He must have studied the classics at Glasgow
University, where he was apprenticed to Mr. Gordon, a surgeon. Gordon,
again, was an excellent man, appreciated by Smollett himself in after
days, and the odious Potion of "Roderick Random" must, like his rival,
Crab, have been merely a fancy sketch of meanness, hypocrisy, and
profligacy. Perhaps the good surgeon became the victim of that "one
continued string of epigrammatic sarcasms," such as Mr. Colquhoun told
Ramsay of Ochtertyre, Smollett used to play off on his companions, "for
which no talents could compensate." Judging by Dr. Carlyle's Memoirs
this intolerable kind of display was not unusual in Caledonian
conversation: but it was not likely to make Tobias popular in England.
Thither he went in 1739, with very little money, "and a very large
assortment of letters of recommendation: whether his relatives intended
to compensate for the scantiness of the one by their profusion in the
other is uncertain; but he has often been heard to declare that their
liberality in the last article was prodigious." The Smolletts were not
"kinless loons"; they had connections: but who, in Scotland, had money?
Tobias had passed his medical examinations, but he rather trusted in his
MS. tragedy, "The Regicide." Tragical were its results for the author.
Inspired by George Buchanan's Latin history of Scotland, Smollett had
produced a play, in blank verse, on the murder of James I.
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