1830.] Singular Smith. 171 



should, he would wince amazingly under the infliction, and be very 

 much hurt in his feelings. Indeed, he does not merit any such notice 

 from any one ; for he has none of that provoking irascibility generally 

 attendant on genius (for he is a genius, as I have shown, and shall pre- 

 sently show). He was never known to have been engaged in more than 

 one literary altercation ; then he endeavoured, but in vain, to convince 

 his grocer, who had beaten his boy to the blueness of stone-blue for 

 spelling sugar without an h, that he was assuredly not borne out in his 

 orthography by Johnson and Walker. 



To sum up the more prominent points of his character in few words. 

 As he is a great respecter of himself, so he is a great respecter of all 

 persons in authority : his bow to a beadle on Sundays is indeed a lesson 

 in humility. Being a sincere lover of his country, he is also a sincere 

 lover of himself: he prefers roast beef and plum-pudding to any of your 

 foreign kickshaws ; and drinks the Colonnade champagne when he can, 

 to encourage the growth of English gooseberries; smokes largely, to 

 contribute his modicum to the home- consumption j pays all government 

 demands with a cheerfulness unusual and altogether perplexing to tax- 

 gatherers ; and subscribes to a lying-in hospital (two guineas annually 

 nothing more) . In short, if he has not every virtue under heaven, it is 

 no fault of Mr. Smith. The virtues, he has been heard to say, are 

 such high-priced luxuries, that a man of moderate income cannot afford 

 to indulge much in them. 



These are Mr. John Smith's good qualities : if he has failings, they 

 " lean to virtue's side," but do not much affect his equilibrium : he is a 

 perpendicular man in general, and not tall enough in his own conceit to 

 stoop when he passes under Temple Bar. If he is singular, he lays it 

 to the accident of his birth : he was the seventh Smith of a seventh Smith. 

 This fortuitous catenation in the links of the long chain of circumstance, 

 which has before now bestowed on a fool the reputation of" a wise man," 

 only rendered him, as he is free to confess, an odd man. His pursuits 

 have indeed of late been numerous beyond mention, and being taken up 

 in whimsies, ended in oddities. As 1 have said, he wrote verses, and 

 they were thought by some people to be very odd and unaccountable. 



He lost a Miss , who was dear to him, in trinket expenses more 



especially, through a point of poetical etiquette certainly very unpar- 

 donable. In some lines addressed to that amiable spinster and deep- 

 dyed has bleu, he had occasion to use the words one and two) and 

 either from the ardour of haste, or the inconsiderateness of love, which 

 makes the wisest of us commit ourselves, or perhaps from the narrow- 

 ness of his note-paper, he penned the passage thus : 



" Nature has made us 2, but Love shall make us 1 ; 

 1 mind, 1 soul, 1 heart," &c. 



This reminded the learned lady too irresistibly of a catalogue of sale 

 1 warming-pan, 2 stoves, 1 stewpan, 1 smokejack, c., and she dismissed 

 him in high dudgeon. 



It was now that, to divert his attention from the too " charming agonies 

 of love, whose miseries delight" every one but the invalid himself, he 

 took to landscape painting. The connoisseurs, who know something, 

 asserted that he had the oddest notions of the picturesque that ever dis- 

 guised canvas. His cattle did indeed much more resemble the basket- 

 balls of a pantomime, than the kine of nature. His sheep had an un- 



Y 2 



