Cape 
31 
magniloquence of his historic style. ‘Our immortal Fielding was 
of the younger branch of the Earls of Denbigh, who drew their 
origin from the Counts of Hapsburgh, . . . The romance of 
‘Tom Jones,’ that exquisite picture of human manners, will out- 
live the Palace of the Escurial and the Imperial Eagle of the 
House of Austria.” Time has not yet fully tested his prophecy. 
The Eagle of the House of Austria no longer covers a Holy Roman 
Empire with its wings, but ‘Tom Jones” survives, and the Escurial 
still stands where it did. 
Smollett pressed closely on the heels of Richardson and Fielding 
with his “Roderick Random,” in 1758, followed by “ Peregrine 
Pickle,” “Ferdinand, Count Fathom,” and “Humphry Clinker.” In 
the first two of these Smollett, who had been present as an assistant 
surgeon on one of Her Majesty’s ships at the bombardment of 
Carthagena in 1741, draws largely on his personal experiences, 
and gives a vivid, though it may be a dramatically exaggerated 
picture of the roughness and tyranny of life in the navy. His 
experiences on shore are equally interesting and diverting, and I 
do not know where there are to be found more lively and striking 
pictures of life on sea or land one hundred and fifty years ago, 
than those which appear in his pages. They are full, too, of keen 
satire upon official jobbery, injustice, and corruption, and other 
defects which were common in that age, though not perhaps 
peculiar to it; and as for incident, there are incidents and inter- 
ludes enough in ‘Roderick Random” alone, to furnish forth a 
dozen novels of the modern type. 
Laurence Sterne, as we all know, was a country parson, who 
wrote very eloquent sermons, but had the reputation of falling 
sadly short in practice of the moral standard which he set up therein. 
His first and last novel, “Tristram Shandy,” was published in 
1759, two years before the death of Richardson ; and he completes 
the quartett of novelists who, flourishing at the same time, held 
the field against all comers—except, perhaps, Oliver Goldsmith— 
until Sir Walter Scott entered it. 
I called ‘Tristram Shandy” a novel; but it really has none of 
the essentials of a novel, except the drawing of character by means 
