In the meantime let us look a little more closely into the
special and somewhat exceptional conditions under which the
Travel Letters of Smollett were produced. Smollett, as we have
seen, was one of the first professional men of all work in
letters upon a considerable scale who subsisted entirely upon the
earnings of his own pen. He had no extraneous means of support.
He had neither patron, pension, property, nor endowment,
inherited or acquired. Yet he took upon himself the burden of a
large establishment, he spent money freely, and he prided himself
upon the fact that he, Tobias Smollett, who came up to London
without a stiver in his pocket, was in ten years' time in a
position to enact the part of patron upon a considerable scale to
the crowd of inferior denizens of Grub Street. Like most people
whose social ambitions are in advance of their time, Smollett
suffered considerably on account of these novel aspirations of
his. In the present day he would have had his motor car and his
house on Hindhead, a seat in Parliament and a brief from the
Nation to boot as a Member for Humanity. Voltaire was the only
figure in the eighteenth century even to approach such a
flattering position, and he was for many years a refugee from his
own land. Smollett was energetic and ambitious enough to start in
rather a grand way, with a large house, a carriage, menservants,
and the rest. His wife was a fine lady, a "Creole" beauty who had
a small dot of her own; but, on the other hand, her income was
very precarious, and she herself somewhat of a silly and an
incapable in the eyes of Smollett's old Scotch friends. But to
maintain such a position--to keep the bailiffs from the door from
year's end to year's end--was a truly Herculean task in days when
a newspaper "rate" of remuneration or a well-wearing copyright
did not so much as exist, and when Reviews sweated their writers