"Smollett" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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 Random,' consists chiefly in the exuberance of animal spirits, ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... 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 playing. ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... the same to me; I'm fond of yielding, And therefore leave them to the purer page Of Smollett, Prior, Ariosto, Fielding, Who say strange things for so correct an age;[258] I once had great alacrity in wielding My pen, and liked poetic war to wage, And recollect the time when all this cant Would have ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... "Best Stories," and an admirable set they were! I wish that anything of mine were worthy to go into such company. His purity of feeling, almost ascetic, led him to reject Boccaccio, but he admitted Chaucer and some of Balzac's, and Smollett, Goldsmith, and De Foe, and Walter Scott's best, Irving's Rip Van Winkle, Bernardin St. Pierre's "Paul and Virginia," and "Three Months under the Snow," and Charles Lamb's generally overlooked "Rosamund Gray." There were eases for "Socrates and his Friends," and for ...
— The End Of The World - A Love Story • Edward Eggleston
... 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 ...
— Cobwebs from a Library Corner • John Kendrick Bangs
... the Merchant Service, first appeared in the Metropolitan Magazine, 1832. It is one of the novels which specially suggests a comparison between Marryat and Smollett, both authors having described acts of impressment with vigour ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... 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 over ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... 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 ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... a mild deism. His politics, says Dr Johnson, were characterized by an "impetuous eagerness to subvert and confound, with very little care what shall be established,'' and he is caricatured in the republican doctor of Smollett's Peregrine Pickle. He was elected a member of the Medical Society of Edinburgh in 1740. His ambitions already lay outside his profession, and his gifts as a speaker made him hope one day to enter parliament. In 1740 he printed ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... stuff made from the part of the rice grain that is rubbed off in the polishing process. It does not look appetising. An easier thing would be to leave some of the coating on the rice. One thinks of what Smollett said of ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... 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. ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... thus read together many delightful French and English works, among which may be mentioned those of the learned Dr. Smollett, of the ingenious Mr. Henry Fielding, of the graceful and fantastic Monsieur Crebillon the younger, whom our immortal poet Gray so much admired, and of the universal Monsieur de Voltaire. Once, when Mr. Crawley asked what the young people were reading, the ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... institution for women, banks and other important commercial offices. Pop. (1891) 7796; (1901) 8007. Alexandria is connected with BONHILL, on the opposite bank of the river, by a bridge which replaced in 1898 one bought three years earlier by the county council from the Smollett family, who have been closely associated with the district since the time of Sir James Smollett, the novelist's grandfather. The industries of Bonhill centre in the calico printing, dyeing and bleaching which find their headquarters in the valley. ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... Henry H. Breen, a countryman of Mr. Arnold. In it I find examples of bad grammar and slovenly English from the pens of Sydney Smith, Sheridan, Hallam, Whately, Carlyle, Disraeli, Allison, Junius, Blair, Macaulay, Shakespeare, Milton, Gibbon, Southey, Lamb, Landor, Smollett, Walpole, Walker (of the dictionary), Christopher North, Kirk White, Benjamin Franklin, Sir Walter Scott, and Mr. Lindley ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... 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 "Queen's broad cutlash," and for ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... unable to identify; but when I looked hard at others I often found them to be very familiar to me, whether from paintings or from mere description. Thus between the first two speakers, who had betrayed themselves as Defoe and Smollett, there sat a dark, saturnine corpulent old man, with harsh prominent features, who I was sure could be none other than the famous author of Gulliver. There were several others of whom I was not so sure, sitting at the other side of the table, but I conjecture that both Fielding and Richardson ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... sir," returned Captain Smollett. "And I think I should have had the choosing of my own hands, if you ...
— Treasure Island • Robert Louis Stevenson
... defeat of Culloden, 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 over which the author of Roderick Random presided. ...
— English Satires • Various
... easy to see what Fielding proposed to himself 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 Wild is a pretty consistent picaresque satire, in which the ...
