But his unhappy tendency to enter for the same stakes as his great forerunners makes it almost impossible not to compare _Ferdinand Fathom_ with _Jonathan Wild_: and the effect is very damaging to the Count.

Much of the book is dull: and Fathom's conversation is (to adopt a cant word) extremely unconvincing.

The fact seems to be that Smollett had run his picaresque vein dry, as far as it connected itself with mere rascality of various kinds, and he did well to close it.

He had published three novels in five years: he waited seven before his next, and then eleven more before his last.
A qualified apology has been hinted above for _Sir Launcelot Greaves_.
It is undoubtedly evidence of the greatness of _Don Quixote_ that there should have been so many direct imitations of it by persons of genius and talent: but this particular instance is unfortunate to the verge of the preposterous, if not over it.

The eighteenth century was indeed almost the capital time of English eccentricity: and it was also a time of licence which sometimes looked very like lawlessness.