebrides with rainy weather, in open boats, or upon horseback over wild moorland and morasses, a journey that even to Voltaire sounded like a tour to the North Pole. Smollett, in Humphrey Clinker, says the people at the other end of the island knew as little of Scotland as they did of Japan, nor was Charing Cross, witness as it did the greatest height of 'the tide of human existence,' then bright with the autumnal ...
— James Boswell - Famous Scots Series • William Keith Leask
... truly who do say We have no writing-folk to-day Like those whose names, in days gone by, Upon the scroll of fame stood high. And when I think of Smollett's tales, Of waspish Pope's ill-natured rails, Of Fielding dull, of Sterne too free, Of Swift's uncurbed indecency, Of Dr. Johnson's bludgeon-wit, I must confess I'm glad ...
— Cobwebs from a Library Corner • John Kendrick Bangs
... determined in the affirmative,' etc. The occasional insertion of a dash instead of a name, or the wary mention of a 'certain great leader' or 'a certain great personage' tell a simple tale of the jealousy with which the press was then regarded both in England and on the continent. The prosecution of Smollett, Cave, Wilkes and others were still fresh in the ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... The works 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 ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... a great reader of novels; had read 'Old Mortality' four times in English and once in French. Ellis said he preferred Miss Austen's novels to Scott's. Talked of the old novelists—Fielding, little read now, Smollett less; Mackintosh is a great admirer of Swift, and does not think his infamous conduct to Vanessa quite made out. Talked of the articles of our religion, and said that they were in almost exact conformity with certain doctrines ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... to 1841, 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. ...
— Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs, Vol. 1 • George Boutwell
... in turn wrote only three books 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 Random." There we have the real ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... 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 ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... Monmouth House 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 ancient brick turned almost purple by age; and the monuments ...
— Chelsea - The Fascination of London • G. E. (Geraldine Edith) Mitton
... a novelist and prose poet is to be classed in the front rank of the noble company to which he belongs. He has revived the novel of genuine practical life, as it existed in the works of Fielding, Smollett, and Goldsmith; but at the same time has given to his material an individual coloring and expression peculiarly his own. His characters, like those of his great exemplars, constitute a world of their own, whose truth to nature every reader instinctively recognizes ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... administers modern comforts with an old-fashioned civility. But round and about the Pulteney one has still the scenery of Georgian England, the white, faintly classical terraces and houses of the days of Fielding, Smollett, Fanny Burney and Jane Austen, the graceful bridge with the bright little shops full of "presents from Bath"; the Pump Room with its water drinkers and a fine array of the ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... it and went home. He had to stand for a long time and rattle the front door before it would open, then he ran humming up the stairs, and when he had entered the room he threw himself down on the sofa with one of Smollett's novels in his hand, and read and laughed till after midnight. At last it grew too cold in the room, he leaped up and went stamping up and down to drive away the chill. He stopped at the window. The sky ...
— Mogens and Other Stories - Mogens; The Plague At Bergamo; There Should Have Been Roses; Mrs. Fonss • Jens Peter Jacobsen
... poet's fame is lasting, a novelist's is comparatively ephemeral." Moved by a similar sentiment, Reade once said, "The most famous name in English literature and all literature is a dramatist's; and what pygmies Fielding and Smollett, and all the modern novelists, from Dickens, the head and front of them, down to that milk-and-water specimen of mediocrity, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... "carry," far from being a corruption, is pure old English, and is used in the Bible, and by Smollett, though it is amusing to note that the "Georgia Gazetteer" for 1837, mentions as a lamentable provincialism such an application of the word as "to carry (instead of lead) a horse to water." If the "Gazetteer" were indeed correct in this, ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... Daniel Defoe. Robinson Crusoe. Richardson. Pamela, and Other Novels. Fielding. Joseph Andrews. Tom Jones. Its Moral. Smollett. Roderick Random. Peregrine Pickle. ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... 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 story." After a ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... 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 ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... 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, with a long hooked nose and ...
