O Poverty! thy frowns were early dealt
O'er him who mourned thee, not by fancy led
To whine and wail o'er woes he never felt,
Staining his rhymes with tears he never shed,
And heaving sighs a mock song only bred:
Alas! he knew too much of every pain

That showered full thick on his unsheltered head;
And as his tears and sighs did erst complain,
His numbers took it up, and wept it o'er again.

JAMES AND HORACE SMITH.

JAMES SMITH (1775-1839) was a lively and amusing author both in prose and verse. His father, Mr Robert Smith, was an eminent legal practitioner in London, and solicitor to the Board of Ordnancea gentleman of learning and accomplishments, whose

Smith

stroying equally the harmless curiosity of the reader,
and the critical independence of the author; and
Cumberland, besides, was too vain, too irritable and
poor, to secure a good list of contributors.
then became a constant writer in the Monthly
Mirror (wherein Henry Kirke White first attracted
the notice of what may be termed the literary world),
and in this work appeared a series of poetical imita-
tions, entitled Horace in London, the joint production
of James and Horace Smith. These parodies were
subsequently collected and published in one volume
in 1813, after the success of the Rejected Addresses
had rendered the authors famous. Some of the
pieces display a lively vein of town levity and
humour, but many of them also are very trifling
and tedious. In one stanza, James Smith has given
a true sketch of his own tastes and character :-

•

The Review proved a complete failure. The system right, which had been originally offered to Mr Mur of publishing names was an unwise innovation, de-ray for L.20, was purchased by that gentleman, in 1819, after the sixteenth edition, for L.131. The articles written by James Smith consisted of imita tions of Wordsworth, Cobbett, Southey, Coleridge, Crabbe, and a few travesties. Some of them are inimitable, particularly the parodies on Cobbett and Crabbe, which were also among the most popular. Horace Smith contributed imitations of Walter Scott, Moore, Monk Lewis, Lord Byron, W. T. Fitzgerald (whose Loyal Effusion' is irresistibly ludicrous for its extravagant adulation and fustian), Dr Johnson, &c. The amount of talent displayed by the two brothers was pretty equal; for none of James Smith's parodies are more felicitous than that of Scott by Horace. The popularity of the Rejected Addresses' seems to have satisfied the ambition of the elder poet. He afterwards confined himself to short anonymous pieces in the New Monthly Maga zine and other periodicals, and to the contribution of some humorous sketches and anecdotes towards Mr Mathews's theatrical entertainments, the author. ship of which was known only to a few. The Country Cousins, Trip to France, and Trip to America, mostly written by Smith, and brought out by Mathews at the English Opera House, not only brought the witty writer a thousand pounds-a sum filled the theatre, and replenished the treasury, but allusion without shrugging up his shoulders, and to which, we are told, the receiver seldom made ejaculating, A thousand pounds for nonsense! Mr Smith was still better paid for a trifling exer tion of his muse; for, having met at a dinner party the late Mr Strahan, the king's printer, then sufferDring from gout and old age, though his faculties remained unimpaired, he sent him next morning the following jeu d'esprit :

Me toil and ease alternate share,
Books, and the converse of the fair,

(To see is to adore 'em);
With these, and London for my home,
I envy not the joys of Rome,
The Circus or the Forum!

