The Expedition of Humphry Clinker

106 TOBIAS SMOLLETT
street who will either flatter him in private, or mount the public
rostrum as his panegyrist, he damns all the other writers of the age,
with the utmost insolence and rancour—One is a blunderbuss, as
being a native of Ireland; another, a half-starved louse of literature,
from the banks of the Tweed; a third, an ass, because he enjoys a
pension from the government; a fourth, the very angel of dullness;
because he succeeded in a species of writing in which this Aris-
tarchus had failed; a fifth, who presumed to make strictures upon
one of his performances, he holds as a bug in criticism, whose
stench is more offensive than his sting—In short, except himself
and his myrmidons, there is not a man of genius or learning in the
three kingdoms. As for the success of those, who have written
without the pale of this confederacy, he imputes it entirely to want
of taste in the public; not considering, that to the approbation of
that very tasteless public, he himself owes all the consequence he
has in life.
Those originals are not fit for conversation. If they would main-
tain the advantage they have gained by their writing, they should
never appear but upon paper—For my part, I am shocked to find
a man have sublime ideas in his head, and nothing but illiberal
sentiments in his heart—The human soul will be generally found
most defective in the article of candour— I am inclined to think,
no mind was ever wholly exempt from envy; which, perhaps, may
have been implanted, as an instinct essential to our nature. I am
afraid we sometimes palliate this vice, under the specious name of
emulation. I have known a person remarkably generous, humane,
moderate, and apparently self-denying, who could not hear even
a friend commended, without betraying marks of uneasiness; as if
that commendation had implied an odious comparison to his pre-
judice, and every wreath of praise added to the other’s character,
was a garland plucked from his own temples. This is a malignant
species of jealousy, of which I stand acquitted in my own con-
science—Whether it is a vice, or an infirmity, I leave you to
inquire.
There is another point, which I would much rather see deter-
mined; whether the world was always as contemptible, as it appears
to me at present?—If the morals of mankind have not contracted
an extraordinary degree of depravity, within these thirty years,
then must I be infected with the common vice of old men, difficilis,
querulus, laudator temporis acti; or, which is more probable, the