As for the description of the parliamentary election, it is by no means the least graphic of its kind in the fiction of the last two centuries.

The speech of Sir Valentine Quickset, the fox-hunting Tory candidate, is excellent, both for its brevity and for its simplicity.

Any of his bumpkin audience could understand perfectly his principal points: that he spends his estate of "vive thousand clear" at home in old English hospitality; that he comes of pure old English stock; that he hates all foreigners, not excepting those from Hanover; and that if he is elected, he "will cross the ministry in everything, as in duty bound." In the characters, likewise, though less than in the scenes just spoken of, we recognise something of the old Smollett touch.

True, it is not high praise to say of Miss Aurelia Darnel that she is more alive, or rather less lifeless, than Smollett's heroines have been heretofore.
Nor can we give great praise to the characterisation of Sir Launcelot.
Yet if less substantial than Smollett's roystering heroes, he is more distinct than de Melvil in Fathom, the only one of our author's earlier young men, by the way, (with the possible exception of Godfrey Gauntlet) who can stand beside Greaves in never failing to be a gentleman.

It is a pity, when Greaves's character is so lovable, and save for his knight-errantry, so well conceived, that the image is not more distinct.
Crowe is distinct enough, however, though not quite consistently drawn.
There is justice in Scott's objection [Tobias Smollett in Biographical and Critical Notices of Eminent Novelists] that nothing in the seaman's "life.