The Truest Monument To His Stay In
Italy Is The Book Of Italian Travel That He Wrote, And The Best Effect
Is That Sort Of Peripatetic Novel Which He May Be Said To Have Invented
In _Humphrey Clinker,_ And Which Has Survived The Epistolary Form Into
Our Own Time.
It is a very simple shaft that rises over his grave, with
the brief record, "Memoriae Tobiae Smollett, qui
Liburni animam
efflavit, 16 Sept., 1773," but it is imaginable with what wrath he would
have disputed the record, if it is true, according to all the other
authorities, that he exhaled his spirit two years earlier, and how he
would have had it out with those "friends and fellow-countrymen" who had
the error perpetuated above his helpless dust.
It was not easy to quit the sweetly solemn place or to resist the wish
which I have here indulged, that some kinsman or kinswoman of those whom
the blossoms and leaves are hiding would come to their rescue from
nature now cleiming an undue part in them, and obliterating their very
memories. One would not have a great deal done, but only enough to save
their names from entire oblivion, and with the hope of this I have named
some of their names. It might not be too much even for the United
Kingdom and the United States, though both very poor nations, to join in
contributing the sum necessary for the work. Or some millionaire English
duke, or some millionaire American manufacturer, might make the outlay
alone; I cannot expect any millionaire author to provide a special fund
for the care of the tomb of Smollett.
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