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Smolensk (Government of Russia)

a government of Russia.

It is hilly in the N., and level in the S., and has an area of 21,624 square miles.

It is watered by the Dnieper and Düna and several tributaries of the Volga and the Oka. Forests cover one-third of the soil. Manufacturing industries are developing and there is also considerable stock-raising. Oil, textiles, and lumber are among the chief products. The government was a mediæval principality and is mentioned in 1054. Tartars took possession of it and Lithuania held it in the time at Bath, but gained save material for future satire, especially on the medical profession. With his return to London in 1753, he gave himself up to literature, and produced "Ferdinand Count Fathom," which shows an increase in power. He spent extravagantly, and in the effort to get money made a lively but inaccurate version of "Don Quixote" (1755). After a visit to Scotland he became the chief director of the new "Critical Review" (1756), the severity of which brought a number of reprisals on his head; and in 1757, he published a "History of England" in four volumes. After a period of hack work for the booksellers, in the course of which he served three months in prison for slandering an admiral in the "Critical Review," he joined the staff of the new "British Magazine" (1760) in which appeared "Sir Launcelot Greaves," a weak imitation of "Don Quixote." Two years later he became editor of the "Briton," a weekly periodical started in defence of Lord Bute, which evoked Wilkes's notorious "North Briton."

In 1763, Smollett, having lost his only child, ill, in debt and harassed by enemies, SMOOT decided to leave England with his wife, and for two years made his home at Nice.

After a tour of Italy he returned to London and published his "Travels." A visit to Scotland, where he was made much of in the then brilliant society of Edinburgh, and to Bath, improved his health for a time, and he produced in 1769 his coarse satire, "The History and Adventures of an Atom," dealing with politics in England during the previous fifteen years. At the end of the year he went to seek health at Lucca and Pisa, where he wrote his masterpiece, "Humphrey Clinker." Meantime he was growing weaker, and on Sept. 17, 1771, he died in his villa near Leghorn.