And never, certainly, since Pope wrote his Dunciad, did the beautiful require more taking care of, or evince less capacity for taking care of itself; and never, we must add, was less capacity for taking care of it evinced by its accredited guardians of the press than at this present time, if the reception given to Mr. Smith’s poems is to be taken as a fair expression of “the public taste.”

Now, let it be fairly understood, Mr. Alexander Smith is not the object of our reproaches:  but Mr. Alexander Smith’s models and flatterers.  Against him we have nothing whatsoever to say; for him, very much indeed.

Very young, as is said, self-educated, drudging for his daily bread in some dreary Glasgow prison-house of brick and mortar, he has seen the sky, the sun and moon—­and, moreover, the sea, report says, for one day in his whole life; and this is nearly the whole of his experience in natural objects.  And he has felt, too painfully for his peace of mind, the contrast between his environment and that of others—­his means of culture and that of others—­and, still more painfully, the contrast between his environment and culture, and that sense of beauty and power of melody which he does not deny that he has found in himself, and which no one can deny who reads his poems fairly; who reads even merely the opening page and key-note of the whole: 

For as a torrid sunset burns with gold
Up to the zenith, fierce within my soul
A passion burns from basement unto cope. 
Poesy, poesy, I’d give to thee
As passionately my rich laden years,
My bubble pleasures, and my awful joys,
As Hero gave her trembling sighs to find
Delicious death on wet Leander’s lip. 
Bare, bald, and tawdry, as a fingered moth
Is my poor life; but with one smile thou canst
Clothe me with kingdoms.  Wilt thou smile on me? 
Wilt bid me die for thee?  Oh fair and cold! 
As well may some wild maiden waste her love
Upon the calm front of a marble Jove.

Now this scrap is by no menus a fair average specimen of Mr. Smith’s verse.  But is not the self-educated man who could teach himself, amid Glasgow smoke and noise, to write such a distich as that exquisite one which we have given in italics, to be judged lovingly and hopefully?

What if he has often copied?  What if, in this very scrap, chosen almost at random, there should be a touch from Tennyson’s “Two Voices?” And what if imitations, nay, caricatures, be found in almost every page?  Is not the explanation simple enough, and rather creditable than discreditable to Mr. Smith?  He takes as his models Shelley, Keats, and their followers.  Who is to blame for that?  The Glasgow youth, or the public taste, which has been exalting these authors more and more for the last twenty years as the great poets of the nineteenth century?  If they are the proper ideals of the day, who will blame him for following them as closely as possible—­for saturating his