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notes to the text Volume 1 Title Page “Et genus & virtus, nisi cum re, vilior alga est”: “And yet birth and worth, without substance, are more paltry than seaweed” (Horace, Satires 2.5.8). All translations of Horace and other classical authors are from the Loeb editions (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1912–). Preface 1. “Romance”: Here Smollett joins in the emerging mid-eighteenth-century debate about the origins and generic categories of fiction and especially the distinction between the romance and the new species of fiction that would come to be called the novel. The best known of the many contemporary essays on the subject are Henry Fielding, preface to Joseph Andrews (1742), and Samuel Johnson, Rambler, no. 4 (31 March 1750). Like Fielding, Smollett selfconsciously asserts the legitimacy of the novel as a genre and defends its literary pedigree in detail; in claiming also that his fiction is morally edifying for his readers, Smollett speaks to Johnson’s and others’ concerns about the moral impact of the new fiction. See also Smollett’s discussion of the novel in Ferdinand Count Fathom, 4–6, 9–10. 2. “fable in prose”: From classical times down through the eighteenth century, fables were usually written in verse; the premier modern example was Dryden’s Fables Ancient and Modern (London, 1700), a popular work, frequently reprinted, most recently in 1745. The phrase also echoes Fielding’s key term, “the comic epic-poem in prose [i.e., the novel],” in the preface to Joseph Andrews. 3. “Xenophon”: Xenophon, Athenian writer (b. c. 430 bc). His Cyropaedia, or Education of Cyrus is a moralistic narrative of the career of Cyrus the Great (?–529 bc), founder of the Achaemenid Persian Empire, which eventually stretched from the Mediterranean to the Hindu Kush. 4. “irruption of the Barbarians into Europe”: A reference to the invasion of Western Europe by the Huns, Vandals, Visigoths, Ostrogoths, and other peoples in the fifth century, leading to the fall of Rome in 476 and commonly seen as ushering in what Smollett terms the “dark ages,” which lasted more than five hundred years. Smollett seems to share the traditional view that European culture only slowly revived, beginning in about the eleventh century. 5. “negromancy”: Necromancy, black magic or enchantment, especially conjuring the dead. 6. “Cervantes”: Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (1547–1616), author of Don Quixote (Madrid, 1605–15), which Smollett was already at work translating in 1748. Smollett’s translation was published in 1755 and went through many editions, remaining popular well into the nineteenth century. For the influence of Cervantes on Smollett, see Boucé, 71–99. 7. “assume the sock”: Turn it into comedy (OED), an allusion to the practice in ancient Greek theater of comic actors wearing a sock or light shoe to distinguish their genre from tragedy, for which actors wore a buskin, or high, thick-soled boot. 8. “Le Sage . . . Adventures of Gil Blas”: L’Histoire de Gil Blas de Santillane, 4 vols. (Paris, 1715–35), 390 Notes to Pages 4–7 by Alain René Le Sage (1668–1747). Smollett’s translation, TheAdventures of Gil Blas of Santillane , was published in October 1748, some nine months after Roderick Random, though, as was customary, it bore the upcoming new year, 1749, on the title page. For the influence of Le Sage on Smollett, see Boucé, 71–78, 81–83, 85–90. 9. “advantages of birth”: Birth into the gentry, which would entitle Roderick to expect a superior education. 10. “I have not deviated . . . to avoid personal satire”: Compare with Smollett’s letter to his friend Alexander Carlyle (7 June 1748), in which he denies aiming his satire in Roderick Random at any real people: “I am not a little mortified to find the Characters strangely misapplied to Particular Men whom I never had the least Intention to ridicule” (Letters, 7). See also Boucé’s detailed treatment of the relation between Smollett’s life and his novels (40–67). 11. “North-Briton”: Scot. 12. “unmeaning oaths”: Curses and obscenities uttered more for their sound than their sense, as a habit of speech rather than for their significance. 13. “expletives”: Meaningless exclamations, profane oaths (OED). Apologue 1. “conversation-piece”: A kind of genre painting representing a group of figures, popular from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries. For an earlier use of the conversation piece in a literary context, see Richard Steele, Spectator, no. 474 (3 September 1712). 2. “a bear, an owl, a monkey, and an ass...

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