impertinent. With this last class of delinquents after much
experience he was bound to admit the following dilemma:--If you
chide them for lingering, they will contrive to delay you the
longer. If you chastise them with sword, cane, cudgel, or
horsewhip (he defines the correctives, you may perceive, but
leaves the expletives to our imagination) they will either
disappear entirely, and leave you without resource, or they will
find means to take vengeance by overturning your carriage. The
only course remaining would be to allow oneself to become the
dupe of imposition by tipping the postillions an amount slightly
in excess of the authorized gratification. He admits that in
England once, between the Devizes and Bristol, he found this plan
productive of the happiest results. It was unfortunate that, upon
this occasion, the lack of means or slenderness of margin for
incidental expenses should have debarred him from having recourse
to a similar expedient. For threepence a post more, as Smollett
himself avows, he would probably have performed the journey with
much greater pleasure and satisfaction. But the situation is
instructive. It reveals to us the disadvantage under which the
novelist was continually labouring, that of appearing to travel
as an English Milord, en grand seigneur, and yet having at every
point to do it "on the cheap." He avoided the common conveyance
or diligence, and insisted on travelling post and in a berline;
but he could not bring himself to exceed the five-sou pourboire
for the postillions. He would have meat upon maigre days, yet
objected to paying double for it. He held aloof from the thirty-sou
table d'hote, and would have been content to pay three francs
a head for a dinner a part, but his worst passions were roused
when he was asked to pay not three, but four. Now Smollett
himself was acutely conscious of the false position. He was by