SECOND HALF OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.

NOVELISTS AND HISTORIANS.

WRITERS ON THEOLOGY, PHILOSOPHY, SCIENCE, POLITICS, AND LAW.

CHAPTER XV.

SECOND HALF OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: HISTORIANS, BIOGRAPHERS, ESSAYISTS, NOVELISTS, AND PHILOSOPHERS.

1. Tobias Smollett.-2. Laurence Sterne.-3. Joseph Warton; Thomas Warton.4. Richard Hurd.-5. Horace Walpole; Lady Mary Montague.-6. Samuel Johnson.-7. David Hume.-8. William Robertson; Edward Gibbon.-9. Thomas Reid.-10. Adam Smith; Sir William Blackstone.-11. Edmund Burke.-12. William Paley.-13. Joseph Priestley; Thomas Paine; Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin.-14. Sir Joshua Reynolds; Gilbert White; Edmund Malone; Anna Seward; Hannah More; Henry Mackenzie; Frances Burney; Sophia and Harriet Lee; William Beckford; Clara Reeve; Ann Radcliffe. 1. Tobias Smollett, born in 1721, in the parish of Cardross, was left dependent on his grandfather, Sir James Smollett, of Bonhill, was sent to school at Dumbarton, where he wrote satirical verse, and a poem on Wallace, went from Dumbarton to Glasgow, where he studied medicine and was apprenticed to a surgeon, the Potion of his first novel. He came to London with a tragedy, "The Regicide," written before he was eighteen. It was rejected by managers, but several years afterwards was published with a preface. In 1741, when "Pamela" was a new book, Smollett, aged twenty, was surgeon's mate on board a ship of the line, and sailed in the expedition to Carthagena. This experience of life was also used as material for his first novel. He quitted the service when in the West Indies, lived some time in Jamaica, and met the lady whom he afterwards married. He was back in London in 1746, and then published anonymously "The Tears of Scotland," expressing from his heart, though no Jacobite, his just indignation at the cruelties that disgraced the suppression of the Rebellion of 1745; also "Advice," a satire which gave offence. He wrote "Alceste," an opera, for Covent Garden, quarrelled with the manager, published in 1747 "Reproof," a sequel to " Advice," married, and produced in 1748,

when his age was twenty-seven, his first novel, "The Adventures of Roderick Random." This work, written in the form of autobiography, was a bright story, rich in mirth and a quick sense of outside character, that painted life as Smollett had seen it, blending his own experiences with his fiction. became immediately popular, and helped much in establishing the new form of fiction in which writers dealt immediately with the life of their own time, and the experience in it of common men and women.

It

In 1750 he graduated as physician, at Marischal College, Aberdeen, but was a doctor with few patients. In the summer of 1750 he visited Paris, and probably wrote there his "Peregrine Pickle," published in 1751. Its brightness, and the hearty fun of many of its chapters, like that which describes an entertainment in the manner of the ancients, made the book widely popular, and Smollett famous. This book was followed, in 1753, by a study of depravity in an adventurer chosen from the purlieus of treachery and fraud, the "Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom." In 1755 he published a free translation of "Don Quixote," then visited his mother and friends in Scotland, and, when he came back, accepted the invitation of booksellers to edit the "Critical Review," set up in 1756, to oppose the Whig "Monthly Review," that had been started in 1749. Smollett was genial, but irritable, and now submitted himself to vexation by the irritable race of the small authors. At this time Smollett began "A complete History of England, deduced from the Descent of Julius Cæsar to the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, 1748, containing the Transactions of One Thousand Eight Hundred and Three Years." He is said to have written it in fourteen months. It was published in four volumes in 1757-58, and reprinted afterwards in numbers, extending to cleven volumes, with a weekly sale of twelve thousand. For a paragraph in the "Critical Review" Smollett was fined a hundred pounds, and imprisoned for three months, at the suit of Admiral Knowles, and worked in prison at "The Adventures of Sir Lancelot Greaves," an imitation of Cervantes, published in the "British Magazine" in 1760 and 1761. Smollett then worked at the "Continuation of the His

tory of England" to 1765, published in 1769, in two volumes. After the loss of his only child, Smollett had travelled for health, and in 1766 he published his "Travels through France and Italy." In 1769 appeared his "Adventures of an Atom," dealing, under Japanese names, with English politics, from 1754 to 1768. In 1770 he went to Italy with broken health, and while there published, only a few months before his death, his last, and perhaps his best novel, "The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker." Smollett died, at the age of fifty, near Leghorn, in October, 1771.

2. Laurence Sterne (b. 1713, d. 1768), grandson of Richard Sterne, Archbishop of York, and son of Lieutenant Sterne in a marching regiment, was born at Clonmel barracks. After education at Halifax in Yorkshire, and at Jesus College, Cambridge, he obtained, in 1738, the vicarage of Sutton, near York, and in 1741 a prebend in York Minster, with a house in Stonegate. In that year Sterne married. The first two volumes of "Tristram Shandy" were published at York, in December, 1759, witty and whimsical, suiting the spirit of the time in their defiance of convention, and sometimes of decency. Their success brought Sterne to London, and he thenceforth weakly sacrificed himself to the shallow flatteries of London society. The second edition of this part of "Tristram Shandy" was followed at once by two volumes of the "Sermons of Mr. Yorick." Oliver Goldsmith, in his "Citizen of the World," condemned Sterne's affectations of freedom in dashes and breaks, with the worst license of indelicacy, and was so far displeased by the superficial tricks of the book that he was unjust to the true genius of the writer, and missed the charm of his Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim. In 1761 appeared the third and fourth volumes of "Tristram Shandy; in 1762, the fifth and sixth; in 1765, the seventh and eighth ; in 1767, the ninth and last. In 1768, after a visit to France and Italy, appeared Sterne's "Sentimental Journey," of which the style reminds us that 1761 and 1762 were the dates of the chief sentimental writings of Rousseau. In the same year Sterne died, on the 13th of September, at lodgings in Bond Street, with no friend near; the only sign of human affection