SOURCE: A review of City Poems, in The Athenaeum, No. 1556, August 22, 1857, pp. 1055-57.

Here, the anonymous critic claims that ideas in Smith's City Poems were taken from works of other authors, and that Smith has neither the "vision nor the faculty divine" to be a great poet.

A strange poetical propaganda came in a few years ago, with Apollodorus or Somebody Conqueror. The young gentlemen who followed his banner appeared to be by birth flighty, by education ungrammatical, by transmutation poets. They were all more or less subject to ethereal prospects, opinions, and starry influences. They saw strange visions and dreamt impossible similitudes. In whatever quarter of the world, or season of the year, they happened to light, they were always to be found in conjunction with the moon, and, as a matter of course, continually frothing about the sea, if not putting out the sun and making...