In 1762, when the earl of Bute was first lord of the treasury, he became so justly unpopular, that he found it necessary to employ some able writers to vindicate his administration, and to palliate and defend the steps which had led to his advancement. Amongst others Dr. Smollett was pitched upon; and in defence of his patron he commenced a weekly paper, which he called "The Briton." The first number made its appearance on the 29th of May, 1762, and was immediately followed by the publication of the "North Briton," which in the end entirely routed its antagonist, and put an end to the friendship which had for some time subsisted between Dr. Smollett and Mr. Wilkes. "The Briton" continued to be published till the 12th of February, 1763, when it was laid down. The earl of Bute resigned his post in administration, and did so little for his advocate Dr. Smollett, that he afterwards satirized him, as well as some other political characters, in his "Adventures of an Atom."

Dr. Smollett's constitution being at length much impaired by a sedantry life and assiduous application to study, he went abroad for his health in the month of June, 1763, and continued in France and Italy two years. He wrote an account of his travels in a series of letters to some friends, which were published, in two volumes, 8vo. in 1766. These letters are evidently the production of a man of genius, and possess no inconsiderable degree of merit ; but during his stay abroad Dr. Smollett appeared to be almost constantly under the influence of chagrin and of ill health; and was much inclined to speak unfavorably of the persons that he met. with, and the places through which he passed. Before he quitted the kingdom, he found, in the road to Dover, that "the chambers were in general cold and comfortless, the beds paltry, the cookery execrable, the wine poison, the attendants bad, the publicans insolent, and the bills extortion;" and that there was a drop of tolerable malt liquor to be had from London to Dover." When he arrived at Dover, he discovered, that, “without all doubt, a man could not be much worse lodged and worse treated in any part of Europe; nor would he in any other place meet with more flagrant instances of fraud, imposition, and brutality." He met with similar evils in other places; and it was to this cynical relation of his travels, that Sterne is supposed to have

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alluded, in the following passage of his "Sentimental Journey,” vol. i. p. 86. The learned Smelfungus travelled from Bologne to Paris-from Paris to Rome-and so on but he set out with the spleen and jaundice, and every object he passed by was discoloured and distorted-He wrote an account of them, but it was nothing but the account of his miserable feelings. "I met Smelfungus in the grand portico of the Pantheon-he was just coming out of it. It is nothing but a huge cockpit," said he.

"I wish you had said nothing worse of the Venus of Medicis," replied I" for in passing through Florence, I had heard he had fallen foul upon the goddess, and used her worse than a a common strumpet, without the least provocation in nature.—I popped upon Smelfungus again at Turin, in his return home, and a sad tale of sorrowful adventures had he to tell, wherein he spoke of moving accidents by flood and field, and of the cannibals which eat each other, the Anthropophagi –He had been flayed alive, and bedeviled, and worse used than St. Bartholomew, at every stage he had come at."-" I tell it," cried Smelfungus, "to the world."-" You had better tell it," said I, "to your phy. sician."

Dr. Smollett returned from Italy into England; but finding his health continue to decline, and meeting with fresh mortifications and disappointment, he went back to Italy, where he died on the 21st of October, 1771, near Leghorn, where a monument was erected to his memory, at the expence of his wife, and on which was inscribed an epitaph written by Dr. Armstrong. A pillar, with a Latin inscription, has also been erected to his memory on the banks of the Leven, by his kinsman James Smollett, esq. of Bonhill.

Besides the pieces already mentioned, Dr. Smollett was the author of sundry small poems; of a dramatic piece, called, "The Reprisals; or the Tars of Old England;" which was acted with applause at Drury-lane theatre; and of the "Expedition of Humphry Clinker;" published in 1771, in three volumes, 12 mo.

Dr. Smollett was a man of very considerable abilities, and possessed great talents for composition. He had a high spirit, and much irritability of temper, and was apt to speak of others with

too great a degree of asperity. But to his particular friends and acquaintance, he was kind and generous, even beyond the reach of his abilities. The warmth and impetuosity of his temper, and his propensity to satire, hurried him into unjust reflections in some of his pieces against lord Lyttelton and Mr. Garrick; but of this conduct he afterwards repented, and endeavoured to make some reparation in his subsequent writings. It has been remarked, that "there is a very obvious similitude between the characters of the three heroes of the doctor's chief productions. Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, and Matthew Bramble, are all brothers of the same family. The same satirical, cynical disposition, the same generosity and benevolence, are the distinguishing and characteris tical features of all three; but they are far from being servile copies or imitations of each other. They differ as much as the Ajax, Diomed, and Achilles, of Homer. This was undoubtedly a great effort of genius; and the doctor seems to have described his own character at the different stages and situations of his life."

