Peregrine’s education at Winchester bears out Lord Elcho’s description of that academy in his lately published Memoirs.  It was apt to develop Peregrines; and Lord Elcho himself might have furnished Smollett with suitable adventures.  There can be no doubt that Cadwallader Crabtree suggested Sir Malachi Malagrowther to Scott, and that Hatchway and Pipes, taking up their abode with Peregrine in the Fleet, gave a hint to Dickens for Sam Weller and Mr. Pickwick in the same abode.  That “Peregrine” “does far excel ‘Joseph Andrews’ and ’Amelia’,” as Scott declares, few modern readers will admit.  The world could do much better without “Peregrine” than without “Joseph”; while Amelia herself alone is a study greatly preferable to the whole works of Smollett:  such, at least, is the opinion of a declared worshipper of that peerless lady.  Yet “Peregrine” is a kind of Odyssey of the eighteenth century:  an epic of humour and of adventure.

In February 1753, Smollett “obliged the town” with his “Adventures of Ferdinand, Count Fathom,” a cosmopolitan swindler and adventurer.  The book is Smollett’s “Barry Lyndon,” yet as his hero does not tell his own story, but is perpetually held up as a “dreadful example,” there is none of Thackeray’s irony, none of his subtlety.  “Here is a really bad man, a foreigner too,” Smollett seems to say, “do not be misled, oh maidens, by the wiles of such a Count!  Impetuous youth, play not with him at billiards, basset, or gleek.  Fathers, on such a rogue shut your doors:  collectors, handle not his nefarious antiques.  Let all avoid the path and shun the example of Ferdinand, Count Fathom!”

Such is Smollett’s sermon, but, after all, Ferdinand is hardly worse than Roderick or Peregrine.  The son of a terrible old sutler and camp-follower, a robber and slayer of wounded men, Ferdinand had to live by his wits, and he was hardly less scrupulous, after all, than Peregrine and Roderick.  The daubs of casual generosity were not laid on, and that is all the difference.  As Sophia Western was mistaken for Miss Jenny Cameron, so Ferdinand was arrested as Prince Charles, who, in fact, caused much inconvenience to harmless travellers.  People were often arrested as “The Pretender’s son” abroad as well as in England.

The life and death of Ferdinand’s mother, shot by a wounded hussar in her moment of victory, make perhaps the most original and interesting part of this hero’s adventures.  The rest is much akin to his earlier novels, but the history of Rinaldo and Monimia has a passage not quite alien to the vein of Mrs. Radcliffe.  Some remarks in the first chapter show that Smollett felt the censures on his brutality and “lowness,” and he promises to seek “that goal of perfection where nature is castigated almost even to still life . . . where decency, divested of all substance, hovers about like a fantastic shadow.”