It was not till 1752 that Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, in Italy, received "Peregrine," with other fashionable romances--"Pompey the Little," "The Parish Girl," "Eleanora's Adventures," "The Life of Mrs. Theresa Constantia Phipps," "The Adventures of Mrs. Loveil,"and so on. Most of them contained portraits of real people, and, no doubt, most of them were therefore successful. But where are they now? Lady Mary thought Lady Vane's part of "Peregrine" "more instructive to young women than any sermon that I know." She regarded Fielding as with Congreve, the only "original" of her age, but Fielding had to write for bread, and that is "the most contemptible way of getting bread." She did not, at this time, even know Smollett's name, but she admired him, and, later, calls him "my dear Smollett." This lady thought that Fielding did not know what sorry fellows his Tom Jones and Captain Booth were. Not near so sorry as Peregine Pickle were they, for this gentleman is a far more atrocious ruffian than Roderick Random.
None the less "Peregrine" is Smollett's greatest work. Nothing is so rich in variety of character, scene, and adventure. We are carried along by the swift and copious volume of the current, carried into very queer places, and into the oddest miscellaneous company, but we cannot escape from Smollett's vigorous grasp. Sir Walter thought that "Roderick" excelled its successor in "ease and simplicity," and that Smollett's sailors, in "Pickle," "border on caricature." No doubt they do: the eccentricities of Hawser Trunnion, Esq., are exaggerated, and Pipes is less subdued than Rattlin, though always delightful. But Trunnion absolutely makes one laugh out aloud: whether he is criticising the sister of Mr.
Gamaliel Pickle in that gentleman's presence, at a pot-house; or riding to the altar with his squadron of sailors, tacking in an unfavourable gale; or being run away into a pack of hounds, and clearing a hollow road over a waggoner, who views him with "unspeakable terror and amazement." Mr. Winkle as an equestrian is not more entirely acceptable to the mind than Trunnion. We may speak of "caricature," but if an author can make us sob with laughter, to criticise him solemnly is ungrateful.
Except Fielding occasionally, and Smollett, and Swift, and Sheridan, and the authors of "The Rovers," one does not remember any writers of the eighteenth century who quite upset the gravity of the reader. The scene of the pedant's dinner after the manner of the ancients, does not seem to myself so comic as the adventures of Trunnion, while the bride is at the altar, and the bridegroom is tacking and veering with his convoy about the fields. One sees how the dinner is done: with a knowledge of Athenaeus, Juvenal, Petronius, and Horace, many men could have written this set piece.
But Trunnion is quite inimitable: he is a child of humour and of the highest spirits, like Mr. Weller the elder. Till Scott created Mause Headrig, no Caledonian had ever produced anything except "Tam o' Shanter," that could be a pendant to Trunnion. His pathos is possibly just a trifle overdone, though that is not my own opinion.
Dear Trunnion! he makes me overlook the gambols of his detestable protege, the hero.
That scoundrel is not an impossible caricature of an obstinate, vain, cruel libertine. Peregrine was precisely the man to fall in love with Emilia pour le bon motif, and then attempt to ruin her, though she was the sister of his friend, by devices worthy of Lovelace at his last and lowest stage. Peregrine's overwhelming vanity, swollen by facile conquests, would inevitably have degraded him to this abyss. The intrigue was only the worst of those infamous practical jokes of his, in which Smollett takes a cruel and unholy delight. Peregrine, in fact, is a hero of naturalisme, except that his fits of generosity are mere patches daubed on, and that his reformation is a farce, in which a modern naturaliste would have disdained to indulge. Emilia, in her scene with Peregrine in the bouge to which he has carried her, rises much above Smollett's heroines, and we could like her, if she had never forgiven behaviour which was beneath pardon.
Peregrine's education at Winchester bears out Lord Elcho's description of that academy in his lately published Memoirs. It was apt to develop Peregrines; and Lord Elcho himself might have furnished Smollett with suitable adventures. There can be no doubt that Cadwallader Crabtree suggested Sir Malachi Malagrowther to Scott, and that Hatchway and Pipes, taking up their abode with Peregrine in the Fleet, gave a hint to Dickens for Sam Weller and Mr. Pickwick in the same abode. That "Peregrine" "does far excel 'Joseph Andrews' and 'Amelia'," as Scott declares, few modern readers will admit. The world could do much better without "Peregrine" than without "Joseph"; while Amelia herself alone is a study greatly preferable to the whole works of Smollett: such, at least, is the opinion of a declared worshipper of that peerless lady. Yet "Peregrine" is a kind of Odyssey of the eighteenth century: an epic of humour and of adventure.