— The Social History of Smoking • G. L. Apperson
... 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 ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... down the book without a word, and take up Smith's Wealth of Nations or Smollett's England—the profitable studies recommended, and speedily become lost in a dejected reverie, with fixed eyes ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... to conclude these anecdotes, not to be found in the pages of Hume and Smollett.—Wilson says that both kingdoms rejoiced:—"Preparations were made in England to entertain the Infanta; a new church was built at St. James's, the foundation-stone of which was laid by the Spanish ambassador, for the public exercise of her religion: her portrait was multiplied ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... sir," returned Captain Smollett. "And I think I should have had the choosing of my own hands, ...
— Treasure Island • Robert Louis Stevenson
... all unconsciousness was to establish fiction upon a new basis. She may be said to have created the family novel. Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne had bequeathed their legacy impregnated with objectionable qualities, in spite of strength and charm; they were read rather secretly, and tabooed for women. On the other hand, the followers ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... our departure with the steamer. But a necessary visit to a banker's, and afterwards some unnecessary formalities about our passports, kept us wandering through the streets nearly all day; and we saw nothing in the slightest degree interesting, except the tomb of Smollett, in the burial-place attached to the English Chapel. It is surrounded by an iron railing, and marked by a slender obelisk of white marble, the pattern of which is many times repeated ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... must be owned he is so. His humour, exquisite as it is, is modish. It may not be for all markets. How it affected the Scottish Thersites we know only too well—that dour spirit required more potent draughts to make him forget his misery and laugh. It took Swift or Smollett to move his mirth, which was always, three parts of it, derision. Lamb's elaborateness, what he himself calls his affected array of antique modes and phrases, is sometimes overlooked in these strange days, ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... masterpiece, and to neglect all else that he wrote for it. Nor can the world be blamed. The deliberate and dangerous lewdness of Defoe is one of the most deplorable things in letters. We shelve much of Smollett, much of Fielding, without great regret, but it is lamentable that works of powers and perceptions so supreme as "Moll Flanders" and "Colonel Jack" should be found unfit and unreadable, infinitely more perilous to the young than the coarser, but honester, freedoms of Smollett and Fielding, ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... following narrative Smollett speaks of an "intended massacre" of the Protestants at Londonderry. The people of that city were of Anglo-Saxon blood. Although belonging to various Protestant churches, they were united in their hostility ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... meaningless; though they are, as it 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 ...
— Dickens' London • Francis Miltoun
... the chapter I find many pages of information concerning Shakespeare's plays, Milton's works, and those of Bacon, Addison, Samuel Johnson, Fielding, Richardson, Sterne, Smollett, De Foe, Locke, Pope, Swift, Goldsmith, Burns, Cowper, Wordsworth, Gibbon, Byron, Coleridge, Hood, Scott, Macaulay, George Eliot, Dickens, Bulwer, Thackeray, Browning, Mrs. Browning, Tennyson, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... 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, and I read at recess while the other boys were ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... and fifty miles distant. In these books all the adventures are associated with inns and the various characters, thrown together by chance, there assembled. Dickens unquestionably derived inspiration from Smollett and Fielding; nor is there any doubt but that Harte made a close study ...
— A Tramp Through the Bret Harte Country • Thomas Dykes Beasley
... condition—"disease" is too confining a term—hypochondriasis.[2] Their concern is apparent in both the poetry and prose of two centuries. From Robert Burton's Brobdingnagian exposition in The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) to Tobias Smollett's depiction of the misanthropic and ailing Matthew Bramble in Humphry Clinker (1771), and, of course, well into the nineteenth century, afflicted heroes and weeping heroines populate the pages of England's literature. There is scarcely a decade in ...
