This leads me to speak of the illustrations to Les Chats, which greatly add to its value.  They were engraved by Otten from original drawings by Coypel.  In another edition the same drawings are engraved by Count Caylus.  Some of them are of a charming absurdity.  One, a double plate, represents a tragedy acted by cats on the roof of a fashionable house.  The actors are tricked out in the most magnificent feathers and furbelows, but the audience consists of common cats.  Cupid sits above, with his bow and fluttering wings.  Another plate shows the mausoleum of the Duchess of Lesdiguieres’ cat, with a marble pussy of heroic size, upon a marble pillow, in a grove of poplars.  Another is a medal to “Chat Noir premier, ne en 1725,” with the proud inscription, “Knowing to whom I belong, I am aware of my value.”  The profile within is that of as haughty a tom as ever shook out his whiskers in a lady’s boudoir.

SMART’S POEMS

POEMS ON SEVERAL OCCASIONS. By Christopher Smart, A.M., Fellow of
Pembroke-Hall, Cambridge.  London:  Printed for the Author, by W.
Strahan; And sold by J. Newbery, at the Bible and Sun, in St. Paul’s
Churchyard.  MDCCLII.

The third section of Robert Browning’s Parleyings with certain People of Importance in their Day drew attention to a Cambridge poet of whom little had hitherto been known, Christopher Smart, once fellow of Pembroke College.  It may be interesting, therefore, to supply some sketch of the events of his life, and of the particular poem which Browning has aptly compared to a gorgeous chapel lying perdue in a dull old commonplace mansion.  No one can afford to be entirely indifferent to the author of verses which one of the greatest of modern writers has declared to be unequalled of their kind between Milton and Keats.

What has hitherto been known of the facts of Smart’s life has been founded on the anonymous biography prefixed to the two-volume Reading edition of his works, published in 1791.  The copy of this edition in Trinity Library belonged to Dr. Farmer, and contains these words in his handwriting:  “From the Editor, Francis Newbery, Esq.; the Life by Mr. Hunter.”  As this Newbery was the son of Smart’s half-brother-in-law and literary employer, it may be taken for granted that the information given in these volumes is authoritative.  We may therefore believe it to be correct that Smart was born (as he himself tells us, in The Hop Garden) at Shipbourne, in Kent, on the 11th of April 1722, that his father was steward to the nobleman who afterwards became Earl of Darlington, and that he was “discerned and patronised” by the Duchess of Cleveland.  This great lady, we are left in doubt for what reason, carried her complaisance so far as to allow the future poet L40 a year until her death.  In a painfully fulsome ode to another member of the Raby Castle family, Smart records the generosity of the dead in order to stimulate that of the living, and oddly remarks that