After many years of
narrow circumstance in the Southern climates where he spent his later
life, he tried in vain for that meek hope of literary ambition, a
consulate, perhaps the very post that my companion, a hundred and fifty
years later, was worthily holding. The truest monument to his stay in
Italy is the book of Italian travel that he wrote, and the best effect
is that sort of peripatetic novel which he may be said to have invented
in _Humphrey Clinker,_ and which has survived the epistolary form into
our own time. It is a very simple shaft that rises over his grave, with
the brief record, "Memoriae Tobiae Smollett, qui Liburni animam
efflavit, 16 Sept., 1773," but it is imaginable with what wrath he would
have disputed the record, if it is true, according to all the other
authorities, that he exhaled his spirit two years earlier, and how he
would have had it out with those "friends and fellow-countrymen" who had
the error perpetuated above his helpless dust.
It was not easy to quit the sweetly solemn place or to resist the wish
which I have here indulged, that some kinsman or kinswoman of those whom
the blossoms and leaves are hiding would come to their rescue from
nature now cleiming an undue part in them, and obliterating their very
memories.
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