— Hypochondriasis - A Practical Treatise (1766) • John Hill
... untried agreeable companion. Ability to please is to these incautious subjects of it a most dangerous influence; and books as well as men when most attractive should be treated warily. In Rabelais and Swift, in Fielding and Smollett, coarse manners must be reprobated. In George Eliot's novels, with exceptions, and in 'Jane Eyre,' there is a subtle taint that is unwholesome to the unguarded reader. Thackeray too frequently compels us to associate with evil company; ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... in London; but was for long largely dependent for his livelihood on 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 ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... 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 ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... romance without some knowledge of realism; the more intimate the knowledge the better the book, and it is frequently to this that the failure of a novel is due, although the critic might be at a loss to explain it. Petronius lies behind Tristram Shandy, his influence can be detected in Smollett, and even ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... satire languished for a while, to revive again during the ministry of the Earl of Bute, when everything Scots came in for condemnation, and when Smollett and John Wilkes belaboured each other in the Briton and the North Briton, in pamphlet, pasquinade, and parody, until at last Lord Bute withdrew from the contest in disgust, and suspended the organ ...
— English Satires • Various
... without a moment's dullness. The main narrative, indeed, is no less entertaining than the episodes. The work became a model for story-writers of a much later period, even to the times of Fielding and Smollett. Boccaccio borrowed freely from it; at least one of the many humorous exploits of Cervantes's 'Don Quixote' can be attributed to an adventure of Lucius; while 'Gil Blas' abounds in reminiscences of the Latin novel. The student of folk-lore will easily ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... century by such a book as the "Beggars' Opera;" but upon the morals and the national manners, works of satire afford a world of light that one would in vain look for in regular books of history. Doctor Smollett would have blushed to devote any considerable portion of his pages to a discussion of the acts and character of Mr. Jonathan Wild, such a figure being hardly admissible among the dignified personages who usually push all others out from the possession of the historical page; but a chapter ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... derived from his talks with Coleridge in 1797.[337] When Emerson visited him in 1833, he spoke with loathing of "Wilhelm Meister," a part of which he had read in Carlyle's translation apparently. There was some affectation in this, it should seem, for he had read Smollett. On the whole, it may be fairly concluded that the help of Germany in the development of his genius may be reckoned as very small, though there is certainly a marked resemblance both in form and sentiment between ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... artist's resolution; if the delicacy of our improved times is offended by what may seem deformity upon his canvas, we must remember that we do not shrink from Hogarth's coarseness, but from the coarseness he labored, by exposing, to expel. He painted what Smollett, and Fielding, and Richardson wrote far more offensively; but he surpassed the novelists both in truth and in intention. He painted without sympathizing with his subjects, whom he lashed with unsparing bitterness or humor. He never ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... 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
... famous scheme for reducing the National Debt, projected by Sir John Blunt, who became one of the Directors of it, and ultimately one of the greatest sufferers by it, when the Bubble burst, see Smollett's "History of England," vol. ii; Pope's "Moral Essays," Epist. iii, and notes; and Gibbon's "Memoirs," for the violent and arbitrary proceedings against the Directors, one of whom ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... Bishop Forbes's MS. 'Lyon in Mourning' (partly published by Robert Chambers in 'Jacobite Memoirs' {24b}), it is certain that the courage, endurance, and gay content of the Prince in his Highland wanderings deserve the high praise given by Smollett. Thus, in many ways we see the elements of a distinguished and attractive character in Charles. His enemies, like the renegade Dr. King, of St. Mary's Hall (ob. 1763), in his posthumous 'Anecdotes,' accused the Prince of avarice. He would borrow money from a lady, says King, while ...
