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.