— The History of the Life of the Late Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great • Henry Fielding
... sinecurism and pluralities, fanatics in their Toryism and in attachment to their corporate privileges, cold, rationalistic and almost heathen in their preachings, if they preached at all. The society of the day is mirrored in the pictures of Hogarth, in the works of Fielding and Smollett; hard and heartless polish was the best of it; and not a little of it was Marriage a la Mode. Chesterfield, with his soulless culture, his court graces, and his fashionable immoralities, was about the highest type of an English gentleman; but the Wilkeses, Potters, ...
— Cowper • Goldwin Smith
... all—not even a novel as far as masque and domino are concerned,—though indirectly it touches another of George Sand's curious personal experiences—that with Chopin. Un Hiver a Majorque is perhaps the most ill-tempered book of travel, except Smollett's too famous production, ever written by a novelist of talent or genius. The Majorcans certainly did not ask George Sand to visit them. They did not advertise the advantages of Majorca, as is the fashion with "health resorts" nowadays. She ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... book of confessions penned without reticence and without penitence; a record of forty years of "occult" charlatanism; a collection of tales of successful imposture, of 'bonnes fortunes', of marvellous escapes, of transcendent audacity, told with the humour of Smollett and the delicate wit of Voltaire. Who is there interested in men and letters, and in the life of the past, who would not cry, "Where can such a book as this ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... 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 ...
— Poetical Works of Akenside - [Edited by George Gilfillan] • Mark Akenside
... true masters 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
... the passage so mutilated can easily be tested. The person who could play such tricks was ill suited for his profession, and being relieved of its restraints, he found a more congenial sphere of life among the unsettled crew of men of letters in London, over whom Smollett had just ceased to reign. He did a deal of hard work, and the world owes him at least one good turn in his translation of Cunningham's Latin History of Britain from the Revolution to the Hanover Succession. The value of this work, in the minute light thrown ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... 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 laid down in the Council of Trent. The Jansenists ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... though in very different fields of intellectual effort, have won for them no little distinction abroad. 'Sam Slick' may now be considered an English classic, new editions of which are still published from year to year and placed on the bookseller's shelves with the works of Fielding, Smollett, Butler and Barham. The sayings and doings of the knowing clockmaker were first published by Mr. Howe in the columns of the old Nova Scotia, still published as the weekly edition of the Halifax Chronicle, for the purpose of preserving some good stories and anecdotes of early colonial ...
— The Intellectual Development of the Canadian People • John George Bourinot
... 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 ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... them by merely writing their names on the register, which excludes them from a pension, to which they would be entitled if they behaved well for a certain number of years. The post-houses are often lone, wretched places, one into which I peeped, a grenier, like that described by Smollett, in which the murdered body is concealed. At another post-house we met with a woman calling herself a servante, to whom we took not only an aversion, but a horror; Charlotte said that she should be afraid, not of that woman's cutting her throat, ...
— The Life And Letters Of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... Smollett's version, published in 1755, may be almost counted as one of these. At any rate it is plain that in its construction Jervas's translation was very freely drawn upon, and very little or probably no heed ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... Vane, in Ireland. His "lady" was the too-celebrated Lady Vane, first married to Lord William Hamilton, and secondly to Lord Vane; who has given her own extraordinary and disreputable adventures to the world, in Smollett's novel of "Peregrine Pickle," under the title of "Memoirs of a Lady of Quality." She is also immortalized in different ways, by Johnson, in his ,Vanity of Human Wishes," and by Sir Charles Hanbury Williams, in one of his Odes.-D. [She was the daughter ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... in books is also fine, and it is peculiar. It is not the worse for a little idiosyncrasy. He does not go deep into the Scotch novels, but he is at home in Smollett and Fielding. He is little read in Junius or Gibbon, but no man can give a better account of Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, or Sir Thomas Brown's Urn-Burial, or Fuller's Worthies, or John Bunyan's Holy War. No one is more unimpressible to a specious declamation; no one relishes ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... the last century; for my father had been more than half a Jacobin, in the time when the French Republic cast its glare of promise over the world. Here, too, were the Queen Anne authors, his models, and the English novelists; but among them I found none that charmed me. Smollett, Fielding, and the like, deal too broadly with the coarse actualities of life. The best of their men and women—so merely natural, with the nature found every day—do not meet our hopes. Sometimes the simple picture, warm with life and the light of the common sun, cannot ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... he practises most frequently in his tragedies, the former in his comedies. The comic characters are, without mixture, loathsome and despicable. The men of Etherege and Vanbrugh are bad enough. Those of Smollett are perhaps worse. But they do not approach to the Celadons, the Wildbloods, the Woodalls, and the Rhodophils of Dryden. The vices of these last are set off by a certain fierce hard impudence, to which we know nothing comparable. Their love is the appetite of beasts; ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... 