— Pickle the Spy • Andrew Lang
... taken the 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 mask of the savage, the transpositions of dark souls, ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... beauty can compare with its glassy winding stream, its mossy old woods and guarding hills and the ivy-grown, castellated towers embosomed in its forests or standing on the banks of the Leven—the purest of rivers. At the little village called Renton is a monument to Smollett, but the inhabitants seem to neglect his memory, as one of the tablets on the pedestal is broken and half fallen away. Farther up the vale a farmer showed us an old mansion in the midst of a group of trees ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors - Vol. II Great Britain And Ireland, Part Two • Francis W. Halsey
... collected a strong force, more than twice the number of that of the invaders. He had with him the gentlemen of the name of Buchanan, with the Grahams, and other gentry of the Lennox, and a party of the citizens of Dumbarton, under command of Tobias Smollett, a magistrate, or bailie, of that town, and ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... curiosity. It is not the men whose duties have made them familiar with this class of subjects who are most likely to offend by scenes and descriptions which belong to the physician's private library, and not to the shelves devoted to polite literature. Goldsmith and even Smollett, both having studied and practised medicine, could not by any possibility have outraged all the natural feelings of delicacy and decency as Swift and Zola have outraged them. But without handling doubtful subjects, there are many curious medical experiences which have interest ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... 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 ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... 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 a fresh reading ...
— Life And Adventures Of Peter Wilkins, Vol. I. (of II.) • Robert Paltock
... through Renton, where there were bleaching and calico printing works. A public library graced the centre of the village, as well as a fine Tuscan column nearly 60 feet high, erected to Tobias Smollett, the poet, historian and novelist, who was born in 1721 not half a mile from the spot. The houses were small and not very clean. The next village we came to was Alexandria, a busy manufacturing place where the chief ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... a church of statelier proportions. We walked over to Worcester, through such a mist of local color that I felt like one of Smollett's pedestrian heroes, faring tavern-ward for a night of adventures. As we neared the provincial city we saw the steepled mass of the cathedral, long and high, rise far into the cloud-freckled blue. And as we came nearer still, we stopt on the bridge and viewed the solid minster reflected ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... misrepresented than in Lavengro and The Romany Rye; that that picaresque ideal of romance which, finding utterance in Hurtado de Mendoza, was presently to appeal to such artists as Cervantes, Quevedo, Lesage, Smollett, the Dickens of Pickwick, finds such expression in Lavengro and The Romany Rye as nowhere else; and the tale of Borrow ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... that 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 to have been drawn from nature closely. The ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... "Simplicissimus." In England "Guzman" was several times translated; "Lazarillo" was continually reprinted during two centuries, and original romances of this kind were published here, among others, by Thomas Nash, in the sixteenth, by Richard Head in the seventeenth, by Defoe and Smollett, in the eighteenth century. The initiative of Nash and his group was all the more important and meritorious because before them the comic element was greatly wanting in the English prose romance; amusing stories in the manner of the French had found translators ...
— The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare • J. J. Jusserand
... of those few of our predecessors, to whom this species of writing is indebted for being saved from contempt, and rescued from depravity, we can trace such names as Rousseau, Johnson,(1)Marivaux, Fielding, Richardson, and Smollett, no man need blush at starting from the same post, though many, nay, most men, may ...
— Evelina • Fanny Burney
... Smollett, etc.,—our new Commander-in-chief, Hon. Sir Robert O'Callaghan, brother to Earl of Lismore, a fine soldierly-looking man, with orders and badges;—his brother, an agreeable man, whom I met at Lowther Castle this season. He composes his own music and sings his ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... were then alike absorbed in the works of Dryden, Pope, Addison, Steele, and Swift, and the novels from the pens of Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett had begun to claim and to hold the attention of the English reading public. The children, however, could neither comprehend nor enjoy the witty criticism and subtle treatment of the topics discussed by the older men, although, as ...
— Forgotten Books of the American Nursery - A History of the Development of the American Story-Book • Rosalie V. Halsey
... could save a great deal of money by defrauding the crew; and further, the discipline of the service was such as would astonish the modern philanthropist; there was no appeal for subordinates, and tyranny and oppression, even amounting to the destruction of life, were practised with impunity. Smollett has given his readers some idea of the state of the service a few years after the time of which we are now writing, when it was infinitely worse, for the system of the Dutch, notorious for their cruelty, had been grafted upon that of the English: the ...
