contradictory elements of life in something like their right proportions.
If obscenity and ferocity are found in his fourth novel, they are no
longer found in a disproportionate degree.

There is little more to say of Sir Launcelot Greaves, except in the way
of literary history. The given name of the hero may or may not be
significant. It is safe to say that if a Sir Launcelot had appeared in
fiction one or two generations earlier, had the fact been recognised
(which is not indubitable) that he bore the name of the most celebrated
knight of later Arthurian romance, he would have been nothing but a
burlesque figure. But in 1760, literary taste was changing. Romanticism
in literature had begun to come to the front again, as Smollett had
already shown by his romantic leanings in Count Fathom. With it there
came interest in the Middle Ages and in the most popular fiction of the
Middle Ages, the "greatest of all poetic subjects," according to
Tennyson, the stories of Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table,
which, for the better part of a century, had been deposed from their
old-time place of honour. These stories, however, were as yet so
imperfectly known--and only to a few--that the most to be said is that
some connection between their reviving popularity and the name of
Smollett's knight-errant hero is not impossible.

Apart from this, Sir Launcelot Greaves is interesting historically as
ending Smollett's comparatively long silence in novel-writing after the
publication of Fathom in 1753. His next work was the translation of Don
Quixote, which he completed in 1755, and which may first have suggested
the idea of an English knight, somewhat after the pattern of the Spanish.
Be that as it may, before developing the idea, Smollett busied himself
with his Complete History of England, and with the comedy, The Reprisal:
or the Tars of Old England, a successful play which at last brought about