men of consummate abilities in their profession; exerting themselves with equal industry, eloquence, and erudition, in their endeavours to perplex the truth, brow-beat the evidence, puzzle the judge, and mislead the jury. Did any part of this character come home to your own conscience? or did you resent it as a sarcasm levelled at the whole bench without distinction? I take it for granted, that this must have been the origin of your enmity to me; because I can recollect no other circumstance in my conduct, by which I could incur the displeasure of a man whom I scarce knew by sight, and with whom I never had the least dispute, or indeed concern. If this was the case, you pay a very scurvy compliment to your own integrity, by fathering a character which is not applicable to any honest man, and give the world a handle to believe, that our courts of justice stand greatly in need of reformation. Indeed, the petulance, license, and buffoonery of some lawyers in the exercise of their function, is a reproach upon decency, and a scandal to the nation; and it is surprising that the Judge, who represents his Majesty's person, should suffer such insults upon the dignity of the place. But whatever liberties of this kind are granted to counsel, no sort of freedom, it seems, must be allowed to the evidence, who, by the by, are of much more consequence to the cause. You will take upon you to divert the audience at the expense of a witness, by impertinent allusions to some parts of his private character and affairs; but if he pretends to retort the joke, you insult, abuse, and bellow against him, as an impudent fellow, who fails in his respect to the Court. It was in this manner you behaved to my first witness, whom you first provoked into a passion by your injurious insinuations; then you took an advantage of the confusion which you had entailed upon him; and, lastly, you insulted him, as a person who had shuffled in his evidence. This might have been an irreparable injury to the character of a tradesman, had not he been luckily known to the whole jury, and many other persons in Court, as a man of unquestionable probity and credit. Sir, a witness has as good a title as you have to the protection of the Court; and ought to have more, because evidence is absolutely necessary for the investigation of truth; whereas, the aim of a lawyer is often to involve it in doubt and obscurity. Is it for this purpose you so frequently deviate from the point, and endeavour to raise the mirth of the audience with flat jokes and insipid similes? or have you really so miserably mistaken your own talents, as to set up for the character of a man of humour? For my own part, were I disposed to be merry, I should never desire a more

pregnant subject of ridicule, than your own appearance and behaviour; but, as I am at present in a very serious mood, I shall content myself with demanding adequate reparation for the injurious treatment I have received at your hands; otherwise, I will in four days put this letter in the press, and you shall hear in another manner-not from a ruffian and an assassin-but from an injured gentleman, who is not ashamed of subscribing himself,” &c.

No. II.

CONTROVERSY WITH SHEBBEARE AND GRAINGER.

[AMONG others, he incurred at this time the resentment of Dr Shebbeare, a well-known political and miscellaneous writer, who had been chastised in the Review, for his insolent and seditious publications; and severely punished by the government for his arrogance and abuse, in stigmatizing some great names with all the virulence of censure, and even assailing the throne itself, with oblique insinuation and ironical satire. The incensed author suspected Smollett, and retaliated in a pamphlet, entitled The Occasional Critic, or the Decrees of the Scots Tribunal in the Critical Review rejudged, 8vo, 1757, written with all the presumption of Dennis without his learning, with all his rage without his integrity.

Although the "Occasional Critic" in many instances stumbled on the truth, the whole animation of the performance arose from the vivacity and virulence with which the enraged writer maintained that the authors of the Critical Review were Scots scrubs, and rascals, barbers, tailors, apothecaries, and surgeons' mates, who understood neither Greek, Latin, French, nor English, nor any other language; and that Scotland never produced any one man of genius, learning, or integrity.

The acrimony of Dr Shebbeare's retaliation was greater than Smollett's patience, which was not his most shining virtue, could bear, without resistance or reply; and it immediately drew from him, or one of his literary associates, the following observations:

"Whatever regard we may have for our fellow-subjects in North Britain, and surely we do regard them, not only as our brethren, but also as a people distinguished by their learning and capacity, we have no call to enter the lists as their champions, against an antagonist whom they themselves would hardly deign to oppose.

"We cannot help, however, taking this opportunity of declaring, that of five persons concerned in writing the Critical Review, one only is a native of Scotland; so that our hypercritic's national rancour against that kingdom seems to have mistaken its object; unless he levelled the whole at one member of our society, whom indeed he has reviled, bespattered, and belied with all the venom of low, invidious malice, and all the filth of vulgar abuse. These attacks, however, we forgive, as the natural effect of resentment. That person has occasionally checked and chastised him, as an ignorant and presumptuous quack in politics, an enemy to his king and country, and a desperate incendiary, who, by misrepresenting facts, and aspersing characters, endeavoured to raise a ferment in the nation, at a time when a concurrence of unfortunate incidents had produced a spirit of discontent among the people."-Critical Review, 1757.