— Snarleyyow • Captain Frederick Marryat
... will show us that. Consider the novel—that most recent form of Art! Did not the age which followed Fielding lament the treachery of authors to the Picaresque tradition, complaining that they were not as Fielding and Smollett were? Be sure they did. Very slowly and in spite of opposition did the novel attain in this country the fulness of that biographical form achieved under Thackeray. Very slowly, and in face of condemnation, it has been losing that form in favour of a greater ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... Antrim with a regiment, under orders from the Lord Deputy, filled the city with consternation. What followed there is graphically told in the words of the historian. A better account of a military action than that which Smollett gives of the Battle of the Boyne it ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... of the remarkable men of that time. Smollett describes him in Humphrey Clinker as "one of the first sages of the Scottish kingdom," and "a patriot of a truly Roman spirit." He was Provost of Glasgow during the Rebellion, and while the Government and the Horse Guards slumbered and dawdled, and let Prince Charlie march from the Highlands ...
— Life of Adam Smith • John Rae
... in the direction of modern authors, and I would now say a word or two in regard to those of an earlier period who are also represented. Defoe, Fielding, Richardson, Goldsmith, Smollett, Frances Burney, Samuel Lover, John Galt, Maria Edgeworth, Susan Ferrier, William Godwin, Mary Shelley, Fennimore Cooper, J. G. Lockhart, Leigh Hunt, Thos. Moore, Harriet Martineau, J. L. Motley, Horace Smith, ...
— A Guide to the Best Historical Novels and Tales • Jonathan Nield
... Queen Charlotte; but the genuine fame achieved by her writings in some degree relieved the sense of thraldom, from which she happily escaped with a pension. The novels of Madame D'Arblay are the intermediate step between the novels of Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett, and the Waverly novels of Walter Scott. They are entirely free from any taint of immorality; and they were among the first feminine efforts that were received with enthusiasm: thus it is that, without being of the first order ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... 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 of a corrupt patronage had demoralized the officers; ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... was written. This work was greatly applauded by the critics. Its production made Johnson burst forth into that splendour of laudation in which he said that whatever Goldsmith did, he did better than all others, and he counted him as an historian superior to Hume, Smollett, and Lyttelton. Goldsmith had a fine faculty in histories for presenting vital facts concisely, and making his pages compendious. The grace he had by instinct others strove to create by vast elaboration. ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • E. S. Lang Buckland
... Scotch doctor 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
... parties with the officers of the Horse Guards, who were all men of the world, and some of them of erudition and understanding. I was introduced to Smollett at this time, and was in the coffee-house with him when the news of the Battle of Culloden came, and when London all over was in a perfect uproar of joy. The theatres were not very attractive this season, as ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... interesting fact that the poets and thinkers of the age were Handel's firm admirers. Such men as Gay, Arbuthnot, Hughes, Colley Cibber, Pope, Fielding, Hogarth, and Smollett, who recognized the deep, struggling tendencies of the times, measured Handel truly. They defended him in print, and never failed to attend his performances, and at his benefit concerts their enthusiastic support always insured him ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... or two, the old scholar turned to me and asked, "Did you happen to catch that phrase of Sam Weller's?" I gave it to him without difficulty and then an inspiration occurred to me. The stammering tongue had plundered Father Prout and the prophet Malachi, Dickens and Ingoldsby, Pope and Smollett and Defoe, and as it chanced he had made no literary allusion in English which did not recall some long familiar text to my mind, I offered a bargain. If O'Hanlon would give me the classical stuff in respect to which I was in Pagan darkness, I would give him the English ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray
... character as a patron of men of letters rests chiefly on the money which he spent in this way, though it must be set to his credit that he procured a pension for Samuel Johnson without stipulating for any return. Among his hired scribes was Smollett, who edited a paper for him called The Briton. The other side, too, was active. In obedience to Frederick's instructions the Prussian ambassadors took part in exciting popular discontent with the government; and were justly reproved ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt
... me share; Lord of the lion-heart and eagle-eye, Thy steps I follow with my bosom bare, Nor heed the storm that howls along the sky. 975 SMOLLETT: Ode to Independence. ...
