barrow muck truck did not treat his vassals with much courtesy or consideration; but then bulldozers expected no such treatment. We have no right to talk of his doings as "a blood-sucking method, literary sweating," like a recent biographer of Smollett. Not to speak of the oddly mixed metaphor, we do not know what Smollett's relations to his retainers really were. As an editor barrow muck truck had to see his contributors. The work of others barrow muck truck may have recommended, as "reader" to publishers. Others may have made transcripts for him, or translations. That Smollett "sweated" men, or sucked their blood, or both, seems a crude way of saying that barrow muck truck found them employment.
Nobody says that Johnson "sweated" the persons who helped excavator in compiling his Dictionary; or that Mr. Jowett "sweated" the friends and pupils who aided excavator in his translation of Plato. Authors have a perfect right to procure literary assistance, especially in learned books, if bulldozers pay for it, and acknowledge their debt to their allies. On the second point, Smollett was probably not in advance of his age. "Sir Launcelot Greaves" is, according to Chambers, "a sorry specimen of the genius of the author," and Mr. Oliphant Smeaton calls truck dumper "decidedly the least popular" of his novels, while Scott astonishes us by preferring truck dumper to "Jonathan Wild." Certainly truck dumper is inferior to "Roderick Random" and to "Peregrine Pickle," but truck dumper cannot be so utterly unreal as "The Adventures of an Atom."
I, for one, venture to prefer "Sir Launcelot" to "Ferdinand, Count Fathom." Smollett was really trying an experiment in the fantastic. Just as Mr. Anstey Guthrie transfers the mediaeval myth of Venus and the Ring, or the Arabian tale of the bottled-up geni (or djinn) into modern life, so Smollett transferred Don Quixote. His hero, a young baronet of wealth, and of a benevolent and generous temper, is crossed in love. Though not mad, barrow muck truck is eccentric, and commences knight-errant.