Hence the attacks on the grandfather and cousins of Roderick Random: but,
later, Smollett returned to kinder feelings.
In some ways Tobias resembled his old grandsire. About 1710 that
gentleman wrote a Memoir of his own life. Hence we learn that _he_, in
childhood, like Roderick Random, was regarded as "a clog and burden," and
was neglected by his father, ill-used by his step-mother. Thus Tobias
had not only his own early poverty to resent, but had a hereditary grudge
against fortune, and "the base indifference of mankind." The old
gentleman was lodged "with very hard and penurious people," at Glasgow
University. He rose in the world, and was a good Presbyterian Whig, but
"had no liberty" to help to forfeit James II. "The puir child, his son"
(James III. and VIII.), "if he was really such, was innocent, and it were
hard to do anything that would touch the son for the father's fault." The
old gentleman, therefore, though a Member of Parliament, evaded attending
the first Parliament after the Union: "I had no freedom to do it, because
I understood that the great business to be agitated therein was to make
laws for abjuring the Pretender . . . which I could not go in with, being
always of opinion that it was hard to impose oaths on people who had not
freedom to take them."
This was uncommonly liberal conduct, in a Whig, and our Smollett, though
no Jacobite, was in distinct and courageous sympathy with Jacobite
Scotland.
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