inordinate vanity, which found expression, in 1753, in that extraordinary effusion, The Hilliad, an attempt to preserve Dr. John Hill in such amber as Pope held at the command of his satiric passion.  But these efforts, and an annual Seatonian, were ill adapted to support a poet who had recently appended a wife and family to a phenomenal appetite for strong waters, and who, moreover, had just been deprived of his stipend as a fellow.  Smart descended into Grub Street, and bound himself over, hand and foot, to be the serf of such men as the publisher Newbery, who was none the milder master for being his relative.  It was not long after, doubtless, that Smart fell lower still, and let himself out on a lease for ninety-nine years, to toil for a set pittance in the garrets of Gardner’s shop; and it was about this time, 1754, that the Rev. T. Tyers was introduced to Smart by a friend who had more sympathy with his frailties than Gray had, namely, Dr. Samuel Johnson.

After a world of vicissitudes, which are very uncomfortable reading, about 1761 Smart became violently insane once more and was shut up again in Bedlam.  Dr. Johnson, commenting on this period of the poet’s life, told Dr. Burney that Smart grew fat when he was in the madhouse, where he dug in the garden, and Johnson added:  “I did not think he ought to be shut up.  His infirmities were not noxious to society.  He insisted on people praying with him; and I’d as lief pray with Kit Smart as with any one else.  Another charge was that he did not love clean linen; and I have no passion for it.”  When Boswell paid Johnson his memorable first visit in 1763, Smart had recently been released from Bedlam, and Johnson naturally spoke of him.  He said:  “My poor friend Smart showed the disturbance of his mind by falling upon his knees and saying his prayers in the street, or in any other unusual place.”  Gray about the same time reports that money is being collected to help “poor Smart,” not for the first time, since in January 1759, Gray had written:  “Poor Smart is not dead, as was said, and Merope is acted for his benefit this week,” with the Guardian, a farce which Garrick had kindly composed for that occasion.

It was in 1763, immediately after Smart’s release, that the now famous Song to David was published.  A long and interesting letter in the correspondence of Hawkesworth, dated October 1764, gives a pleasant idea of Smart restored to cheerfulness and placed “with very decent people in a house, most delightfully situated, with a terrace that overlooks St. James’s Park.”  But this relief was only temporary; Smart fell back presently into drunkenness and debt, and was happily relieved by death in 1770, in his forty-eighth year, at the close of a career as melancholy as any recorded in the chronicles of literature.

Save for one single lyric, that glows with all the flush and bloom of Eden, Smart would take but a poor place on the English Parnassus.  His odes and ballads, his psalms and satires, his masques and his georgics, are not bad, but they are mediocre.  Here and there the very careful reader may come across lines and phrases that display the concealed author of the Song to David, such as the following, from an excessively tiresome ode to Dr. Webster: