battlement, the door was opened by the sexton, who, by the light of a
glimmering taper, conducted the despairing lover to a dreary aisle, and
stamped upon the ground with his foot, saying, 'Here the young lady lies
interred.'"

We have here such an amount of the usual romantic machinery of the
"grave-yard" school of poets--that school of which Professor W. L. Phelps
calls Young, in his Night Thoughts, the most "conspicuous exemplar"--
that one is at first inclined to think Smollett poking fun at it. The
context, however, seems to prove that he was perfectly serious. It is
interesting, then, as well as surprising, to find traces of the romantic
spirit in his fiction over ten years before Walpole's Castle of Otranto.
It is also interesting to find so much melodramatic feeling in him,
because it makes stronger the connection between him and his
nineteenth-century disciple, Dickens.

From all that I have said, it must not be thought that the usual Smollett
is always, or almost always, absent from Count Fathom. I have spoken of
the dedication and of the opening chapters as what we might expect from
his pen. There are, besides, true Smollett strokes in the scenes in the
prison from which Melvil rescues Fathom, and there is a good deal of the
satirical Smollett fun in the description of Fathom's ups and downs,
first as the petted beau, and then as the fashionable doctor. In
chronicling the latter meteoric career, Smollett had already observed the
peculiarity of his countrymen which Thackeray was fond of harping on in
the next century--"the maxim which universally prevails among the English
people . . . to overlook, . . . on their return to the metropolis,
all the connexions they may have chanced to acquire during their
residence at any of the medical wells. And this social disposition is
so scrupulously maintained, that two persons who live in the most