strengthen. His father, who was steward of the Kentish estates of Lord Barnard (afterwards Earl of Darlington), possessed a property in the neighbourhood of Shipbourne of about 300l. a year; but it was so much encumbered by debt that his widow was obliged to sell it at his death at a considerable loss. This happened in our poet's eleventh year, at which time he was taken from the school of Maidstone, in Kent, and placed at that of Durham. Some of his paternal relations resided in the latter place. An ancestor of the family, Mr. Peter Smart, had been a prebendary of Durham in the reign of Charles I., and was regarded by the Puritans as a proto-martyr in their cause, having been degraded, fined, and imprisoned for eleven years, on account of a Latin poem which he published in 1643, and which the high-church party chose to consider as a libel. What services young Smart met with at Durham from his father's relations we are not informed; but he was kindly received by Lord Barnard, at his seat of Raby Castle; and through the interest of his lordship's family obtained the patronage of the Duchess of Cleveland, who allowed him for several years an annuity of forty pounds. In his seventeenth year he went from the school of Durham to the University of Cambridge, where he obtained a fellowship of Pembroke Hall, and took the degree of master of arts. About the time of his obtaining his fellowship he wrote a farce, entitled 'The Grateful Fair, or the Trip to Cambridge,' which was acted in the hall of his college. Of this production only a few songs and the mock-heroic soliloquy of the Princess Periwinkle have been preserved; but from the draught of the plot given by his biographer the comic ingenuity of the piece seems not to have been remarkable. He distinguished himself at the university both by his Latin and English verses: among the former was his translation of Pope's Ode on St. Cecilia's Day,' on the subject of which, and of other versions which he projected from the same author, he had the honour of corresponding with Pope. He also obtained, during several years, the Seatonian prize for poetical essays on the attributes of the Deity. He afterwards printed those compositions, and probably rested on them his chief claims to the name of a poet. In one of them he rather too loftily denominates himself "the poet of his God." From his verses upon 'The Eagle chained in a College Court,' in which he addresses the bird,

6

X

"Thou type of wit and sense, confined,

Chain'd by th' oppressors of the mind,"

it does not appear that he had great respect for his college teachers; nor is it pretended that the oppressors of the mind, as he calls them, had much reason to admire the application of his eagle genius to the graver studies of the university; for the life which he led was so dissipated as to oblige him to sequester his fellowship for tavern debts.

In the year 1753 he quitted college, upon his marriage with a Miss Carnan, the stepdaughter of Mr. Newbery, the bookseller. With Newbery he had already been engaged in several schemes of authorship, having been a frequent contributor to 'The Student, or Oxford and Cambridge Miscellany,' and having besides conducted 'The Midwife, or Old Woman's Magazine.' He had also published a collection of his poems; and having either detected or suspected that the notorious Sir John (formerly Dr.) Hill had reviewed them unfavourably, he proclaimed war with the paper knight, and wrote a satire on him, entitled "The Hilliad.' One of the bad effects of 'The Dunciad' had been to afford to indignant witlings an easily copied example of allegory and vituperation. Every versifier who could echo Pope's numbers, and add an iad to the name of the man or thing that offended him, thought himself a Pope for the time being, and, however dull, an hereditary champion against the powers of Dulness. Sir John Hill, who wrote also a book upon Cookery, replied in a 'Smartiad;' and probably both of his books were in their different ways useful to the pastry-cooks. If the town was interested in such a warfare, it was to be pitied for the dearth of amusement. But though Smart was thus engaged, his manners were so agreeable and his personal character so inoffensive as to find friends among some of the most eminent men of his day, such as Dr. Johnson, Garrick, and Dr. Burney. Distress brought on by imprudence, and insanity produced by distress, soon made him too dependent on the kindness of his friends. Some of them contributed money, Garrick gave him a free benefit at Drury Lane Theatre, and Dr. Johnson furnished him with several papers for one of his periodical publications. During the confinement which his alienation of mind rendered necessary, he was deprived of pen and ink and paper; and used to indent his poetical thoughts with a key on the wainscot of the

wall. On his recovery he resumed his literary employments, and for some time conducted himself with industry. Among the compositions of his saner period was a verse translation of the Fables of Phædrus, executed with tolerable spirit and accuracy. But he gave a lamentable proof of his declining powers in his translation of the Psalms and in his 'Parables of Jesus Christ, done into familiar verse,' which were dedicated to Master Bonnel Thornton, a child in the nursery. He was also committed for debt to the King's Bench prison, within the rules of which he died, after a short illness, of a disorder in the liver.

If Smart had any talent above mediocrity, it was a slight turn for humour.* In his serious attempts at poetry, he reminds us

of those

"whom Phoebus in his ire

Hath blasted with poetic fire."

The history of his life is but melancholy. Such was his habitual imprudence that he would bring home guests to dine at his house, when his wife and family had neither a meal nor money to provide one. He engaged, on one occasion, to write The Universal Visitor,' and for no other work, by a contract which was to last ninety-nine years. The publication stopped at the end of two years. During his bad health he was advised to walk for exercise, and he used to walk for that purpose to the alehouse; but he was always carried back.

THOMAS GRAY.

[Born, 1716. Died, 1771.]

MR. MATTHIAS, the accomplished editor of Gray, in delineating his poetical character, dwells with peculiar emphasis on the charm of his lyrical versification, which he justly ascribes to the naturally exquisite ear of the poet having been trained to consummate skill in harmony, by long familiarity with the finest models in the most poetical of all languages, the Greek and Italian. "He was indeed," says Mr. Matthias, "the inventor, it may be strictly said so, of a new lyrical metre in his own tongue. The peculiar formation of his strophe, antistrophe, and * An instance of his wit is given in his extemporary spondaic on the three fat beadles of the university :

66

Pinguia tergeminorum abdomina bedellorum."

epode was unknown before him; and it could only have been planned and perfected by a master genius, who was equally skilled by long and repeated study, and by transfusion into his own mind of the lyric compositions of ancient Greece and of the higher 'canzoni' of the Tuscan poets, 'di maggior carme e suono,' as it is termed in the commanding energy of their language. Antecedent to 'The Progress of Poetry' and to 'The Bard,' no such lyrics had appeared. There is not an ode in the English language which is constructed like these two compositions; with such power, such majesty, and such sweetness, with such proportioned pauses and just cadences, with such regulated measures of the verse, with such master principles of lyrical art displayed and exemplified, and, at the same time, with such a concealment of the difficulty, which is lost in the softness and uninterrupted flowing of the lines in each stanza, with such a musical magic, that every verse in it in succession dwells on the ear and harmonizes with that which has gone before."

So far as the versification of Gray is concerned, I have too much pleasure in transcribing these sentiments of Mr. Matthias to encumber them with any qualifying remarks of my own on that particular subject; but I dissent from him in his more general estimate of Gray's genius, when he afterwards speaks of "second to none.'

it as

In order to distinguish the positive merits of Gray from the loftier excellence ascribed to him by his editor, it is unnecessary to resort to the criticisms of Dr. Johnson. Some of them may be just, but their general spirit is malignant and exaggerated. When we look to such beautiful passages in Gray's odes as his Indian poet amidst the forests of Chili, or his prophet bard scattering dismay on the array of Edward and his awestruck chieftains on the side of Snowdon-when we regard his elegant taste, not only gathering classical flowers from the Arno and Ilyssus, but revealing glimpses of barbaric grandeur amidst the darkness of Runic mythology-when we recollect his "thoughts that breathe, and words that burn”—his rich personifications, his broad and prominent images, and the crowning charm of his versification, we may safely pronounce that Johnson's critical fulminations have passed over his lyrical character with more noise than destruction.

At the same time it must be recollected that his beauties are

rather crowded into a short compass than numerous in their absolute sum. The spirit of poetry, it is true, is not to be computed mechanically by tale or measure; and abundance of it may enter into a very small bulk of language. But neither language nor poetry are compressible beyond certain limits; and the poet whose thoughts have been concentrated into a few pages cannot be expected to have given a very full or interesting image of life in his compositions. A few odes, splendid, spirited, and harmonious, but by no means either faultless or replete with subjects that come home to universal sympathy, and an Elegy, unrivalled as it is in that species of composition,—these achievements of our poet form, after all, no such extensive grounds of originality as to entitle their author to be spoken of as in genius "second to none." He had not, like Goldsmith, the art of unbending from grace to levity. Nothing can be more unexhilarating than his attempts at wit and humour, either in his letters or lighter poetry. In his graver and better strains some of the most exquisite ideas are his own; and his taste, for the most part, adorned and skilfully recast the forms of thought and expression which he borrowed from others. If his works often "whisper whence they stole their balmy spoils," it is not from plagiarism, but from a sensibility that sought and selected the finest impressions of genius from other gifted minds. But still there is a higher appearance of culture than fertility, of acquisition than originality, in Gray. He is not that being of independent imagination, that native and creative spirit, of whom we should say that he would have plunged into the flood of poetry had there been none to leap before him. Nor were his learned acquisitions turned to the very highest account. He was the architect of no poetical design of extensive or intricate compass. One noble historical picture, it must be confessed, he has left in the opening scene of his 'Bard;' and the sequel of that ode, though it is not perhaps the most interesting prophecy of English history which we could suppose Inspiration to pronounce, contains many richly poetical conceptions. It is, however, exclusively in the opening of 'The Bard' that Gray can be ever said to have portrayed a grand, distinct, and heroic scene of fiction.*

* [Gray's Elegy pleased instantly and eternally. His Odes did not, nor do they yet, please like his Elegy.-Byron, Works, vol. v. p. 15.

Had Gray written nothing but his Elegy, high as he stands, I am not sure