The History and Remarkable Life
of the truly honourable
Colonel Jacque
Commonly call’d
Colonel Jack

INTRODUCTION

Smollett bears witness to the popularity of Defoe’s Colonel Jacque.In the sixty-second chapter of Roderick Random, the hero of thatnovel is profoundly impressed by the genius of the disappointed poet,Melopoyn, the story of whose tragedy is Smollett’s acrimonious versionof the fate of his own first literary effort, The Regicide. Melopoyntells Random that while waiting in vain for his tragedy to beproduced, he wrote some pastorals which were rejected by onebookseller after another. A first said merely that the pastorals wouldnot serve; a second advised Melopoyn to offer in their place something“satirical or luscious;” and a third asked if he “had got never apiece of secret history, thrown into a series of letters, or a volumeof adventures, such as those of Robinson Crusoe and Colonel Jack, or acollection of conundrums, wherewith to entertain the plantations?”Smollett probably wrote this passage some time in the year 1747, forRoderick Random was published in January, 1748. It was twenty-fouryears earlier—December twentieth, 1722—that Colonel Jacque hadbeen publi

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