1797, had a great run in Boston, and his Algerine Captive, published in the same year, was one of the earliest American novels. It was a rambling tale of adventure, constructed somewhat upon the plan of Smollett's novels and dealing with the piracies which led to the war between the United States and ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... 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 ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... remembered, than in any household of the United Kingdom. The first warning of the troubles that were in store for him was an anonymous letter addressed to him as editor of the Christian Observer, defending works of fiction, and eulogising Fielding and Smollett. This he incautiously inserted in his periodical, and brought down upon himself the most violent objurgations from scandalised contributors, one of whom informed the public that he had committed the obnoxious number to the flames, and should thenceforward cease ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... 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, travelled over Europe in the hope of finding health, he saw everything through his own jaundiced eyes. "I'll tell it," said Smellfungus, "to the world." "You had better tell it," said Sterne, "to your physician." The restless, anxious, dissatisfied temper, ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... stately, and the 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 ...
— Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland A.D. 1803 • Dorothy Wordsworth
... you object to talk about inns? It always seems to me to be very good talk. Walter Scott is full of inns. In "Don Quixote" and "Gil Blas" there is plenty of inn-talk. Sterne, Fielding, and Smollett constantly speak about them; and, in their travels, the last two tot up the bill, and describe the dinner quite honestly; whilst Mr. Sterne becomes sentimental over a cab, and weeps generous tears ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... 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
... remembered 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 parents in Miss ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... told, "what ills from beauty spring," was not Lady Vane, the subject of Smollett's memoirs, in Peregrine Pickle, but, according to Mr. Malone, she was Anne Vane, mistress to Frederick prince of Wales, and died in 1736, not long before Johnson settled in London. Some account of her was published, ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... alike crawl to him—and this won him the admiration of Colley Cibber, who immortalized the scene in a sonnet. People liked Handel, or they did not, and among the Old Guard who stood by him, let these names, among others, be remembered: Colley Cibber, Gay, Arbuthnot, Pope, Hogarth, Fielding and Smollett. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... find these verses, sweet, gracious, and idiomatic as they are? The use of the word "felice" for "feliz" is a poetical license, and displays more than a stranger's knowledge of Spanish composition. It has been said that Smollett has left many French words in his translation of Gil Blas, and that too strong an inference ought not to be drawn from the employment of Spanish phrases by Le Sage. But what are the words? Are they words in the mouth of every one, and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... among his relatives the possibility that young Thomas might grow up into a prig; but, after all, what else could be expected from a child who, at the age of three, had been presented by his father, as a reward for proficiency in his studies, with the twenty-four volumes of Smollett's History ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... defended its sanctity more effectively than troops. Literature descended from her high altar to lend it dignity; and the long, silent library displayed row upon row of the masters, appropriately clad in morocco or calf,—Smollett, Macaulay, Gibbon, Richardson, Fielding, Scott, Dickens, Irving and Thackeray, as though each had striven for a tablet here. Art had denied herself that her canvases might be hung on these walls; and even the Church, on that first Sunday of my visit, forgot the blood ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... 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
... Smollett gives a good account of the Carthagena expedition in his "Roderick Random," and for a good satisfactory detail of the blundering Walcheren expedition the reader is referred to Harriet Martineau's "History of England," vol. i, pages ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... of its passages, besides, bear upon the writer's personal experiences, and serve to piece the imperfections of his biography. If it brought him no sudden wealth, it certainly raised his reputation with the book-selling world. A connexion already begun with Smollett's 'Critical Review' was drawn closer; and the shrewd Sosii of the Row began to see the importance of securing so vivacious and unconventional a pen. Towards the end of the year he was writing for Wilkie the collection of periodical essays ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... over, and had made the engine of his ambitious schemes. Schiller's early experience of a military life seems now to have stood him in good stead; his soldiers are delineated with the distinctness of actual observation; in rugged sharpness of