— Handy Dictionary of Poetical Quotations • Various
... itself.' [*] But Carlyle forgot the sluggishness of the ordinary imagination, and, for the moment, the stupendous dulness of the ordinary historian. It cannot be matter for surprise that people prefer Smollett's 'Humphrey Clinker' ...
— Obiter Dicta • Augustine Birrell
... keeping still to authors, Charles Dickens knew very little about books. His keen business-like intellect perceived that the study of life and of the world's forces is worth more than the study of letters, and he also kept himself clear of scholarly lumber. He read Fielding, Smollett, Gibbon, and, in his later life, he was passionately fond of Tennyson's poetry; but his greatest charm as a writer and his success as a social reformer were both gained through his simple power of looking at things for ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... aboard this great battleship and to see not only the material perfection of the ship herself in engines, guns and all arrangements, but the fine quality of the officers and crew. Have you ever read Smollett's novel, I think "Roderick Random" or "Humphrey Clinker," in which the hero goes to sea? It gives me an awful idea of what a floating hell of filth, disease, tyranny, and cruelty a war-ship was in those days. Now every arrangement is as clean and healthful as possible. The men can ...
— Letters to His Children • Theodore Roosevelt
... these again 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 ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... English literature, the first to be copied was that of Cervantes's Don Quixote, rendered into English by Thomas Shelton in 1612. Swift must have had the rambling method of Cervantes well in mind when he wrote his Gulliver; and Smollett confessedly took it as his pattern and set out to imitate. The most that was required by such a method in the way of initial construction was to select a hero, give some account of his early history, from the day of his birth ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... 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
... 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 ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay
... among the other items in that Armada of Sir Chaloner's, just taking leave of England; most obscure of the items then, but now most noticeable, or almost alone noticeable, is a young Surgeon's-Mate,—one Tobias Smollett; looking over the waters there and the fading coasts, not without thoughts. A proud, soft-hearted, though somewhat stern-visaged, caustic and indignant young gentleman. Apt to be caustic in speech, having sorrows of his own under lock and ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... well alone. They thought that, once out, he had shown remarkably inept seamanship. And they thought that he had chosen a too near and too well- lighted stage for the exhibition of both. This forenoon the "Eighteenth Century Novelists" involved Smollett, and with every reference to the water looks of understanding traveled from student to student: that the class was of both sexes made the situation no better. Cope was in good enough physical condition,—the unspeakable draught from the unspeakable flask had ensured ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller
... 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 Latin is miserably bad {63}—as Coleridge ...
— Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland A.D. 1803 • Dorothy Wordsworth
... 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 ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... better work. A book which holds by Rabelais on the one hand and by the Queen of Navarre on the other is not likely, however, to appeal to that part of the English and American reading public that expurgates its Chaucer, and blushes at the mention of Fielding and Smollett. Such readers will do well to avoid the 'Contes drolatiques;' although, like 'Don Juan,' they contain a great deal of what was best in their author, of his frank, ebullient, sensuous nature, lighted up here at least by a genuine if scarcely ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... parallel has often been pointed out between the two pairs of novelists who were most popular in the middle of our own and of the preceding century. The intellectual affinity which made Smollett the favourite author of Dickens is scarcely so close as that which commended Fielding to Thackeray. The resemblance between 'Pickwick' and 'Humphrey Clinker,' or between 'David Copperfield' and 'Roderick ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... "Now, Cap'n Smollett," remonstrated Silver, "dooty is dooty, as I knows, and none better; but we're off dooty now; and I can't see no call to ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XXI • Robert Louis Stevenson
... characteristic addition—"all very 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 ...
— Byron • John Nichol |
