Connoisseur" is facetiously proposing to establish a factory for
the fashioning of novels, with one, a master workman, to furnish
plots and subordinates to fill in the details--an anticipation
of the famous literary menage of Dumas pere.

Although there was, under these conditions, inevitable imitation
of the new model, there was a deeper reason for the rapid
development. The time was ripe for this kind of fiction: it was
in the air, as we have already tried to suggest. Hence, other
fiction-makers began to experiment with the form, this being
especially true of Smollett. Out of many novelists, feeble or
truly called, a few of the most important must be mentioned.


I

The Scotch-born Tobias Smollett published his first fiction,
"Roderick Random," eight years after "Pamela" had appeared, and
the year before "Tom Jones"; it was exactly contemporaneous with
"Clarissa Harlowe," A strict contemporary, then, with Richardson
and Fielding, he was also the ablest novelist aside from them, a
man whose work was most influential in the later development. It
is not unusual to dismiss him in a sentence as a coarser
Fielding. The characterization hits nearer the bull's eye than
is the rule with such sayings, and more vulgar than the greater
writer he certainly is, brutal where Fielding is vigorous: and
he exhibits and exaggerates the latter's tendencies to the
picaresque, the burlesque and the episodic. His fiction is of
the elder school in its loose fiber, its external method of
dealing with incident and character. There is little or nothing