SOURCE: "Alexander Smith," in Macmillan's Magazine, Vol. 15, February 15, 1867, pp. 342-52.

In the following excerpt, written soon after Smith's death, Mason eulogizes Smith's writing career and refutes common criticisms of his work.

On the 5th of last month Alexander Smith died in his house at Wardie, near Edinburgh, at the age of thirty-six. The degree of feeling evoked by this event in different quarters has varied, of course, with the different estimates that had been formed of the worth of the deceased—his place and likelihood in that portion of the British literature of our time to which he was a contributor, but the other contributors to which have been, and are, so numerous. By his personal friends, and those locally around him, the loss has been felt as hardly any other within that circle could have been. Nor is there a newspaper in the country that has not...