Travels Through France And Italy By Tobias Smollett
































































































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Before he left Montpellier Smollett indulged in two more 
seemingly irresistible tirades against French folly: one against 
their persistent hero - Page 44
Travels Through France And Italy By Tobias Smollett - Page 44 of 535 - First - Home

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Before He Left Montpellier Smollett Indulged In Two More Seemingly Irresistible Tirades Against French Folly:

One against their persistent hero-worship of such a stuffed doll as Louis le Grand, and the second in ridicule of the immemorial French panacea, a bouillon.

Now he gets to Nice he feels a return of the craving to take a hand's turn at depreciatory satire upon the nation of which a contemporary hand was just tracing the deservedly better-known delineation, commencing

Gay sprightly land of mirth and social ease, Pleas'd with thyself, whom all the world can please. . . .

Such inveteracy (like Dr. Johnson's against Swift) was not unnaturally suspected by friends in England of having some personal motive. In his fifteenth letter home, therefore, Smollett is assiduous in disclaiming anything of the kind. He begins by attempting an amende honorable, but before he has got well away from his exordium he insensibly and most characteristically diverges into the more congenial path of censure, and expands indeed into one of his most eloquent passages - a disquisition upon the French punctilio (conceived upon lines somewhat similar to Mercutio's address to Benvolio), to which is appended a satire on the duello as practised in France, which glows and burns with a radiation of good sense, racy of Smollett at his best.

To eighteenth century lovers the discussion on duelling will recall similar talks between Boswell and Johnson, or that between the lieutenant and Tom in the Seventh Book of Tom Jones, but, more particularly, the sermon delivered by Johnson on this subject a propos of General Oglethorpe's story of how he avoided a duel with Prince Eugene in 1716.

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