feature, they sometimes remind us of Smollett's seamen. Here are all the wild lawless spirits of Europe assembled within the circuit of a single trench. Violent, tempestuous, unstable is the life they lead. Ishmaelites, their hands against every man, and every man's hand against them; ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... could turn from Grotius to Dickens, from Vattel to Thackeray. He could digest the points of the elaborate arguments of eminent counsel, and then turn aside to a gentle tonic from the administrating hand of Smollett or Walter Scott. Method was his master-key to all the combinations in the locks ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... country made it 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 ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... first intellects of the country were engaged on their National Encyclopaedia, and mighty was the mischief which they accomplished through its means; but works of this character in Britain were left to authors of a lower standing. Smollett once conducted a critical review; Gilbert Stuart an Edinburgh magazine; Dr. Johnson drew up parliamentary debates for two years together; Edmund Burke toiled at the pages of an Annual Register; and Goldsmith, ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... fanaticism! My guide at Leghorn conducted me to see the 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 Pere ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... 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 a 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. Further up the vale a farmer showed us an old mansion in the midst of a group of trees on the bank of the Leven, which he said belonged to Smollett—or Roderick Random, ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... 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 ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the room. Behind the glazed doors of the mahogany bookcase appeared Hume and Smollett, Scott and Shakespeare; and conspicuous among these a handsome family Bible. But the glazed doors were locked. In Mr. Sheldon's study there appeared to be no other books than these few standard works. Yes, on some obscure little shelves, low down in one of the recesses formed by the ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... book may be as foolish as to give one's self into the hands of an 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
... 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 key, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... a wish for my opinion of the work, which so flattered me, that nothing less would serve my overweening fancy, than a formal criticism on the book. In fact, I have gravely planned a comparative view of you, Fielding, Richardson, and Smollett, in your different qualities and merits as novel-writers. This, I own, betrays my ridiculous vanity, and I may probably never bring the business to bear; and I am fond of the spirit young Elihu shows in the book of Job—"And I said, I will also declare my opinion," I have quite disfigured my copy ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... 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 with which he was less ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray
... 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
... 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 with considerable aptitude quotations from ...
— The True George Washington [10th Ed.] • Paul Leicester Ford
... 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
... a testy but warm-hearted old gentleman, who imagines that he possesses a most angelic temper, and when he quarrels with his son, the captain, fancies it is the son who is out of temper, and not himself. Smollett's "Matthew Bramble" evidently suggested this character. William Dowton (1764-1851) was the best actor of ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... dining about two hours after noon. Sometimes we lounged on the floor of ferns, smoking, 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 ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... to serve as a foundation on which other historians may hereafter raise a noble superstructure, swelling in process of time, until Knickerbocker's New York may be equally voluminous with Gibbon's Rome, or Hume and Smollett's England! ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... to write them. I make but a poor figure at composition, my head is too fickle, my thoughts are running after birds eggs play and trifles, till I get vexed with myself. Mamma has a troublesome task to keep me steady, and I own I am ashamed of myself. I have but just entered the third volume of Smollett, tho' I had designed to have got it half through by this time. I have determined this week to be more diligent, as Mr. Thaxter will be absent at Court, and I cannot pursue my other studies. I have Set myself a Stent and determine to read the 3rd volume Half out. If I can but keep my resolution, ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... 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 ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... 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 ...
— Chelsea - The Fascination of London • G. E. (Geraldine Edith) Mitton
... 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 of ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... how it begins. It makes an American's enjoyment of England an emotion more searching than anything Continental. I had seen the coffee-room of the Red Lion years ago, at home—at Saragossa Illinois—in books, in visions, in dreams, in Dickens, in Smollett, in Boswell. It was small and subdivided into six narrow compartments by a series of perpendicular screens of mahogany, something higher than a man's stature, furnished on either side with a meagre uncushioned ledge, denominated in ancient Britain a seat. In each of these rigid receptacles ...
