Renton Primary school

Image: © Eddie Mackinnon Taken: 13 May 2007

Renton Primary school, War Memorial and the Tobias Smollet Monument. Tobias George Smollet was born at Dalquhurn, Dunbartonshire. He was educated at Dumbarton and at Glasgow University. He served an apprenticeship to a Glasgow surgeon, but except for a period spent as surgeon in the navy, 1739-44, he only practised in a desultory fashion. Smollett died at Leghorn, September 17, 1771. He was an unequal writer, but in parts he attains a higher level than even his contemporary Fielding, and created a gallery of characters seldom surpassed. In his book "Discovering Scottish Writers" Louis Stott describes Smollet as the "first Scottish novelist and he has never been surpassed." A monument to the novelist was erected in 1774 and now stands outside Renton Primary School. The inscription, written in Latin jointly by Dr Samuel Johnson, Professor George Stuart of Edinburgh and Mr Ramsay of Ochtertyre, themselves literary giants, a translation of the inscription on the wall reads: Stay Traveller If elegance of taste and wit, if fertility of genius and an unrivalled talent in delineating the characters of mankind, have ever attracted your admiration, pause awhile on the memory of Tobias Smollett, MD, one more than commonly endowed with these virtues which, in a man or citizen, you would praise or imitate. Who, having secured the applause of posterity by a variety of literary abilities and a peculiar felicity of composition was, by a rapid and cruel distemper, snatched from this world in the fifty-first year of his age.

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