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Italy
.
    Sterne in his
Sentimental Journey
made the work more famous than it ever would otherwise have been by referring to the author as the learned “Smelfungus ” who, “set out with spleen and prejudice, and every object he passed by was discoloured and distorted.” Thus when Smollett came back to England he saw Bath through eyes still discoloured and distorted. He went up to Scotland with the spleen and jaundice working at such a pitch thateverything even in his native land was productive of “misery and disgust.” He temporarily eased the fever of his feelings by a virulent political allegory,
The History and Adventures of an Atom
. Then with that foreknowledge of death that is the privilege of men who have known life well, Smollett set out for perpetual exile in Italy.
    A dying man, he could do no more than write his masterpiece,
Humphry Clinker
. Hazlitt declared this work to be “the most pleasant gossipy novel that was ever written,” and Thackeray described it as “the most laughable story that has ever been written, since the goodly art of novel writing began.” But Thackeray, it should be remembered, was prejudiced against Dickens.
    Certainly there is no novel in the language that would seem to have been written more completely free of the shadow of madness and death than
Humphry Clinker
. Yet Smollett when he wrote it was never free from the fear that he was losing his reason, and never in doubt that he was dying.
    It is after all only just a novel. It was a travel book in design, and a letter-book in form. This opened mail-bag of letters from different people about the same events is simply an opportunity for Smollett to reveal the only psychological discovery that he ever made: that different people have different minds. It was as remote from a book of travels as Mr. Belloc’s
Path to Rome
is remote from a Baedeker. Jaundice and spleen are still its principal constituents, and Smollett saw the defects of this world with the acute eye of a sanitary inspector. His work is truly excellent journalism. Consider, for instance, this admirable piece of sensational writing on the pollution of the nation’s food.
    The bread I eat in London is a deleterious paste, mixed up with chalk, alum and bone-ashes; insipid to the taste, and destructive to the constitution. The good people are not ignorant of this adulteration; but they prefer it to wholesome bread, because it is whiter than the meal of corn, thus they sacrifice their taste and their health, and the lives of their tender infants, to a most absurd gratification of a misjudging eye; and the miller, or the baker, is obliged to poison them and their families, in order to live by his profession.
    Humphry Clinker
is full of such passages, which have as little to do with fiction as with travel. The book is pure Smollett, recognisable as he was to his mother who had not seen him for years, by the twinkle in his eye. When it appeared, the author was out of all favour in England. And Smollett, who had made more men amused or angry than any other author of his time died in the sad limbo that lies midway between neglect and unpopularity.
    His widow continued to live on near his foreign grave, supporting herself obscurely and with difficulty; a shadowy, retreating figure the whole of whose private fortune had been spent by her husband; a woman who in heaven must have found much to talk about with the first Mrs. Fielding.

Laurence Sterne and His Fragment of Life
    It would be possible to write a far larger and more comprehensive history than this outline of outlines, yet do no more than touch on the strangely vegetating figure of the Yorkshire Parson, Laurence Sterne. He had a mind which was so peculiarly and richly and vexatiously his own that, though he was later in life imported to London because of it, no one of talent was fool enough to try to model his own style on Sterne’s.
    And so no school of
Tristram Shandy
—just