For a time he remained in the West Indies, where he fell in love with Miss Anne Lascelles, whom he afterwards married.  In 1746 he returned to London, and, after an unsuccessful attempt to practise medicine, he threw himself with great vigor into the field of literature.  He was a man of strange and antagonistic features, just and generous in theory, quarrelsome and overbearing in practice.  From the year 1746 his pen seems to have been always busy.  He first tried his hand on some satires, which gained for him numerous enemies; and in 1748 he produced his first novel, Roderick Random, which, in spite of its indecency, the world at once acknowledged to be a work of genius:  the verisimilitude was perfect; every one recognized in the hero the type of many a young North countryman going out to seek his fortune.  The variety is great, the scenes are more varied and real than those in Richardson and Fielding, the characters are numerous and vividly painted, and the keen sense of ridicule pervading the book makes it a broad jest from beginning to end.  Historically, his delineations are valuable; for he describes a period in the annals of the British marine which has happily passed away,—­a hard life in little stifling holds or forecastles, with hard fare,—­a base life, for the sailor, oppressed on shipboard, was the prey of vile women and land-sharks when on shore.  What pictures of prostitution and indecency! what obscenity of language! what drunken infernal orgies!  We may shun the book as we would shun the company, and yet the one is the exact portraiture of the other.

Roderick Random was followed, in 1751, by Peregrine Pickle, a book in similar taste, but the characters in which are even more striking.  The forms of Commodore Trunnion, Lieutenant Hatchway, Pipes the boatswain, and Ap Morgan the choleric Welsh surgeon, are as familiar to us now as at the first.

Smollett had now retired to Chelsea, where his facile pen was still hard at work.  In 1753 appeared his Ferdinand Count Fathom, the portraiture of a complete villain, corresponding in character with Fielding’s Jonathan Wild, but with a better moral.

About this time he translated Don Quixote; and although his version is still published, it is by no means true to the idiom of the language, nor to the higher purpose of Cervantes.

Passing by his Complete History of Authentic and Entertaining Voyages, we come to his History of England from the Descent of Julius Caesar to the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, in 1748.  It is not a profound work; but it is so currently written, that, in lieu of better, the latter portion was taken to supplement Hume; as a work of less merit than either, that of Bissett was added in the later editions to supplement Smollett and Hume.  For this history he is said to have received L2000.

In 1762 he issued The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves, who, with his attendant, Captain Crowe, goes forth, in the style of Don Quixote and Sancho, to do the world.  Smollett’s forte was in the broadly humorous, and this is all that redeems this work from utter absurdity.