Tobias Smollett

Travels through France & Italy Tobias Smollett

Book Excerpt: ...manner, power of will, anthropological interest, self-effacement in view of some great objects--all these qualities have made travel-books live. One knows pretty nearly the books that one is prepared to re-read in this department of literature. Marco Polo, Herodotus, a few sections in Hakluyt, Dampier and Defoe, the early travellers in Palestine, Commodore Byron's Travels, Curzon and Lane, Doughty's Arabia Deserta, Mungo Park, Dubois, Livingstone's Missionary Travels, something of Borrow (fact or fable), Hudson and Cunninghame Graham, Bent, Bates and Wallace, The Crossing of Greenland, Eothen, the meanderings of Modestine, The Path to Rome, and all, or almost all, of E. F. Knight. I have run through most of them at one breath, and the sum total would not bend a moderately stout bookshelf. How many high-sounding works on the other hand, are already worse than dead, or, should we say, better dead? The case of Smollett's Travels, there is good reason to hope, is only one of suspended animation. To come t...