— A Passionate Pilgrim • Henry James
... an earlier age than usual, went to sea. The last was fortunate enough to have for his captain one of that new race of naval officers who, well educated and accomplished, form a notable contrast to the old heroes of Smollett. Percival, however, had not been long in the service before the deaths of his two elder brothers, preceded by that of his father, made him the head of his ancient house, and the sole prop of his mother's earthly hopes. He ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... early notice of this incursion, and 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 ancestor of ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... characters are drawn by themselves, was, at the middle of the last century, the monopoly of writers who required indecorum, such as Fielding and Smollett. All, or nearly all, which could be permitted to the young, was dry narrative, written by people who could not make their personages talk character; they all spoke {190} alike. The author of the Rambler[426] is ridiculed, because his young ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... thought it very funny; so were 'Evelina' and 'Cecilia.' I wanted to try Smollett and Fielding, after reading some fine essays about them, but Papa told me ...
— A Garland for Girls • Louisa May Alcott
... lay 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
... 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 of Commodore ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... 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 Richardson, recommended by grave divines from the ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... 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 We've battled ...
— The Path to Home • Edgar A. Guest
... 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. ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... problems on fly-leaves in his prayer-book during service, for I have repeatedly seen there his laborious calculations in minutely small figures; and he never opened his prayer-book but at church—as perhaps he thought, with the old woman of Smollett, that it was a species of impiety to study such works anywhere else. Whilst all this was going on in the back rows, Mr Root, in the full-blown glory of his Sunday paraphernalia, and well powdered, attended exclusively to the holiness and devout comportment ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... made to 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 ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... it was as much as anyone could do to edge in a word for Junius. Lamb could not bear 'Gil Blas;' this was a fault. I remember the greatest triumph I ever had was in persuading him, after some years' difficulty, that Fielding was better than Smollett. On one occasion he was for making out a list of persons famous in history that one would wish to see again, at the head of whom were Pontius Pilate, Sir Thomas Browne, and Dr. Faustus; but we black-balled most of his list. But with what a gusto he would ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... 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
... word of Rabelais and I am not in the least dismayed by Heine's impishness, but I have always found Fielding's and Smollett's grosser scenes difficult ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... modified. Sailors do not, as Smollett says they did in his day, regard Davy Jones as the fiend who presides over all the evil spirits of the deep, and who is seen in various shapes, warning the devoted wretches of death and woe. In fact, ...
— Storyology - Essays in Folk-Lore, Sea-Lore, and Plant-Lore • Benjamin Taylor
... backwards and forwards busy with the manifold cares of childhood, while all the time, to his Young Men gathered round him, he was thundering against the last book, or the last picture show, or the last new music, in language not unworthy of Defoe or Smollett, for Henley could call a spade not only a spade but a steam shovel when so minded. He could soar to the heights and dive to the depths in the ...
— Nights - Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... unavoidable, and merely participative progress, which any one class makes in sharing the general movement of the race. Thus, because the sailor, who to-day steers the Hibernia or Unicorn steam-ship across the Atlantic, is a somewhat different man from the exaggerated sailors of Smollett, and the men who fought with Nelson at Copenhagen, and survived to riot themselves away at North Corner in Plymouth;—because the modern tar is not quite so gross as heretofore, and has shaken off some of his shaggy jackets, ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... kindly replied to M.'s inquiry, has appended to his answer the following Query:—"Is Smollett justified in using the words assassin and assassinate, as applied to cases of intended homicide, when death ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 45, Saturday, September 7, 1850 • Various
... or who liked to talk about old authors or old books. In his love of books he was very catholic. "Shaftesbury is not too genteel, nor Jonathan Wild too low. But for books which are no books," such as "scientific treatises, and the histories of Hume, Smollett, and Gibbon," &c., he confesses that he becomes splenetic when he sees them perched up on shelves, "like false saints, who have usurped the true shrines" of the legitimate occupants. He loved old books and authors, indeed, ...
— Charles Lamb • Barry Cornwall
... fiction, believing that great characters like Jonathan Edwards and George Washington never read such naughty books when they were young. Let us see. Here is the "Adventures of Peregrine Pickle; in which are included the Memoirs of a Lady of Quality," by Tobias Smollett, in three volumes. On the title page of the first volume is the autograph of George Washington, written in the cramped hand of a boy of fourteen. The work shows more evidence of having been attentively read, even to the end of the ...