To London he seems to have been as strongly at

tached as Dr Johnson himself. 'A confirmed me

tropolitan in all his tastes and habits, he would often quaintly observe, that London was the best place in summer, and the only place in winter; or quote Dr Johnson's dogma-"Sir, the man that is tired of London is tired of existence." At other times he would express his perfect concurrence with Mosley's assertion, that in the country one is always maddened with the noise of nothing: or laughingly quote the Duke of Queensberry's rejoinder on being told one sultry day in September that London was exceedingly empty-" Yes, but it's fuller than the country." He would not, perhaps, have gone quite so far as his old friend Jekyll, who used to say, that "if compelled to live in the country, he would have the approach to his house paved like the streets of London, and hire a hackney-coach to drive up and down the street all day long;" but he would relate, with great glee, a story showing the general conviction of his dislike to ruralities. He was sitting in the library at a country house, when a gentleman, informing him that the family were all out, proposed a quiet stroll into the pleasure-grounds. "Stroll! why, don't you see my gouty shoe?" "Yes, but what then? you don't really mean to say that you have got the gout? I thought you had only put on that shoe to avoid being shown over the improvements." There is some good-humoured banter and exaggeration in this dislike of ruralities; and accordingly we find that, as Johnson found his way to the remote Hebrides, Smith occasionally transported himself to Yorkshire and other places, the country seats of friends and noblemen. The 'Rejected Addresses' appeared in 1812, having engaged James and Horace Smith six weeks, and proving one of the luckiest hits in literature. The directors of Drury Lane theatre had offered a premium for the

best poetical address to be spoken on opening the

new edifice; and a casual hint from Mr Ward, secre

tary to the theatre, suggested to the witty brothers the composition of a series of humorous addresses, professedly composed by the principal authors of the day. The work was ready by the opening of the theatre, and its success was almost unexampled.

The easy social bachelor-life of James Smith was perately, and at his club-dinner restricted himself fa much impaired by hereditary gout. He lived tem his half-pint of sherry; but as a professed joker and diner out,' he must often have been tempted to over-indulgence and irregular hours. Attacks of gout began to assail him in middle life, and he gra

•

Eighteen editions have been sold; and the copy-dually lost the use and the very form of his limbs,

*Memoir prefixed to Smith's Comic Miscellanies, 2 vols.

bearing all his sufferings, as his brother states, with an undeviating and unexampled patience.' One of

4

1941.

430

"

Your lower limbs seemed far from stout
When last I saw you walk;
The cause I presently found out
When you began to talk.

The power that props the body's length,
In due proportion spread,

In you mounts upwards, and the strength
All settles in the head.

Mr Strahan was so much gratified by the compli ment, that he made an immediate codicil to his will, by which he bequeathed to the writer the sum of L.3000! Horace Smith, however, mentions that Mr Strahan had other motives for his generosity, for he respected and loved the man quite as much as he admired the poet. James made a happier, though, in a pecuniary sense, less lucky epigram on Miss Edgeworth :

We every-day bards may 'anonymous' sign
That refuge, Miss Edgeworth, can never be thine.
Thy writings, where satire and moral unite,
Must bring forth the name of their author to light
Good and bad join in telling the source of their birth;
The bad own their EDGE, and the good own their

WORTH.

Where Muggins broke before.
But sulphury stench and boiling drench
Destroying sight, o'erwhelmed him quite;

He sunk to rise no more.

Still o'er his head, while Fate he braved,
His whizzing water-pipe he waved;

Whitford and Mitford ply your pumps;
You, Clutterbuck, come, stir your stumps;
Why are you in such doleful dumps?
A fireman, and afraid of bumps!
What are they feared on? fools-'od rot 'em !'
Were the last words of Higginbottom.

The Upas in Marybone Lane.
[By JAMES SMITH.]

A tree grew in Java, whose pestilent rind
A venom distilled of the deadliest kind;
The Dutch sent their felons its juices to draw,
And who returned safe, pleaded pardon by law.

Face-muted, the culprits crept into the vale,
Advancing from windward to 'scape the death-gale;
How few the reward of their victory earned!
For ninety-nine perished for one who returned.

Britannia this Upas-tree bought of Mynheer,
Removed it through Holland, and planted it here;
'Tis now a stock-plant of the genus wolf's-bane,
And one of them blossoms in Marybone Lane.

The house that surrounds it stands first in the row,
Two doors at right angles swing open below;
And the children of misery daily steal in,
And the poison they draw they denominate Gin.

There enter the prude, and the reprobate boy,
The mother of grief, and the daughter of joy,
The serving-maid slim, and the serving-man stout,
They quickly steal in, and they slowly reel out.
Surcharged with the venom, some walk forth erect,
Apparently baffling its deadly effect;
But, sooner or later, the reckoning arrives,
And ninety-nine perish for one who survives.

