"Poet and Scholar" reads the epitaph on Seba Smith's gravestone in Patchogue, Long Island, where he died on 28 July 1868. Yet, if remembered at all, Smith would have been known--then and later--for his creation of Jack Downing, the first popular cracker-barrel philosopher, whose letters put both political shenanigans and lofty abstractions in homespun terms that informed while entertaining. Jack Downing's letters were widely reprinted and imitated, and with the addition of characterizations on stage, in cartoons, and in broadsides, as well as the original letters and their imitators for more than thirty years, he may well have been the most popular American literary character in the nineteenth century. He was certainly the forerunner of later cracker-barrel humorists, such as Thomas Chandler Haliburton's "Sam Slick," James Russell Lowell's "Hosea Biglow," Artemus Ward, Peter Finley Dunne's "Mr. Dooley," Marietta Holley's "Samantha," Will Rogers, and others. Seba Smith, however, aspired to literature...