under thoughtful brows. We seem to be getting not so much scenes
of life as an author's setting of the scene for his own private
reasons. Such is at least the occasional effect of Smollett.
Also is there more of bitterness, of savagery in him: and where
Fielding was broad and racily frank in his handling of delicate
themes, this fellow is indecent with a kind of hardness and
brazenness which are amazing. The difference between plain-speaking
and unclean speaking could hardly be better
illustrated. It should be added, in justice, that even Smollett
is rarely impure with the alluring saliency of certain modern
fiction.

In the first story, "The Adventures of Roderick Random" (the
cumbrous full titles of earlier fiction are for apparent reasons
frequently curtailed in the present treatment), published when
the author was twenty-seven, he avails himself of a residence of
some years in Jamaica to depict life in that quarter of the
world at a time when the local color had the charm of novelty.
The story is often credited with being autobiographic, as a
novelist's first book is likely to be; since, by popular belief,
there is one story in all of us, namely, our own. Its
description of the hero's hard knocks does, indeed, suggest the
fate of a man so stormily quarrelsome throughout his days: for
this red-headed Scot, this "hack of genius," as Henley
picturesquely calls him, was naturally a fighting man and,
whether as man or author, attacks or repels sharply: there is
nothing uncertain in the effect he makes. His loud vigor is as
pronounced as that of a later Scot like Carlyle; yet he stated
long afterward that the likeness between himself and Roderick
was slight and superficial. The fact that the tale is written in