It is safe to say that if a Sir Launcelot had appeared in fiction one or two generations earlier, had the fact been recognised (which is not indubitable) that he bore the name of the most celebrated knight of later Arthurian romance, he would have been nothing but a burlesque figure.

But in 1760, literary taste was changing.

Romanticism in literature had begun to come to the front again, as Smollett had already shown by his romantic leanings in Count Fathom.

With it there came interest in the Middle Ages and in the most popular fiction of the Middle Ages, the "greatest of all poetic subjects," according to Tennyson, the stories of Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table, which, for the better part of a century, had been deposed from their old-time place of honour.

These stories, however, were as yet so imperfectly known--and only to a few--that the most to be said is that some connection between their reviving popularity and the name of Smollett's knight-errant hero is not impossible.
Apart from this, Sir Launcelot Greaves is interesting historically as ending Smollett's comparatively long silence in novel-writing after the publication of Fathom in 1753.