Smollett's reputation has been of course always mainly, indeed almost wholly, that of a novelist, though his miscellaneous work is of no small merit. But that he wrote his best novel in letters and that perhaps it is one of the best so written, has been mentioned. His Travels are also of the letter-kind—especially of the ill-tempered-letter-kind. Of his actual correspondence we have not much. But the following has always seemed to the present writer an admirable and agreeably characteristic example. Smollett's outwardly surly but inwardly kindly temper, and his command of phrase ("great Cham of literature" has, as we say now, "stuck") both appear in it: and the matter is interesting. We have, so far as I remember, no record of any interview between Johnson and Smollett, though they must have met. They were both Tories, and Johnson wrote in the Critical Review which Smollett edited. But Johnson's gibes at Scotland are not likely to have conciliated Smollett: and there was just that combination of likeness and difference between the two men which (especially as the one was as typically English as the other was Scotch) generates incompatibility. How victoriously Wilkes got over Johnson's personal dislike to him all readers of Boswell know: and it is one of the most amusing passages in the book. On this occasion, too, he did what was asked of him. "Frank" had not been pressed, but had joined for some reason of his own. However, he accepted his discharge and returned to his master, staying till that master's death.