developed, or you can pay no man a higher compliment than to call him a Good Buffalo. For consider what, in Fielding's case, is comprehended in the term. Here is a man brave, generous, kind to the nth degree; a man with a great hatred of meanness and hypocrisy, and a strong regard for all Forms of virtus, whether natural and impulsive or an effect of culture and reflection; an impassioned lover, a devout husband, a most cordial and careful father; so staunch a friend that his books are so many proofs of his capacity for friendship; of so sound a heart, of so vigorous a temperament, of so clear-eyed and serene a spirit, that years and calamities and disease do not exist for him, and he takes his leave of the World in one of the most valiant and most genial little books that ever was penned; distinguished among talkers by a delightful gaiety, a fine and gracious understanding, an inalienable dignity; withal of an intelligence at once so vigilant and so penetrating, at once so observant and so laborious and exacting, that, without hurry as without noise, patient ever and ever diligent, a master of life, a master of character, a master of style, he achieved for us the four great books we have, and, in achieving them, did so nobly by his nation and his mother tongue that he that would praise our splendid, all-comprehending speech aright has said the best he can of it when he says that it is the speech of Shakespeare and Fieldunfit for print. One of the Hunters-John, I think-was a chief witness for the defence; and in the course of his evidence he noted that he had seen such a case before; at Bow St., 'in Harry Fielding's time.' I am sure of the quotation, though I have forgot the speaker's Christian name.

ing. If to be a Good Buffalo be all that (and in Harry Fielding's case it is all that, and more)why, then, I can't help wishing that the breed were more prolific; and even that M. Henri Taine had himself belonged to it.

Great Books.

I shall say nothing about the four great books, for The Four the very simple reason that everything there is to say about them has been said. Like Dickens's work, and Scott's, but, as is inevitable and natural, to a still greater extent, as yet they are as essential a component in the mighty fabric of our Literature as the plays and poems of Shakespeare, or the poetry of Spenser and Milton, and Gibbon and John Bunyan, and Defoe's half-failures, and Mr. Boswell's biography. And when I say that to consider them in all their stately shapeliness of plan, their admirable completeness of structure, their reasoned prodigality of detail and adornment: is for me about the same, neither more nor less, than considering St. Paul's, which I esteem the piece of architecture the nearest to perfection these eyes of mine have seen, it will be apprehended, I hope, that I keep not silence out of irreverence. But everybody worth mentioning-(as Lady Mary, Gibbon, Gray, Scott, Coleridge, Byron, Thackeray, Dickens, George Eliot, Sir Leslie Stephen, Mr. Lang, Mr. Austin Dobson, Mr. Saintsbury,1) has spoken: and

1 Whose notes on Fielding are edifying and sagacious in no mean degree: especially the passages in which he deals with Mr. Jones's relations to Lady Bellaston, and seeks to explain Dr. Johnson's dislike of Fielding. Thackeray's view was distorted and obscured by the fact that (a) he was so terrible a Sentimentalist that he thought Amelia Sedley and Laura Bell ideals for which to live and die; (b) that he considered Fielding the Man a most improper Person; and (c) that he

why should I essay to say something new and convincing after these? 'Tis enough that, as I think, Harry Fielding was a great and good man; who also, by premeditation and design, laboriously created an Art, and created it in such terms, and to such a purpose, that none has practised it since his time but must have worked and written differently if this immortal Master had not written and worked before him.

envied Fielding the Artist his chances, would have liked to make a real Man, as Fielding had done, and could do nothing better than the ingenuous Pendennis. Scott is, as they say, 'all right as far as he goes'; but he goes not very far, and, as I have said, he frankly prefers Smollett before Fielding, even to the extent of making the Englishman pick a quarrel with the Scot, and so completely falsifying history; the fact being, of course, that Smollett: who, take him all round, was a worse case of megalomania than Richardson himself: began by grossly insulting Fielding and his friend Lyttelton in the First edition of Peregrine Pickle, and went on to produce the really infamous pamphlet in which (1752) he professed to give an account of the strange and dreadful madness of one Habakkuk Hilding, 'trading justice and chapman.' Another critic, whose identity I will not discover, goes so far, in the vain endeavour to be original (an endeavour which hath made him eminently individual in the matter of facts and dates), as to ask if Amelia be not 'a little dull'? I will close this note by owning that Thackeray, if he, whether wilfully or stupidly, misunderstood and mis-stated the Man, was in absolute sympathy with the Writer, and that his eulogy of Fielding (in The English Humourists) is the most eloquent and the best

there is.

SMOLLETT

THE life of Smollett has been written by several His biographers hands in several styles: in the classic vein by his friend and imitator Dr. Moore, whose Zeluco, now almost unreadable, was long renowned as moving and most dangerous work; by Walter Scott, who, taking his author, as he took most things,

Like a gentleman at ease,

With moral breadth of temperament,

produced a note on him that, despite a patriotism which makes the writer often take bladders for lanterns, none who wishes to esteem his Smollett can afford to leave unread; by Mr. David Hannay, whose little book is of peculiar value and interest to those who would know what was the Navy in which Smollett observed the originals of his most famous creations. There are others, notably Robert Chambers and an anonymous Quarterly Reviewer. But I think that any one who reads

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1I can imagine no more useful summary of Smollett's adventures and capacities than that contributed by Mr. T. Seccombe in the Dictionary of National Biography: this, though I think that Mr. Seccombe is, like Scott, to his hero's faults a little blind, and to his hero's virtues rather kinder than he ought to be.

these three, and supplements his reading with Smollett passim, need read no more to be able to figure the man as he was. I purpose, then, to give but the briefest outline of the career, and to keep as close to the man-the humorous, arrogant, redheaded, stiff-necked, thin-skinned, scurrilous, brilliant, Scots hack of genius-as his novels will let me.

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His boyhood. It is said that Roderick Random is largely an autobiography. If this be so-and it is scarce credible -then must Smollett have had a most bitter boyhood: a boyhood, truly, which would go far to account for the high-handed, hard-hitting, indiscriminating insolence and aggressiveness of his later years. By his own showing, he was hated by his grandfather, and by his cousins bullied into ferocity; all because his father had married out of his station, and by so doing had secured the lasting displeasure of his own progenitor, and the immitigable hate and scorn of his time-serving kinsfolk. There is very little of all this in what is actually known of Smollett's life. He came of a house which, though in nowise ancient,' was in every sense respectable; 1 and his grandfather, Sir James of Bonhill-sometime a judge in the Commissary Court, often returned to the old Scots Parliament, a commissioner for the effecting of the Union between the Kingdoms-was by way of being a distinguished man.

His house.

1 He was a gentleman of coat-armour, and in France would have been counted noble.'-HANNAY, Smollett (1887), p. 1.

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