who can stand beside Greaves in never failing to be a gentleman. It
is a pity, when Greaves's character is so lovable, and save for his
knight-errantry, so well conceived, that the image is not more distinct.
Crowe is distinct enough, however, though not quite consistently drawn.
There is justice in Scott's objection [Tobias Smollett in Biographical
and Critical Notices of Eminent Novelists] that nothing in the seaman's
"life . . . renders it at all possible that he should have caught" the
baronet's Quixotism. Otherwise, so far from finding fault with the old
sailor, we are pleased to see Smollett returning in him to a favourite
type. It might be thought that he would have exhausted the possibilities
of this type in Bowling and Trunnion and Pipes and Hatchway. In point
of fact, Crowe is by no means the equal of the first two of these. And
yet, with his heart in the right place, and his application of sea terms
to land objects, Captain Samuel Crowe has a good deal of the rough charm
of his prototypes. Still more distinct, and among Smollett's personages
a more novel figure, is the Captain's nephew, the dapper, verbose,
tender-hearted lawyer, Tom Clarke. Apart from the inevitable Smollett
exaggeration, a better portrait of a softish young attorney could hardly
be painted. Nor, in enumerating the characters of Sir Launcelot Greaves
who fix themselves in a reader's memory, should Tom's inamorata, Dolly,
be forgotten, or the malicious Ferret, or that precious pair, Justice and
Mrs. Gobble, or the Knight's squire, Timothy Crabshaw, or that very
individual horse, Gilbert, whose lot is to be one moment caressed, and
the next, cursed for a "hard-hearted, unchristian tuoad."

Barring the Gobbles, all these characters are important in the book from
first to last. Sir Launcelot Greaves, then, is significant among
Smollett's novels, as indicating a reliance upon the personages for
interest quite as much as upon the adventures. If the author failed in a
similar intention in Fathom, it was not through lack of clearly conceived