HUMPHRY CLINKER. (Humphry Clinker,' the last of Smollett's novels, was published in 1771, just before the author's death. It is the story of a Welsh gentleman named Matthew Bramble, a crusty, bachelor who, suffering from gout and imaginary dis eases, makes a tour of England and Scotland in order to be amused and to drink the waters at famous wells. He visits Bristol, Bath, Lon don, Harrogate, Scarborough, Edinburgh, Glas. gow and the Scottish lakes. Of his party are his sistter Tabitha, a mature spinster, with her maid Winifred Jenkins and her dog Chowder; his nephew Jeremiah Melford, a student fresh from Oxford, and his sentimental niece Lydia Melford. The novel takes its name from a footman picked up on the way between Bath and London, a shabby country lad who proves' to have many accomplishments and the innate qualities of a gentleman. He becomes a Methodist preacher and converts the women of the company to the new doctrine of grace without works. The novel, written primarily to describe the sights and misadventures of a journey through the British Isles, has a sort 'of plot. Tabitha and Lydia both get husbands; and Humphry Clinker, made happy by the dis covery that, though his mother was but a bar maid, his father was Matthew Bramble, is married to Winifred Jenkins. All return to Brambleton Hall in, time for a Christmas dinner.
Thackeray rightly thought Clinker' the most laughable novel ever writ ten. The farcical comedy, naturally rising out of the situation, is enhanced•by a very clever use of letters which the travelers send to their friends at home, descriptive of the same in cidents from the very different :points of view of a hypochondriac, an aged spinster, a young woman in love, a ygung man of the world and a -vivacious servant-maid. To Lydia, for ex
ample, the tourney is a continuous round of delight; while nothing except Scotland gives the slightest pleasure to her uncle. All the scenes are based upon the direct observation of the author, who makes Matthew Bramble the mouthpiece of his own sardonic humor. In this gentleman more than anywhere else, Smollett embodied his own personality. He was generous, irritable, keenly intelligent, but thoroughly disillusioned. Perhaps the most amusing character is Lismahago, a soldier of fortune, who has been scalped and otherwise mutilated in Indian wars in America. To Ta bitha he is °the prettiest gentleman)) she has ever seen, and she marries him. With others besides Thackeray 'humphry Clinker' has been a favorite. Lismahago, after undergoing a sea change, reappears in Scott's Dalgetty; and from Smollett, Dickens learned the art of caricature. From the one passed to the other the humor to be derived from comic misspellings, unex pected turns of phrases and whimsical exag geration. These characteristics in their ex treme form appear in the letters of Winifred Jenkins, who writes from London to Mary Jones at Brambleton Hall: °I have seen the park, and the paleass of Saint Gimses, and the king's and the queen's magisterial pursing, and the sweet young princes and the billyfents, and pye-bald ass, and all the rest of the royal