Travels through France and Italy by Tobias George Smollett
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page 23 of 476 (04%)
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some very interesting additional notes upon the buildings of
Pisa, upon Sir John Hawkwood's tomb at Florence, and upon the congenial though recondite subject of antique Roman hygiene. [Cf. the Dinner in the manner of the Ancients in Peregrine Pickle, (xliv.) and Letters IX. to XL in Humphry Clinker.] After Smollett's death his books were for the most part sold for the benefit of his widow. No use was made of his corrigenda. For twenty years or so the Travels were esteemed and referred to, but as time went on, owing to the sneers of the fine gentlemen of letters, such as Walpole and Sterne, they were by degrees disparaged and fell more or less into neglect. They were reprinted, it is true, either in collective editions of Smollett or in various collections of travels; [For instance in Baldwin's edition of 1778; in the 17th vol. of Mayor's Collection of Voyages and Travels, published by Richard Phillips in twenty-eight vols., 1809; and in an abbreviated form in John Hamilton Moore's New and Complete Collection of Voyages and Travels (folio, Vol. 11. 938-970).] but they were not edited with any care, and as is inevitable in such cases errors crept in, blunders were repeated, and the text slightly but gradually deteriorated. In the last century Smollett's own copy of the Travels bearing the manuscript corrections that he had made in 1770, was discovered in the possession of the Telfer family and eventually came into the British Museum. The second volume, which affords admirable specimens of Smollett's neatly written marginalia, has been exhibited in a show-ease in the King's Library. The corrections that Smollett purposed to make in the Travels are |
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