Humpuny Cure, By Tobies Smolott. 2 vols, (B. Blackwell, 153.)
Smollett, of all English novelists, excels in the use'of the happy cident, writes Mr. Ellis Roberts in the "Westminster Gazette." He is coarser, commoner, and frequently more tedious than his great~ contemporary, Fielding; he has not is wit, nor Sterne's sentiment, nor Richardson's sensibility and power of analysis. He has no radiance much inferior authors have, oddities do not agreeably' surprise one, as do John Galt's or Susan Ferrier's, He is less human than Miss Edgeworth, and has in his manner @ morose pugnacity, attacking wantonly and unskilfully. If, however, I were asked what English novelist I could read most contentedly for the gusto ut incident, the surprise of felicitous invention, I should have to name Smollett with Captain Marryal "Humphry Clinker," his last and east unamiable book, is softened him. There was radium in the waters then, I suppose, though the hard Scot did not know it, and the water and the air of that benign and comfortable city mollified the an-fractuositien vf Tobias Smollett. They did not at all destroy his individuality, 'There is' plenty of savour in "Humphry Clinker," and the book's shrewdness is none the loss apt because Smollett is not so provocative in the application of his lancet, Of all novels composed in the form of epistles "Humphry Clinker" is and of the most successful, How well the book opens with Matthew Bramble's letter, and few readers can fail to be carried along gaily and quickly till they come to. that luckless introduction of poor Humphry at Marlborough, where Mrs. Tabitha complained against him as "an impudent varlet for presuming to ride before persons of sion without a shirt." Then how excellent is Humphry Clinker's account vf his qualifications when be offers himself to Bramble as servant for life:
Soto, anous (answered your honour (answer il horse, pea ants sow edu shee him rowel him
tom country of Wilts—Then can mak urn dings and oh-naut" mend and tin Here uncle "burt out act fired, what oth Clinker), m play. upon the ewes Bitseyed Saran, Arius Smollett has scareely had justice of gamer
done'to him as an ingenious maker of high-spirited fun—too much stress Has been laid on the fact that the fun is occasionally rather strong for squeamish stomachs, or even for stomachs that are not easily It would be useless to deny this; but it should not be allowed to make us neglect the far more important fact that he is a master of rollicking. The kind of fun he gives us, differs in accent, in stress from that of Dickens and Wells but is of essentially the same kind. It is the fun of the clown, of the circus, of the startlingly inappropriate and unexpected; and in his best work it is combined with real knowledge of human nature and a real zest for life know the trye story and have no Latin can now at Inet get it, The letters which make this collection one of the great landmarks of modern literature are, of course, those of Heloise. In that famous firat letter she states, once for all, the modern position of woman, of woman protesting against man's enunciation of her as a mere instrument of pleasure, as a temptation viley because more alluring, than the temptation of gluttony oF sloth, There are phrases in that letter 20 modern that they might have been written by @ heroine of Thsen's; it la, in every sentence of it, full of the conviction that the only. true love is that which respects and delights in the personality, the mind, the soul of the beloved, that it has nothing but an accidental Hikencss to the concupiscence which Abelard
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.