170 Singular Smith. [AUG. 



perhaps, marry. " Smiths/' as he says, " are as plentiful as black- 

 berries. Throw a cat out of every other window, from one end to the 

 other of this metropolis, and it would fall on the head of one Smith. 

 Rush suddenly round a corner, and knock down the first man yotu meet, 

 he is a Smith ; he prostrates a second, the second a third, the third a 

 fourth the ninth a tenth they are all and severally miths." 



I am indeed afraid that he is irrecoverably a bachelor, for several 

 reasons which I shall mention. He is, at this time, " a little, round, oily 

 man," five feet and a half in his shoes ; much given to poetry, pedes- 

 trianism, whim, whistling, cigars, and sonnets ; " amorous," as the poets 

 say, of umbrageousness in the country, and umbrellas in the town; 

 rather bald, and addicted to Burton ale : and a lover of silence and after- 

 noon siestas indeed, he is much given to sleep, which, as he says, is 

 but a return in kind ; for sleep was given to man to refresh his body 

 and keep his spirits in peace ; indulgences these which have any thing 

 but a marrying look : so that no unwilling Daphne has lost a willing 

 Damon in my duodecimo friend. It is too manifest that he prefers 

 liberty, and lodgings for a single gentleman, to the " Hail, wedded love !" 

 of the poet of Paradise a sort of clergyman " triumphale" to which his 

 ear is most unorthodoxically deaf when time is called. He has even gone 

 so far as to compare good and bad marriages with two very remarkable 

 results in chemical experiment, by which, in one instance, charcoal is 

 converted into diamond, and in the other, diamond is deflagrated into 

 charcoal. The fortunate Benedict marries charcoal, which, after a pa- 

 tient process, proves a diamond : the unfortunate husband weds a dia- 

 mond, which, tried in the fire of adversity, turns out charcoal. Yet he 

 is not unalive to those soft impressions which betoken a sensitive nature. 

 He has been twice in love ; thrice to the dome of St. Paul's with the 

 three sisters Simpson, and once to Richmond by water with a Miss 

 Robinson, in May, that auspicious month, dedicated to love and lettuces. 

 These are perhaps the only incidents in his unchequered life which ap- 

 proach the romantic and the sentimental ; yet he has passed through the 

 ordeal unsinged at heart, and is still a bachelor. He was, at one time, 

 passionately partial to music and mutton-chops, muffins and melancholy, 

 predilections much cultivated by an inherent good taste, and an ardent 

 love of the agreeable ; yet he has taken to himself no one to do his 

 mutton and music, no one to soften his melancholy and spread his 

 muffins. It is unaccountable ; the ladies say so, and I agree with 

 them. 



I have mentioned the things he is inclined to ;" I must now specify 

 " those he has no mind to." His antipathies are tight boots and bad ale 

 two of the evils of life (which is at best but of a mingled yarn) for 

 which he has an aversion almost amounting to the impatient. His dis- 

 like to a scold is likewise most remarkable, perhaps peculiar to himself; 

 for I do not remember to have noticed the antipathy in any one beside. 

 A relation is, to be sure, linked to a worthy descendant of Xantippe ; 

 and this perhaps is the key to his objections to the padlock of matrimony. 



It is the bounden duty of a biographer (and I consider this paper to 

 be biographical) to give, in as few words as possible, the likeness of his 

 hero. Two or three traits are as good as two or three thousand, where 

 volume-making is not the prime consideration. He is eccentric, but 

 without a shadow of turning. He is sensitive to excess ; for, though no 

 one ever has horsewhipped him, I have no doubt if either A. or B. 



