The following essay is about James Smith and his brother, Horace.

The first years of the nineteenth century were not only a great age of strong individual poetic voices but also a great age of literary society inhabited by the "gentlemen amateurs," authors for whom literature was a by-product of their social and professional lives. In no other age, Stuart Curran remarks, "does one find so many authors celebrated less for what they wrote than for the company they kept." The lives and works of most of these literary amateurs are little known today, but the best of them may offer readers new insights into the age and provide a background for their more significant literary contemporaries. Two of the more notable of these literary gentlemen were the brothers Horace and James Smith.

James Smith and Horatio (Horace) Smith were the sons of Mary Bogle Smith, daughter of...