And
Smollett --who clearly hates America anyway --would have sold lots of records and canonized himself as a true-blue social-justice warrior.
Police said
Smollett, who is black and gay, told them the attackers also yelled he was in "MAGA country," an apparent reference to President Donald Trump's "Make America Great Again" campaign slogan that some critics have said is racist and discriminatory.
Smollett, 36, who is black and openly gay and plays a gay musician on the Fox network hip-hop drama "Empire," was charged last month in a single-count criminal complaint with making a false report to police, defined under Illinois law as a form of disorderly conduct.
Smollett was beaten at around 2:00 am by two attackers who yelled "racial and homophobic slurs" while he walked downtown in the third-biggest US city, said police, who did not name him but said the victim was an actor from "Empire."
Smollett's fellow cast members and production company identified him as the victim.
Walpole's fondness for "the inanimate part of Rome" is contrasted with his aversion to "the animate part", in which he foreshadows the "splenetic" type of traveller, best exemplified by Tobias
Smollett.
The indefatigable research of
Smollett's main twentieth-century biographer, the late Lewis M.
Tobias
Smollett (1721-1771) was the Scottish author best known for such picaresque novels as The Adventures of Roderick Random and The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle but also was an enormously popular historian of England.
Only two essays in the collection give a nod to the fact that they are parts of a larger whole, the essay on Roy Campbell, by the editors themselves, and Christopher Ehland's essay on
Smollett. Von Koppenfels notes that until well into the eighteenth century English readers of Don Quixote primarily reacted, as did Butler, to the foolishness of the protagonist; only later, in writers like Fielding and Sterne, did the Don's virtues come to be appreciated.
Thousands of pounds have also been spent refurbishing a statue of
Smollett and building a protective wall complete with inscription around it.
All were therefore available to
Smollett. It should be added that scholars have observed minor raids on Swift's work on previous occasions, including a possible recollection of A Modest Defence of Punning in one of Win Jenkins's verbal distortions.
Indeed, I was tempted to call it a good old-fashioned critical reading of
Smollett, but those words might not have the honeyed pervasiveness that they once had.