SOURCE: "Alexander Smith: Poet and Essayist," in The London Mercury, Vol. XII, No. 69, July, 1925, pp. 284-94.

In the following essay, Grimsditch argues that while Smith's poetry is noteworthy because of its imagery, Smith deserves high regard as a prose writer because of the personal nature of and the humor found in his essays.

In literature, as in life, there is no fixed ratio between merit and reward, whether reward be taken to mean popularity and pecuniary gain or posthumous renown. Posterity, it is true, does sort out the authors who were undeniably great and relentlessly eliminates those who were undoubtedly little; but between these two extremes are placed a number of men whose status, in the eyes of the critics, is not definitely determined. Their reputations are reconsidered from time to time, and, not infrequently, as with Herman Melville and "Erewhon" Butler at the present time, the work...