CAMBRIDGE, May 8, 1736.

* * * * *

  GRAY ON HIMSELF.

  Too poor for a bribe, and too proud to importune,
  He had not the method of making a fortune;
  Could love and could hate, so was thought something odd;
  No very great wit, he believed in a God;
  A post or a pension he did not desire,
  But left church and state to Charles Townshend and Squire.

* * * * *

END OF GRAY’S POEMS.

* * * * *

THE POETICAL WORKS

OF

TOBIAS SMOLLETT.

THE

LIFE OF TOBIAS SMOLLETT.

The combination of a great writer and a small poet, in one and the same person, is not uncommon.  With not a few, while other, and severer branches of study are the laborious task of the day, poetry is the slipshod amusement of the evening.  Dr Parr calls Johnson probabilis poeta—­words which seem to convey the notion that the author of “The Rambler,” who was great on other fields, was in that of poetry only respectable.  This term is more applicable to Smollett, whose poems discover only in part those keen, vigorous, and original powers which enabled him to indite “Roderick Random” and “Humphrey Clinker.”  Yet the author of “Independence,” and “The Tears of Scotland,” must not be excluded from the list of British poets—­an honour to which much even of his prose has richly entitled him.

The incidents in Smollett’s history are not very numerous, and some of them are narrated, under faint disguises, with inimitable vivacity and vraisemblance in his own fictions.  Tobias George Smollett was born in Dalquhurn House, near the village of Renton, Dumbartonshire, in 1721.  His father, a younger son of Sir James Smollett of Bonhill, having died early, the education of the poet devolved on his grandfather.  The scenery of his native place was well calculated to inspire his early genius.  It is one of the most beautiful regions in Scotland.  A fine hollow vale, pervaded by the river Leven, and surrounded by rich woodlands and bold hills, stretches up from Dumbarton, with its double peaks and ancient castle, to the magnificent Loch Lomond; and in one of the loops of this winding vale was the great novelist born and bred.  He called his native region, in “Humphrey Clinker,” the “Arcadia of Scotland,” and has sung the Leven in one of his small poems.  He was sent to the Grammar School of Dumbarton, and thence to Glasgow College.  He was subsequently placed apprentice to one M. Gordon, a medical practitioner in Glasgow; and from thence, according to some of his biographers, he proceeded to study medicine in Edinburgh.  When he was about nineteen years of age, his grandfather expired, without having made any provision for him; and he was compelled,