and fertility of mind. "Sure I," said Gray, in a letter to Mason, "am
something a better judge than all the man-midwives and presbyterian
parsons that ever were born. Pray give me leave to ask you, do you find
yourself tickled with the commendations of such people? (for you have
your share of these too) I dare say not; your vanity has certainly a
better taste. And can then the censure of such critics move you?" And
Warburton, who had probably been exasperated in the same way, called his
History of England the nonsense of a vagabond Scot.

In the same year was published a Compendium of Authentic and
Entertaining Voyages, in seven volumes, which was said to have been made
under his superintendence. We have his own word [3], that he had written
a very small part of it. In 1757, his Reprisal, or the Tars of Old
England, an entertainment in two acts, in which the scene throughout is
laid on board ship, and which describes seamen in his usual happy vein,
was acted at Drury-lane with tolerable success. In 1758, he published
his History of England from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Treaty
of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748, four volumes. Of this work, hasty as it was,
having been compiled in fourteen months, ten thousand copies were
speedily sold.

Some strictures in the Critical Review, which, in order to screen the
printer of it, he generously avowed himself to have written, once more
exposed him to a legal prosecution. The offensive passages were
occasioned by a pamphlet, in which Admiral Knowles had vindicated
himself from some reflections that were incidentally cast on him in the
course of Sir John Mordaunt's trial for the failure of a secret
expedition on the coast of France, near Rochefort. In his comments on
the pamphlet, Smollett had stigmatized Knowles, the author of it, as "an
admiral without conduct, an engineer without knowledge, an officer