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The charge that Smollett knew no Spanish can be laid to rest with some confidence. There is much evidence that he understood Spanish and had studied Don Quixote in the original.

Simply considering the general question of Smollett's facility with languages, there is every probability he could have acquired a reasonable competence in Spanish in a relatively short time. As a boy he was taught Latin by John Love, headmaster of the Dumbarton grammar school and a man respected as a classical scholar and pedagogue. At Dumbarton not only the lectures but the dialogues between student and master were in Latin; indeed, if a boy slipped into the vernacular in class he could be whipped.[36] Smollett learned his lessons well. As an adult he read Claudian aloud, in Latin, to his friend William Huggins;[37] and during his travels in France he was capable of writing, entirely in Latin, a lengthy diagnosis of his ailments addressed to the eminent physician, Dr. Fizès, who, Smollett scornfully remarks, could answer him only in French.[38] That Smollett read French easily is clear not only from his translations of Le Sage, Fénelon and Voltaire, but also from the notes to his Don Quixote, for which he made extensive use of Louis Moréri's Grand dictionnaire historique, and also (and much more impressively) of M. de la Curne de Ste. Palaye's "Mémoires sur l'ancienne chevalerie,"[39] in which many passages consist of quotations from medieval sources. From his correspondence with William Huggins, the translator of Ariosto and Dante, we also know that Smollett had a sufficient command of Italian to be able to read Francesco Berni's Orlando innamorato as well as Ariosto's Orlando furioso in the original: "Since I parted from you in the Country," Smollett wrote Huggins in November 1759, "I have read Berni and the orlando furioso in the Italian from one end to the other, and was indeed become a sort of a Knight errant in Imagination . . . ."[40] Later, anticipating his journey to Italy, he wrote William Hunter that he was "giving my whole attention to the Italian Language which I think I shall be able to speak tolerably in six months."[41]

Linguistic facility such as this, at least in the romance languages, did not seem particularly extraordinary to the educated class of Great Britain in the eighteenth century, most of whom attended schools where, as Fielding put it, a boy had Latin "inoculated into his Tail."[42] Fielding, for one, considered

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this sort of aptitude for languages completely unremarkable. From Lisbon where he planned to write a history of Portugal, he wrote his half-brother John asking that he send him "a conversible Man," someone of learning and good humor, to be his companion and amanuensis: it would be an advantage, of course, if the man understood Portuguese or Spanish, "which," however, Fielding assured his brother, "if he doth not, he may easily, if he hath the Latin Grammatical Rudiments, learn . . . ."[43]

It is not unlikely, then, that Smollett could have acquired a competence in Spanish without great difficulty. But the case for his knowledge of the language needn't rest on probabilities alone. In letters to friends Smollett expressly stated his qualifications both to undertake the translation of Don Quixote and to serve as British consul at Madrid. In June 1748, before beginning the work, he wrote Alexander Carlyle: "I have contracted with two Booksellers to translate Don Quixote from the Spanish Language, which I have studied some time."[44] How long, one wonders, was "some time"? If Shebbeare's story is true that Smollett had studied Spanish in Brussels for six weeks, the period in question--to judge from what we know of his movements--would probably have been a time in the early 1740s. Later, in a letter of December 1762, Smollett informed John Home that "[i]n the last ministry" (probably in the autumn of 1759) he had "made some advances towards the Consulship of Madrid for which I thought myself in some respects qualified, as I understood the Spanish Language and was personally known to Mr. Wall, the minister of his catholic majesty."[45] That he did not mean to deceive his friends by pretending to knowledge he did not have is certain from the testimony of John Moore, one of Smollett's closest friends and the editor of his Works (1797). In his biographical sketch of Smollett, Moore takes up the question of his competence to undertake the translation of Don Quixote; his observations on the subject are eminently sane and to our purpose:

[Smollett] has been accused [Moore writes] of not having had a sufficient knowledge of the Spanish language when he undertook that task. To perform it perfectly, it would be requisite that the translator had lived some years in Spain; that he had obtained not only a knowledge of the language of the court and polite society, but an acquaintance also with the vulgar idioms, the proverbs in use among the populace, and the various customs of the country to which allusions are made. It would likewise be requisite that the translator of Cervantes should be a man of genius, of a great native fund of humour, of a complete knowledge of his own language, and the power of adopting the solemn, the familiar, the ironical, and the burlesque phraseology as they suited the occasion. It will probably be long before all those requisites are united in one man, and that he shall be inclined to translate Don Quixote. Dr. Smollett possessed, in an eminent degree, the qualities last mentioned; and although he never was in Spain, he certainly had a very considerable knowledge of the language; that he had been at pains to inform himself of many of the obsolete customs of the country appears by the notes to his translation.[46]

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To the testimony of Smollett and his friend that he understood the language of Cervantes, we may add other clear signs from outside the text of the translation itself that he read Don Quixote in the original--read it perhaps with some difficulty, but read it nevertheless. Included in the list of books seized by the customs when Smollett landed at Boulogne to begin his travels in 1763 are two copies of Cervantes' masterpiece: one a translation of Don Quixote in four volumes (probably the second edition of his own version [1761]); the other, Don Quixote in the original Spanish. He also carried with him five dictionaries: in Greek, Latin, French, Italian--and in Spanish.[47] Incidental passages scattered throughout Smollett's writings also suggest that he was well acquainted with the language of Cervantes. He understood, for instance, the characteristics of Spanish pronunciation, and he could recall at will some of Cervantes' more colorful locutions in Don Quixote. In Italy on his travels Smollett commented on "the pronunciation of the Tuscans," which he found "disagreeably guttural: the letters C and G they pronounce with an aspiration, which hurts the ear of an Englishman; and is, I think, rather rougher than that of the X, in Spanish. It sounds as if the speaker had lost his palate."[48] In Adventures of an Atom the mob, "like the cow-heel in Don Quixote [II.iv.7; 2: 374-75][49] . . . seemed to cry, Comenme, comenme; Come eat me, come, eat me."[50] And, chiding his friend Huggins for complaining that he was oppressed with business, Smollett recalled one of Cervantes' favorite expressions ("tortas y pan pintado") that recurs in Don Quixote (e.g. I.iii.3; 1: 94): "You talk of the Pistrinum or Cart's Tail; that is, according to the Spanish Proverb, no more than panpintado, Cakes and Gingerbread to what I undergo"[51]--it is worth noting, moreover, that Smollett's translation of pan pintado is a closer English equivalent than any previous attempt (e.g. Jarvis: "tarts and cheese-cakes"), and was adopted by Putnam.

Later, we will consider what the translation itself reveals about Smollett's command of the language of Cervantes. For now it should be clear that, as he claimed, he had studied Spanish and was entirely capable of reading it.