dignity itself restrains
  By condescension’s silken reins,
  While you the lowly Muse upraise.

Smart passed, already “an infant bard,” from what he calls “the splendour in retreat” of Raby Castle, to Durham School, and in his eighteenth year was admitted of Pembroke Hall, October 30, 1739.  His biographer expressly states that his allowance from home was scanty, and that his chief dependence, until he derived an income from his college, was on the bounty of the Duchess of Cleveland.

From this point I am able to supply a certain amount of information with regard to the poet’s college life which is entirely new, and which is not, I think, without interest.  My friend Mr. R.A.  Neil has been so kind as to admit me to the Treasury at Pembroke, and in his company I have had the advantage of searching the contemporary records of the college.  What we were lucky enough to discover may here be briefly summarised.  The earliest mention of Smart is dated 1740, and refers to the rooms assigned to him as an undergraduate.  In January 1743, we find him taking his B.A., and in July of the same year he is elected scholar.  As is correctly stated in his Life, he became a fellow of Pembroke on the 3rd of July 1745.  That he showed no indication as yet of that disturbance of brain and instability of character which so painfully distinguished him a little later on, is proved by the fact that on the 10th of October 1745, Smart was chosen to be Praelector in Philosophy, and Keeper of the Common Chest.  In 1746 he was re-elected to those offices, and also made Praelector in Rhetoric.  In 1747 he was not chosen to hold any such college situations, no doubt from the growing extravagance of his conduct.

In November 1747, Smart was in parlous case.  Gray complains of his “lies, impertinence and ingratitude,” and describes him as confined to his room, lest his creditors should snap him up.  He gives a melancholy impression of Smart’s moral and physical state, but hastens to add “not that I, nor any other mortal, pity him.”  The records of the Treasury at Pembroke supply evidence that the members of the college now made a great effort to restore one of whose talents it is certain they were proud.  In 1748 we find Smart proposed for catechist, a proof that he had, at all events for the moment, turned over a new leaf.  Probably, but for fresh relapses, he would now have taken orders.  His allusions to college life are singularly ungracious.  He calls Pembroke

      this servile cell,
  Where discipline and dulness dwell,

and commiserates a captive eagle as being doomed in the college courts to watch

      scholastic pride
  Take his precise, pedantic stride;