Authorities. Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Dr. Smollett: prefixed to an edition of his Poems and Plays, pub lished in small 8vo. in 1784, by T. Evans. Biographia Dra matica. Smollett's Travels, &c. New and Gen. Biog. Dict. 8vo. edt. 1784,

THE LIFE OF

CHARLES CHURCHILL,

[A. D. 1781, to 1764.]

CHARLES CHURCHILL was born in Vine-street, in the parish of St. John's, Westminster, in the year 1731. His father, who was a respectable clergymen, was curate and lecturer of that parish, and was possessed besides of a living in the country. Young Charles received his grammatical education at Westminster school;

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in which he soon distinguished himself so far, as to make his tutor sensible that he was a lad of considerable abilities. His application however by no means kept pace with his natural talents; so that the chief character he obtained was, that he was a boy that could do well, if he would. The vivacity of his imagination, and the dissipation of his temper, prevented his making that degree of improvement which might reasonably have been expected. When, therefore, he was sent by his father to the university of Oxford, he was refused an admittance into that seat of literature, on account of his deficiency in the learned languages. It was, however given out by himself and his friends, that he could have answered the college examination, had he thought proper; but that he so much despised the trifling questions which were proposed to him, that instead of returning suitable replies, he only launched out into satirical reflections on the abilities of the gentleman, whose office it was to make the trial of his literary improvements. Some time after his rejection at the university, when he was little more than seventeen years of age, he contracted an intimacy with a young lady in the neighbourhood, which ended in a tasty marriage. He now, however, applied himself so much to literature, made such a progress in it, and sustained so good a character, that notwithstanding his want of an university education, he was thought worthy of being admitted into holy orders, at the usual time of obtaining them, and accordingly was ordained by Dr. Sherlock, at that time bishop of London. The first preferment he received in the church was, a small curacy of thirty pounds a year in Wales. To that remote part of the country, he carried his wife, and having taken a little house, he applied himself to the duties of his station. with cheerfulness and assiduity. His behaviour, we are told, gained him the love and esteem of his parishioners; and his sermons, though somewhat raised above the level of his audience, were commended and followed. His chief disturbance was the smallness of his income, which he must have found very scanty, even if he had possessed œconomy; but that was no part of his character. To supply therefore, the deficiency of his scanty salary, he entered into a branch of trade which he hoped might raise him to competence, and perhaps to riches; but which, in fact, involved him in debts that long kept him in perplexity and trouble

The business in which he engaged was that of keeping a cyderware-house, with a view of vending that commodity in the different parts of the neighbouring country. A man of genius, and a poet, was but ill-qualified for such an uudertaking. Mr. Churchill could not condescend to the patience and frugality which are necessary in the common course of merchandize, where small gains are to be quietly expected, and carefully accumulated. A kind of rural bankruptcy was therefore the consequence of the at tempt.

The ill success of Churchill's trading project brought him back to London; and his father dying soon after, he succeeded him as curate and lecturer in the parish of St. John's. The emoluments of that situation not amounting to quite an hundred pounds a year, in order to improve his finances, he undertook to teach young ladies to read and write English with propriety and correctness; and was engaged for this purpose in the boarding-school of Mrs. Dennis. In this new employment Mr. Churchill conducted himself with all the decorum becoming his clerical profession. Still, however, his mode of living bore no proportion to his income; so that he contracted a variety of debts, which he was totally incapable of paying, and he seemed in great danger of being lodged in a jail. From that evil, however, he was relieved by the benevolent interposition of Dr. Lloyd, the second master of Westminster-school, and father of Robert Lloyd, the poet. The doctor undertook to treat with Churchill's creditors, and succeeded in engaging them to consent to a composition of five shillings in the pound. But it is supposed, upon good grounds, that Churchill afterwards paid at least a part of his creditors the full value of their debts.

Though Churchill had not hitherto appeared in the world under the character of an author, he was known among his acquaintance to be a man of a very vigorous imagination, and a strong understanding; and he was in the habits of intimacy with Thornton, Colman, and Lloyd, who had already begun to make a considerable figure in the republic of letters. He had also been a diligent frequenter of the theatre, and had bestowed great attention on stage representation: so that he was well qualified for delineating the excellencies and defects of the actors, which the vigour of his fan