.

the solemn silence, and lonely situation of the place, conspired with the occasion of his coming, and the dismal images of his fancy, to produce a real rapture of gloomy expectation, which the whole world could not have persuaded him to disappoint.

The clock struck twelve, the owl screeched from the ruined battlement, the door was opened by the sexton, who, by the light of a glimmering taper, conducted the despairing lover to a dreary aisle, and stamped upon the ground with his foot, saying, 'Here the young lady lies interred.'" We have here such an amount of the usual romantic machinery of the "grave-yard" school of poets--that school of which Professor W.L.
Phelps calls Young, in his Night Thoughts, the most "conspicuous exemplar"-- that one is at first inclined to think Smollett poking fun at it.

The context, however, seems to prove that he was perfectly serious.
It is interesting, then, as well as surprising, to find traces of the romantic spirit in his fiction over ten years before Walpole's Castle of Otranto.

It is also interesting to find so much melodramatic feeling in him, because it makes stronger the connection between him and his nineteenth-century disciple, Dickens.
From all that I have said, it must not be thought that the usual Smollett is always, or almost always, absent from Count Fathom.