without resolution, and a man without veracity." It can scarcely be
wondered, if, after such provocation, the party injured was not deterred
by menaces, or diverted by proposals of agreement, from seeking such
reparation as the law would afford him. This reparation the law did not
fail to give; and Smollett was sentenced to pay a penalty of one hundred
pounds, and to be confined for three months in the prison of the King's
Bench. Cervantes wrote his Don Quixote in a gaol; and Smollett resolved,
since he was now in one, that he would write a Don Quixote too. It maybe
said of the Spaniard, according to Falstaff's boast, "that he is not
only witty in himself, but the cause that wit is in other men;" and
among the many attempts at imitation, to which the admirable original
has given rise, Sir Launcelot Greaves is not one of the worst. That a
young man, whose brain had been slightly affected by a disappointment in
love, should turn knight-errant, at a time when books of chivalry were
no longer in vogue, is not, indeed, in the first instance, very
probable. But we are contented to overlook this defect in favour of the
many original touches of character, and striking views of life,
particularly in the mad-house, and the prison into which he leads his
hero, and which he has depicted with the force of Hogarth. If my
recollection does not mislead me, he will be found in some parts of this
novel to have had before him the Pharsamond of Marivaux, another copy of
Cervantes. But it does not anywhere like Count Fathom, betray symptoms
of being a mere translation. Sir Launcelot Greaves was first printed
piecemeal in the British Magazine, or Monthly Repository, a miscellany
to which Goldsmith was also a contributor. It has the recommendation of
being much less gross and indelicate than any other of his novels.

During the same period, 1761 and 1762, he published, in numbers, four
volumes of a Continuation of his History of England; and in 1765, a
fifth, which brought it down to that time.