Excerpt from The Works of Tobias Smollett, M.D, Vol. 1 of 8: With Memoirs of His Life; To Which Is Prefixed a View of the Commencement and Progress of Romance
But yet he was perhaps more remarkable for acute ness of observation and well-ordered retentiveness of perception than for originality of invention. In the instinctive conception of things, as it regards the passions of the human mind and their diverse modes of influencing character, he is not on a par with Richardson. In the opinion of competent judges, indeed, even Fielding was not possessed of so self dependent a genius in regard to spontaneousness of invention and richness of imagination as the author of 'clarissa.' Their conceptions of character were founded on the actual occurrences of life, as they themselves had witnessed them; his, in a great mea sure, sprang from the fertile soil of his own' mind, in the absence of their wide and varied experience of those occurrences and of the living features of the persons engaged in them. Yet he was so thoroughly versed in the inmost recesses 'of the human mind, and in the various passions that emanate from them, that, in describing the outward manifestation of those pas sions, which compose the infinitely varied idiosyn oracies of mankind, he exhibited the hand of a great master. But, owing perhaps to his having paid his devotions too exclusively to the 'idols of the Den,' his portraitures of human nature, as it displays itself in manners, were less like those diverse characters we meet with in the changeful affairs of life, than those of his rivals.
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