of ‘The Parables,’ in which the decline of his powers is manifest. On 11 Sept. 1768 Smart called at his old friend Dr. Burney's in Poland Street, and Fanny Burney, who mentions his ‘sweetly elegant “Harriet's Birthday,”’ inscribed in her diary: ‘This ingenious writer is one of the most unfortunate of men—he has been twice confined in a madhouse, and, but last year, sent a most affecting letter to papa to entreat him to lend him half a guinea. He is extremely grave, and has still great wildness in his manners, looks, and voice.’ It must have been soon after this that he was permanently confined in the king's bench by his creditors. The rules were eventually obtained for him by his brother-in-law, Thomas Carnan, and a small subscription was raised, ‘of which Dr. Burney was the head.’ He died in the rules of the king's bench on 21 May 1771 (Gent. Mag. 1771, p. 239; cf. Cambridge Chronicle, 25 May 1771), and was buried in St. Paul's churchyard. He left two daughters, of whom the elder, Mary Anne (d. 1809), married Thomas Cowslade (d. 1806), proprietor of the ‘Reading Mercury,’ while the younger, Elizabeth Anne, became Mrs. Le Noir [q. v.] His widow died on 16 May 1809 at Reading, aged 77. In one of his odes the poet apologises for being a little man, and the inference is confirmed by the ‘Cambridge Chronicle,’ which states that he was a ‘little, smart, black-eyed man.’ If the portraits may be believed, his eyes were grey. A poor mezzotint in a small oval is prefixed to his collected ‘Poems’ (1791); an anonymous portrait in oils is in the possession of C. Litton Falkiner, esq., of 9 Upper Merrion Street, Dublin, and a fine portrait (five feet by four feet), owned by Frederick Cowslade, esq., of Reading, has been attributed, on somewhat uncertain authority, to Sir Joshua Reynolds.
In manner Smart seems to have been abnormally nervous and retiring, but when this shyness was overcome, he was particularly amiable, and had a frank and engaging air which, with children especially, often overflowed with drollery and high spirits. Latterly, however, owing to bad habits, penurious living, and his constitutional melancholia, he became a mere wreck of his earlier self.
Twenty years after Smart's death was issued in a collective form his ‘Poems,’ containing the ‘Seatonians,’ epigrams, fables, imitations of Pope and Gray, Young, and Akenside—everything, in fact, that might be expected from a facile and uninspired versifier of that age. The ‘Song to David’ was omitted as affording a ‘melancholy proof’ of mental estrangement. It is, however, scarcely correct to say (as has often been said) that it was left to the present age to discover his one ‘inspired lay.’ When the poem was reprinted in 1819 a review in the ‘London Magazine’ for March 1820 concluded by likening the poem to ‘one of our ancient cathedrals—imperfect, unequal, and with strange, anomalous parts of no perceptible use or beauty, yet exquisite in the finishing of other parts, and, in its general effect, appropriately solemn and splendid.’ A juster criticism could scarcely be passed. To describe the ‘Song,’ with Dante Gabriel Rossetti, as the ‘only great accomplished poem of the eighteenth century,’ is to exaggerate grossly, if in good company; for (after comparing the poem to an exquisitely wrought chapel in a prosaic mansion) Robert Browning, apostrophising the poet, speaks of his
Song, where flute-breath silvers trumpet clang,
And stations you for once on either hand
With Milton and with Keats
(Parleyings, No. iii.). It is hardly disputable that the ‘Song to David’ supplies a very remarkable link between the age of Dryden and the dawn of a new era with Blake; and it combines to a rare degree the vigour and impressive diction of the one with the spirituality of the other. There are few episodes in our literary history more striking than that of ‘Kit Smart,’ the wretched bookseller's hack, with his mind thrown off its balance by poverty and drink, rising at the moment of his direst distress to the utterance of a strain of purest poetry.
The following is a list of Smart's works: 1. ‘Carmen Alex. Pope in S. Cæciliam Latine redditum,’ 1743, fol.; 1746. 2. ‘The Eternity of the Supreme Being,’ 1750, 4to. 3. ‘The Immensity of the Supreme Being,’ 1750, 4to. 4. ‘Solemn Dirge to the Memory of the Prince of Wales,’ 1751, 4to. 5. ‘Occasional Prologue and Epilogue to Othello’ [1751], fol. 6. ‘The Omniscience of the Supreme Being,’ 1752, 4to. 7. ‘Poems,’ 1752, 8vo. 8. ‘The Power of the Supreme Being,’ 1753, 4to. 9. ‘The Hilliad: an Epic Poem,’ 1753, 4to. 10. ‘The Goodness of the Supreme Being,’ 1755, 4to. 11. ‘Hymn to the Supreme Being,’ 1756, 4to. 12. ‘The Works of Horace, translated literally into English Prose,’ 2 vols. 12mo, 1756 (many editions; Bohn, 1848, 8vo). 13. ‘A Song to David,’ 1763, 4to. 14. ‘Poems on Several Occasions: viz. Munificence and Modesty; Female Dignity; Verses from Catullus; after dining with Mr. Murray; Epitaphs’, &c., 1763, 4to. 15. ‘Poems: Reason and Imagination, a fable,’ &c. [1763], 4to. 16. ‘An