— Anti-Slavery Opinions before the Year 1800 - Read before the Cincinnati Literary Club, November 16, 1872 • William Frederick Poole
... history, and Adam Smith his wonderful work, which was to revolutionise and new-model the economy of all the governments of the earth. And there, in my little library, were the histories of Henry and Robertson, the philosophy of Kaimes and Reid, the novels of Smollett and Mackenzie, and the poetry of Beattie and Home. But, if there was no lack of Scottish intellect in the literature of the time, there was a decided lack of Scottish manners; and I knew too much of my humble countrymen not to regret it. True, I had before me the writings of Ramsay and my unfortunate ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume 2 - Historical, Traditional, and Imaginative • Alexander Leighton
... have 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 ...
— Days Off - And Other Digressions • Henry Van Dyke
... 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 residence of ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... were all 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, Clara Reeve, and Mrs. Radcliffe represented the Gothic romance. ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... essays form a whole, and a whole which has the interest of a novel. It must be remembered, too, that at that time no novel, giving a lively and powerful picture of the common life and manners of England, had appeared. Richardson was working as a compositor. Fielding was robbing birds' nests. Smollett was not yet born. The narrative, therefore, which connects together the Spectator's Essays, gave to our ancestors their first taste of an exquisite and untried pleasure. That narrative was indeed constructed with no art or labour. The events were such ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... other, the Duke of Newcastle was the most ridiculed. Every act of his life, every speech which he uttered, nay, almost every look and gesture, became instantly food for burlesque. All the scribblers of the empire, with some of the higher class, as Smollett, were pecking at him day by day; yet, in a Parliament where Chatham, with his powerful eloquence, Bedford with his subtle argument, Townshend with his wit, and the elder Fox with his indefatigable intrigue, were all contending for the mastery; this man, who seemed sometimes half-frenzied, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various
... the ode, and my point of getting the sack, you will be exactly in the situation of Davy in the farce, who stipulates for more wages, less work, and the key of the ale-cellar. I was greatly delighted with the circumstances of your investiture. It reminded me of the porters at Calais with Dr. Smollett's baggage, six of them seizing upon one small portmanteau, and bearing it in triumph to his lodgings. You see what it is to laugh at the superstitions of a gentleman-usher, as I think you do somewhere. 'The whirligig of Time ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... difficult no doubt," said one of the guests, "to frame any distinct conception of the dishes and the delicacies of a former age. If we dress them by such receits as remain, the result will always have something absurd in it, like the dinner which Smollett describes so humourously in his ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... "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 ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... or so of ink, and a 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 were ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... writers continually, and in the first-rate ones occasionally, you find an affectation of interest in mountains, clouds, and forests, yet whenever they write from their heart, you will find an utter absence of feeling respecting anything beyond gardens and grass. Examine, for instance, the novels of Smollett, Fielding, and Sterne, the comedies of Moliere, and the writings of Johnson and Addison, and I do not think you will find a single expression of true delight in sublime nature in any one of them. Perhaps Sterne's "Sentimental Journey," in its total absence ...
— Lectures on Architecture and Painting - Delivered at Edinburgh in November 1853 • John Ruskin
... own national morals in the last 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 ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... are? For instance, Art is allowed as much indecent license today as in earlier times —but the privileges of Literature in this respect have been sharply curtailed within the past eighty or ninety years. Fielding and Smollett could portray the beastliness of their day in the beastliest language; we have plenty of foul subjects to deal with in our day, but we are not allowed to approach them very near, even with nice and guarded forms of speech. But not so with Art. The brush may still deal freely with ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... the colony, to drive the slow cattle. He strode out in advance, and scarce felt the ground beneath his feet. The thermometer was at 28 degrees, yet his coat was only tied round his neck by the sleeves as he swept along all health, fire, manhood, love and hope. He marched this day like dear Smollett's lines, whose thoughts, though he had never heard them, ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... 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 ...
— Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs, Vol. 1 • George Boutwell
... his yachts, which were stationed in the Tower-quay, in readiness to convey him away, should the dreaded Highlanders, as it now began to be generally expected, march to London in a few days. The "moneyed corporations," according to Smollett, were all in the deepest dejection; they reflected that the Highlanders, of whom they had conceived a most terrible idea, were within four days' march of the capital; they anticipated a revolution ruinous to their own prosperity, and ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume III. • Mrs. Thomson
... 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 ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury
... Stevenson goes, the 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
... 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 hoped ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... commenced in this little work, a history to serve as a foundation on which other historians may hereafter raise a noble superstructure, swelling in process of time, until Knickerbocker's New York may be equally voluminous with Gibbon's Rome, or Hume and Smollett's England! ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... engineer of the young man, the stern, practical father grew utterly discouraged when he saw mathematics shelved for Smollett. Robert was then put to studying law with a ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... 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 some of his earlier lyrics ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... 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 ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... frequently, or with half the enthusiasm. About this period, also, I became acquainted with the works of Richardson, and those of Mackenzie—(whom in later years I became entitled to call my friend)—with Fielding, Smollett, and some others ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... introduced into fiction the now familiar figure of the British tar, in the persons of Tom Bowling and Commodore Trunnion, as Fielding had introduced, in Squire Western, the equally national type of the hard-swearing, deep-drinking, fox-hunting Tory squire. Both Fielding and Smollett were of the {209} hearty British "beef-and-beer" school; their novels are downright, energetic, coarse, and high-blooded; low life, physical life, runs riot through their pages—tavern brawls, the breaking of pates, and the off-hand courtship ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... took his find to Edinburgh and showed the translations to the men who earned the city Smollett's sobriquet, a "hotbed of genius": Robertson, fresh from the considerable success of his two volume History of Scotland (1759); Robert Fergusson, recently appointed professor of natural history at the University of Edinburgh; Lord Elibank, ...
— Fragments Of Ancient Poetry • James MacPherson
... eran los tiempos" (the weather was fine) said Cervantes, which words Smollett literally translated: "Happy were the times." Both meanings would ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 1 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... 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 ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... coute qu'il coute[Fr]; whatever may happen, if the worst come to the worst; come what may, happen what may, come what will; sink or swim; rain or shine. Phr. cela va sans dire[Fr]; there is -no question, - not a shadow of doubt; the die is cast &c. (necessity) 601; " facts are stubborn things " [Smollett]. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... of 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 ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... 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 for ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... the notes. The Allgemeine Litteratur Zeitung[30] devotes a long review chiefly to the explanation of the errors in this volume, not the least striking of which is the explanation of the reference to Smelfungus, whom everyone knows to have been Smollett: "This learned Smelfungus appears to have written nothing but the Journey which is here mentioned."[31] As an explanation of the initial "H" used by Sterne for Hume, the note is given, "The author 'H' ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... he do with it?'" (which was the last he had then written). "A 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, Anthony Trollope, seem ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... one 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
... learned! Happy? "No. I am afraid I shall some day get crazy." William Hazlitt, the great essayist! Happy? "No. I have been for two hours and a half going up and down Paternoster Row with a volcano in my breast." Smollett, the witty author! Happy? "No. I am sick of praise and blame, and I wish to God that I had such circumstances around me that I could throw my pen into oblivion." Buchanan, the world-renowned writer, exiled from his own country, appealing to Henry VIII. for protection! Happy? "No. Over mountains ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... love to write them. I make but a poor figure at composition, my head is much too fickle, my thoughts are running after birds' eggs, play and trifles till I get vexed with myself. I have but just entered the 3d volume of Smollett, tho' I had designed to have got it half through by this time. I have determined this week to be more diligent, as Mr. Thaxter will be absent at Court and I Cannot pursue my other Studies. I have Set myself a Stent and determine to read the 3d volume Half out. If I can but (p. 004) keep ...
— John Quincy Adams - American Statesmen Series • John. T. Morse
... gentleman in Chaucer, Paragot had over "his beddes hedde" a shelf of books to which, careless creature that he was, he did not dream of denying me access. In that attic in Tavistock Street I read Smollett and Byron and somehow spelt through "Nana." I also found there the De Imitatione Christi, which I read with much the same enjoyment as I did the others. You must not think this priggish of me. The impressionable ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke |
