Travels through France and Italy. Tobias Smollett
Yet after incurring all this unpopularity at a time when the populace of London was more inflamed against Scotsmen than it has ever been before or since, and having laboured severely at a paper in the ministerial interest and thereby aroused the enmity of his old friend John Wilkes, Smollett had been unceremoniously thrown over by his own chief, Lord Bute, on the ground that his paper did more to invite attack than to repel it. Lastly, he and his wife had suffered a cruel bereavement in the loss of their only child, and it was partly to supply a change from the scene of this abiding sorrow, that the present journey was undertaken.
The first stages and incidents of the expedition were not exactly propitious. The Dover Road was a byword for its charges; the Via Alba might have been paved with the silver wrung from reluctant and indignant passengers. Smollett characterized the chambers as cold and comfortless, the beds as "paultry" (with "frowsy," a favourite word), the cookery as execrable, wine poison, attendance bad, publicans insolent, and bills extortion, concluding with the grand climax that there was not a drop of tolerable malt liquor to be had from London to Dover. Smollett finds a good deal to be said for the designation of "a den of thieves" as applied to that famous port (where, as a German lady of much later date once complained, they "boot ze Bible in ze bedroom, but ze devil in ze bill"), and he grizzles lamentably over the seven guineas, apart from extras, which he had to pay for transport in a Folkestone cutter to Boulogne Mouth.
Having once arrived at Boulogne, Smollett settled down regularly to his work as descriptive reporter, and the letters that he wrote to his friendly circle at home fall naturally into four groups. The first Letters from II. to V. describe with Hogarthian point, prejudice and pungency, the town and people of Boulogne. The second group, Letters VI.-XII., deal with the journey from Boulogne to Nice by way of Paris, Lyon, Nimes, and Montpellier. The third group, Letters XIII.-XXIV., is devoted to a more detailed and particular delineation of Nice and the Nicois. The fourth, Letters XXV.-XLI., describes the Italian expedition and the return journey to Boulogne en route for England, where the party arrive safe home in July 1765.
Smollett's account of Boulogne is excellent reading, it forms an apt introduction to the narrative of his journey, it familiarises us with the milieu, and reveals to us in Smollett a man of experience who is both resolute and capable of getting below the surface of things. An English possession for a short period in the reign of the Great Harry, Boulogne has rarely been less in touch with England than it was at the time of Smollett's visit. Even then, however, there were three small colonies, respectively, of English nuns, English Jesuits, and English Jacobites. Apart from these and the English girls in French seminaries it was estimated ten years after Smollett's sojourn there that there were twenty-four English families in residence. The locality has of course always been a haunting place for the wandering tribes of English. Many well-known men have lived or died here both native and English. Adam Smith must have been there very soon after Smollett. So must Dr. John Moore and Charles Churchill, one of the enemies provoked by the Briton, who went to Boulogne to meet his friend Wilkes and died there in 1764. Philip Thicknesse the traveller and friend of Gainsborough died there in 1770. After long search for a place to end his days in Thomas Campbell bought a house in Boulogne and died there, a few months later, in 1844. The house is still to be seen, Rue St. Jean, within the old walls; it has undergone no change, and in 1900 a marble tablet was put up to record the fact that Campbell lived and died there. The other founder of the University of London, Brougham, by a singular coincidence was also closely associated with Boulogne. [Among the occupants of the English cemetery will be found the names of Sir Harris Nicolas, Basil Montagu, Smithson Pennant, Sir William Ouseley, Sir William Hamilton, and Sir C. M. Carmichael. And among other literary celebrities connected with the place, apart from Dickens (who gave his impressions of the place in Household Words, November 1854) we should include in a brief list, Charles Lever, Horace Smith, Wilkie Collins, Mrs. Henry Wood, Professor York Powell, the Marquis of Steyne (Lord Seymour), Mrs. Jordan, Clark Russell, and Sir Conan Doyle. There are also memorable associations with Lola Montes, Heinrich Heine, Becky Sharpe, and above all Colonel Newcome. My first care in the place was to discover the rampart where the Colonel used to parade with little Clive. Among the native luminaries are Daunou, Duchenne de Boulogne, one of the foremost physiologists of the last century, an immediate predecessor of