1830.] Singular Smith. 169 



have not read it ; but editors are so impatient of their time and space, 

 that space and time would both be annihilated if they had their will. 

 " The child is father of the man/' 



sings a very praiseworthy poet ; and our hero corroborated this fact to 

 the letter : for as John Smith, junior, could never settle down to any 

 profitable pursuit, so neither could John Smith, senior. Filled with the 

 divine afflatus, his soul soared above this terrene earth, and business 

 became a bore. As some one has said, his delights were dolphin-like, 

 and played above the element he lived in. Blest with early competency, 

 corpulency, and content, what were the toils of the working-day world 

 to him ? It was business enough for him to have nothing to do, and 

 his own time to do it in. He passed twenty years of his term-time in 

 this pleasant vacation, and was fully occupied; many who pass the same 

 period more busily have less to show for it. Undoubtedly, the grand 

 intention of Mr. Smith's existence, I may say "his being's end and aim," 

 is to do something which he has not yet done not even begun ; but all 

 in good time ! The world works very well in the interim, and can wait 

 his leisure. 



In his thirty-second year, the divine madness of the Muse came upon 

 him once more ; and two sonnets, one to the Moon, the other to the 

 Nightingale (original subjects, which exhibited the wealth of his invention 

 in an exalted light), appeared in the Gentleman's Magazine. Much 

 idle conjecture as to their authorship followed, which he enjoyed with a 

 dignified reserve ; but the important secret was well known, and as well 

 kept, by his trust-worthy friends. Again he " tuned his shepherd's 

 reed," and the purlieus of Holborn rang with the pastoral pipings of the 

 Leather-lane Lycidas : meanwhile 



" Satyrs and sylvan boys were seen 

 Peeping from forth their alleys clean ; 

 Brown the exciseman smiled to hear, 

 And Sims scored up and drank a pot of beer." 



Several years he passed in what he termed fattening his mind ; during 

 which process I am afraid it arrived at the acme of most other prize- 

 fed perfections too much fat, and too little lean. 



Mr. John Smith is now a bachelor, on the young side of forty. He is 

 in the prime of that happy period, ere the freedom of single blessedness 

 has deteriorated into formality, that " last infirmity of noble" bachelors. 

 Caps have been, and are now, set at him ; but he is too shy a bird to be 

 caught in nets of muslin, or imprisoned by the fragile meshes of Mechlin 

 lace. Widows wonder that he does not marry ; wives think he should ; 

 and several disinterested maiden ladies advise him to think seriously of 

 something of that sort; and he, always open to conviction, promises 

 that he will do something of that kind. In fact, he has gone so far as to 

 confess that it is melancholy, when he sneezes in the night, to have no 

 one, night-capped and nigh, to say " God bless you !"* If the roguish 

 leer of his eye, in these moments of compunction, means anything, I am 

 rather more than half inclined to doubt his sincerity. One argument 

 which he urges against committing matrimony is certainly undeniable 

 that there are Smiths enough in the world, without his aiding and 

 abetting their increase and multiplication : he says he shall wait till the 

 words of Samuel, " Now there was no smith found throughout all 

 Israel," are almost applicable throughout all England : and then he may, 



M.M. New Series VOL. X. No. 56. Y 



