The success of smollett's Humphry Clinker has been attributed largely to the novel's central character, the misanthropic sentimentalist from Wales, Matthew Bramble. In Matt Bramble, Smollett finally created an acceptable, nonmalicious satirist who could express benevolently and yet virulently the satire he had been striving to write in his earlier novels. Matt's misanthropy, which evokes from him the invective of the traditional railing satirist, derives from several interrelated causes. In the first place, Matt is a valetudinarian who has not dwelt in the busy haunts of men “within these last thirty years.” Matt often appears as somewhat of a querulus laudator temporis acti, even though he wishes to deny it. He admits that the “rotten parts of human nature” have probably always existed, but his sudden reappearance into the world suggests to him that mankind has “contracted an extraordinary degree of depravity” since his youth. In the second place, Matt suffers physically from the gout and the spleen, so that, as his nephew, Jery, writes, “his peevishness arises partly from bodily pain, and partly from a natural excess of mental sensibility” (xi, 20). Matt is, then, in part an eighteenth-century splenetic humorist whose misanthropy can be traced medically to the humorous melancholy cynics and misanthropes of the Renaissance character-books and Stuart drama. In Con-greve's words, the “character of a splenetic and peevish Humour” displays itself in a “satirical wit.”