Charcot in knowledge of the nervous system, Aug. Mariette, the Egyptologist, Aug. Angellier, the biographer of Burns, Sainte-Beuve, Prof. Morel, and "credibly," Godfrey de Bouillon, of whom Charles Lamb wrote "poor old Godfrey, he must be getting very old now." The great Lesage died here in 1747.] The antiquaries still dispute about Gessoriacum, Godfrey de Bouillon, and Charlemagne's Tour. Smollett is only fair in justifying for the town, the older portions of which have a strong medieval suggestion, a standard of comparison slightly more distinguished than Wapping. He never lets us forget that he is a scholar of antiquity, a man of education and a speculative philosopher. Hence his references to Celsus and Hippocrates and his ingenious etymologies of wheatear and samphire, more ingenious in the second case than sound. Smollett's field of observation had been wide and his fund of exact information was unusually large. At Edinburgh he had studied medicine under Monro and John Gordon, in company with such able and distinguished men as William Hunter, Cullen, Pitcairn, Gregory, and Armstrong—and the two last mentioned were among his present correspondents. As naval surgeon at Carthagena he had undergone experience such as few literary men can claim, and subsequently as compiler, reviewer, party journalist, historian, translator, statistician, and lexicographer, he had gained an amount of miscellaneous information such as falls to the lot of very few minds of his order of intelligence. He had recently directed the compilation of a large Universal Geography or Gazetteer, the Carton or Vivien de St. Martin if those days—hence his glib references to the manners and customs of Laplanders, Caffres, Kamskatchans, and other recondite types of breeding. His imaginative faculty was under the control of an exceptionally strong and retentive memory. One may venture to say, indeed, without danger of exaggeration that his testimonials as regards habitual accuracy of statement have seldom been exceeded. Despite the doctor's unflattering portraits of Frenchmen, M. Babeau admits that his book is one written by an observer of facts, and a man whose statements, whenever they can be tested, are for the most part "singularly exact." Mr. W. J. Prouse, whose knowledge of the Riviera district is perhaps almost unequalled out of France, makes this very remarkable statement. "After reading all that has been written by very clever people about Nice in modern times, one would probably find that for exact precision of statement, Smollett was still the most trustworthy guide," a view which is strikingly borne out by Mr. E. Schuyler, who further points out Smollett's shrewd foresight in regard to the possibilities of the Cornice road, and of Cannes and San Remo as sanatoria." Frankly there is nothing to be seen which he does not recognise." And even higher testimonies have been paid to Smollett's topographical accuracy by recent historians of Nice and its neighbourhood.
The value which Smollett put upon accuracy in the smallest matters of detail is evinced by the corrections which he made in the margin of a copy of the 1766 edition of the Travels. These corrections, which are all in Smollett's own and unmistakably neat handwriting, may be divided into four categories. In the first place come a number of verbal emendations. Phrases are turned, inverted and improved by the skilful "twist of the pen" which becomes a second nature to the trained corrector of proofs; there are moreover a few topographical corrigenda, suggested by an improved knowledge of the localities, mostly in the neighbourhood of Pisa and Leghorn, where there is no doubt that these corrections were made upon the occasion of Smollett's second visit to Italy in 1770. [Some not unimportant errata were overlooked. Thus Smollett's representation of the droit d'aubaine as a monstrous and intolerable grievance is of course an exaggeration. (See Sentimental Journey; J. Hill Burton, The Scot Abroad, 1881, p. 135; and Luchaire, Instit. de France.) On his homeward journey he indicates that he travelled from Beaune to Chalons and so by way of Auxerre to Dijon. The right order is Chalons, Beaune, Dijon, Auxerre. As further examples of the zeal with which Smollett regarded exactitude in the record of facts we have his diurnal register of weather during his stay at Nice and the picture of him scrupulously measuring the ruins at Cimiez with packthread.] In the second place come a number of English renderings of the citations from Latin, French, and Italian authors. Most of these from the Latin are examples of Smollett's own skill in English verse making. Thirdly come one or two significant admissions of overboldness in matters of criticism, as where he retracts his censure of Raphael's Parnassus in Letter XXXIII. Fourthly, and these are of the greatest importance, come some very interesting additional notes upon the buildings