Hunter of Burnside. In 1750, there were
Jacobites enough in the French capital, all wondering very much where
Prince Charles might be, and quite unconscious that he was their
neighbour in a convent in the Rue St. Dominique. Though Moore does not
say so (he is provokingly economical of detail), we may presume that
Smollett went wandering in Flanders, as does Peregrine Pickle. It is
curious that he should introduce a Capucin, a Jew, and a black-eyed
damsel, all in the Ghent diligence, when we know that Prince Charles did
live in Ghent, with the black-eyed Miss Walkenshaw, did go about
disguised as a Capucin, and was tracked by a Jewish spy, while the other
spy, Young Glengarry, styled himself "Pickle." But all those events
occurred about a year after the novel was published in 1751.
Before that date Smollett had got an M.D. degree from Aberdeen
University, and, after returning from France, he practised for a year or
two at Bath. But he could not expect to be successful among fashionable
invalids, and, in "Humphrey Clinker," he make Matthew Bramble give such
an account of the Bath waters as M. Zola might envy. He was still trying
to gain ground in his profession, when, in March 1751, Mr. D. Wilson
published the first edition of "Peregrine Pickle" "for the Author,"
unnamed. I have never seen this first edition, which was "very curious
and disgusting." Smollett, in his preface to the second edition, talks
of "the art and industry that were used to stifle him in the birth, by
certain booksellers and others.
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