He had no sooner repelled the illiberal abuse of a writer, whose injustice he reprobated, and whose resentment he despised, than he was thrown into a more vexatious, and less creditable dispute with Dr Grainger, a man of genius, and a poet, who suspected him to be the writer of the article in the Critical Review, in which his "Translation of Tibullus" had been treated with unjustifiable severity. Whether Dr Grainger's suspicions were well or ill founded, he thought his translation had been criticised in the Review with malignity, and published an angry "Letter to Tobias Smollett, M.D., occasioned by his Criticism upon a late Translation of Tibullus," 8vo, 1758; in which, after refuting the criticisms of the reviewer, he proves, by examples principally taken from the article on his own work, that the authors of the Critical Review had broken, in every particular, their promises solemnly made to the public, in the plan of their journal: mentions Smollett in contemptuous terms, and indulges himself in some ludicrous reflections on the unlucky diminutive of his Christian name.

These personal reflections and pleasantries, which mingled in the controversy between the poet and the critic, who mutually respected each other's talents and character, were not forgotten when Dr Grainger's "Letter" fell under the animadversions of Smollett, or one of his associates, in the Critical Review, who, in ridiculing that playful species of vengeance, was guilty of injustice, if he meant to insinuate that his antagonist could be classed among the dunces of the age.

The writer of the article observes, that "Dr Grainger had

found in Dr Smollett's Christian name Tobias, and its diminutive Toby, a very extraordinary fund of humour and ridicule; but that this species of wit, however entertaining, was not new, for that others had played on the cognomen with as much dexterity as he had on the prenomen; that Smollett had been facetiously converted, by that stupendous genius Dr Hill, into Small-head and Small-wit; that the same happy thought had struck the dunces of a former age, who had not only punned successfully on the name of Alexander Pope, but had even written a poem against. him, entitled Sawney. "Think not, reader," he adds, "that we presume to compare Dr Smollett, as a writer, with Mr Pope; we are sensible of the infinite disparity; but in one respect their fate is similar; they have both been abused, belied, and accused of ignorance, malice, and want of genius, by the confessed dunces of the age, at a time when their works were read and approved, at least as much as any other English contemporary author."

Men of letters, has often been remarked, are more easily provoked, and more vindictive when provoked, than other men. Their quarrels, when they are enraged, are commonly more violent, and better known, than the ordinary competitions of interest in which other men indulge themselves; as they originate in the jealousy of their own fame, or in the envy of that of their brethren, and are circulated in the popular vehicles of wit and satire. The controversy between Smollett and Dr Grainger, it is probable, did not originate in envy, with which the mind of Smollett was not tainted, nor in any personal animosity against his amiable and ingenious countryman, but in a systematic opposition to the authors of the " Monthly Review," in which Dr Grainger was known to be concerned, who had an interest in decrying the qualifications of his colleagues, and of impeaching the decrees of the tribunal in which he presided.

Of the unjust suspicions which his concern in the Critical Review excited in the breasts of Mr Home, the author of the tragedy of "Douglas," Dr Wilkie, author of "The Epigoniad," and some other writers of his own country, whose talents and characters he respected, he complains in a letter to Dr Moore, in the year 1758, in which is the following paragraph:

"I have for some time done very little in the Critical Review. The remarks upon Home's tragedy I never saw until they were in print; and yet I have not read one line of the Epigoniad.' I am told the work has merit; and I am truly sorry that it should have been so roughly handled. Notwithstanding the censures

that have been so freely bestowed upon these and other productions of our country, the authors of the Critical Review have been insulted and abused as a Scots Tribunal."

Besides these, many other disputes arose with different writers, who considered themselves injured by the severity of his criticisms. Seldom a month passed without some complaints of his injustice and inhumanity towards bad writers, or their employers, and those not often expressed in the most decent terms. The public, to whom they appealed, refused their sympathy, and retorted the charge, with disgrace, on his accusers; who, being authors without talents, were themselves impostors, who defrauded the public, and had little reason to expect his indulgence. But whatever reason he had to complain of the personal abuse he suffered from detected dulness and mortified vanity, he afterwards found, that the revenge of an author was nothing compared to the rancour of the politician, and the resentment of little men placed in great stations.-ANDERSON'S Life of Smollett, pp. 57, 62.]