ously. You see somehow that he is a gentleman, through all his battling and struggling, his poverty, his hard-fought successes, and his defeats. His novels are recollections of his own adventures; his characters drawn, as I should think, from personages with whom he became acquainted in his own career of life. Strange companions he must have had; queer acquaintances he made in the Glasgow College—in the country apothecary's shop; in the gun-room of the man-of-war where he served as surgeon, and in the hard life on shore, where the sturdy adventurer struggled for fortune. He did not invent much, as I fancy, but had the keenest perceptive faculty, and
Three months' imprisonment in the King's Bench avenged this stinging paragraph.
But the "Critical" was to Smollett a perpetual fountain of "hot water," Among less important controversies may be mentioned that with Grainger, the translator of "Tibullus." Grainger replied in a pamphlet; and in the next number of the "Review" we find him threatened with "castigation," as an "owl that has broken from his mew!"
In Dr. Moore's biography of him, is a pleasant anecdote. After publishing the "Don Quixote," he returned to Scotland to pay a visit to his mother:—
"On Smollett's arrival, he was introduced to his mother with the connivance of Mrs. Telfer (her daughter), as a gentleman from the West Indies, who was intimately acquainted with her son. The better to support his assumed character, he endeavoured to preserve a serious countenance, approaching to a frown; but while his mother's eyes were riveted on his countenance, he could not refrain from smiling: she immediately sprung from her chair, and throwing her arms round his neck, exclaimed, 'Ah, my son! my son! I have found you at last!'
"She afterwards told him, that if he had kept his austere looks and