Tax, Chancellor Van, the Batavian to thwart,
This compound of crime at a sovereign a quart;
Let gin fetch per bottle the price of champagne,
And hew down the Upas in Marybone Lane.

Address to the Mummy in Belzoni's Exhibition.
[By HORACE SMITH.]

And thou hast walked about (how strange a story!)
In Thebes's streets three thousand years ago,
When the Memnonium was in all its glory,

And time had not begun to overthrow
Those temples, palaces, and piles stupendous,
Of which the very ruins are tremendous!

Speak! for thou long enough hast acted dumby;

Thou hast a tongue, come, let us hear its tune;
Thou'rt standing on thy legs above ground, mummy!
Revisiting the glimpses of the moon.
Not like thin ghosts or disembodied creatures,
But with thy bones and flesh, and limbs and features.

Tell us for doubtless thou canst recollect

To whom should we assign the Sphinx's fame! Was Cheops or Cephrenes architect

Of either pyramid that bears his name?

70

Is Pompey's pillar really a misnomer?
Had Thebes a hundred gates, as sung by Homer?
Perhaps thou wert a mason, and forbidden

By oath to tell the secrets of thy trade-
Then say, what secret melody was hidden

In Memnon's statue, which at sunrise played?
Perhaps thou wert a priest-if so, my struggles
Are vain, for priestcraft never owns its juggles.

Perchance that very hand, now pinioned flat,

Has hob-a-nobbed with Pharaoh, glass to glass;
Or dropped a halfpenny in Homer's hat,

Or doffed thine own to let Queen Dido pass,
Or held, by Solomon's own invitation,
A torch at the great Temple's dedication.

They cautious advance with slouched bonnet and hat, Didst thou not hear the pother o'er thy head,

When the great Persian conqueror, Cambyses,

They enter at this door, they go out at that;
Some bear off their burden with riotous glee,
But most sink in sleep at the foot of the tree.

Marched armies o'er thy tomb with thundering tread,

O'erthrew Osiris, Orus, Apis, Isis,

And shook the pyramids with fear and wonder,
When the gigantic Memnon fell asunder?

I need not ask thee if that hand, when armed,
Has any Roman soldier mauled and knuckled,
For thou wert dead, and buried, and embalmed,

Ere Romulus and Remus had been suckled:
Antiquity appears to have begun
Long after thy primeval race was run.

Thou couldst develope, if that withered tongue
Might tell us what those sightless orbs have seen,
How the world looked when it was fresh and young,
And the great deluge still had left
green;
Or was it then so old, that history's pages
Contained no record of its early ages?

Still silent, incommunicative elf!

Art sworn to secrecy? then keep thy vows;
But prithee tell us something of thyself;

Reveal the secrets of thy prison-house;
Since in the world of spirits thou hast slumbered,
What hast thou seen-what strange adventures num-
bered?

Since first thy form was in this box extended,

We have, above ground, seen some strange mutations;

The Roman empire has begun and ended,

New worlds have risen-we have lost old nations, And countless kings have into dust been humbled, Whilst not a fragment of thy flesh has crumbled.

If the tomb's secrets may not be confessed,
The nature of thy private life unfold:

A heart has throbb'd beneath that leathern breast,
And tears adown that dusky cheek have rolled:
Have children climbed those knees, and kissed that

face?

What was thy name and station, age and race?

Statue of flesh-immortal of the dead!
Imperishable type of evanescence!
Posthumous man, who quit'st thy narrow bed,

And standest undecayed within our presence,
Thou wilt hear nothing till the judgment morning,
When the great trump shall thrill thee with its
warning.

Why should this worthless tegument endure,
If its undying guest be lost for ever?
Oh, let us keep the soul embalmed and pure

In living virtue, that, when both must sever,
Although corruption may our frame consume,
The immortal spirit in the skies may bloom.*

*Originally published in the New Monthly Magazine.