silver fish and gold fish, adoring the Lord by the beauty of their scales.  The Song to David is cryptic to a very high degree, but I think there are no lines in it which patient reflection will not solve.  On every page are stanzas the verbal splendour of which no lover of poetry will question, and lines which will always, to me at least, retain an echo of that gusto with which I have heard Mr. Browning’s strong voice recite them: 

  The wealthy crops of whitening rice
  ’Mongst thyine woods and groves of spice,
    For Adoration grow;
  And, marshall’d in the fenced land,
  The peaches and pomegranates stand,
    Where wild carnations blow.

The laurels with the winter strive;
The crocus burnishes alive
Upon the snow-clad earth;

* * * * *

For Adoration ripening canes
And cocoa’s purest milk detains
The westering pilgrim’s staff;
Where rain in, clasping boughs inclos’d,
And vines with oranges dispos’d,
Embower the social laugh.

For Adoration, beyond match,
The scholar bulfinch aims to catch
The soft flute’s ivory touch;
And, careless on the hazle spray,
The daring redbreast keeps at bay
The damsel’s greedy clutch_.

To quote at further length from so fascinating, so divine a poem, would be “purpling too much my mere grey argument.”  Browning’s praise ought to send every one to the original.  But here is one more stanza that I cannot resist copying, because it seems so pathetically applicable to Smart himself as a man, and to the one exquisite poem which was “the more than Abishag of his age”: 

  His muse, bright angel of his verse,
  Gives balm for all the thorns that pierce,
    For all the pangs that rage;
  Blest light, still gaining on the gloom,
  The more than Michal of his bloom,
    The Abishag of his age.

POMPEY THE LITTLE

THE HISTORY OF POMPEY THE LITTLE; or, the Life and Adventures of a Lap-Dog.  London:  Printed for M. Cooper, at the Globe in Paternoster Row, MDCCLI.

In February 1751 the town, which had been suffering from rather a dreary spell since the acceptable publication of Tom Jones, was refreshed and enlivened by the simultaneous issue of two delightfully scandalous productions, eminently well adapted to occupy the polite conversation of ladies at drums and at the card-table.  Of these one was The Memoirs of a Lady of Quality, so oddly foisted by Smollett into the third volume of his Peregrine Pickle.  This was recognised at once as being the work of the frail and adventurous Lady Vane, about whom so many strange stories were already current in society.  The other puzzled the gossips much longer, and it seems to have been the poet Gray who first discovered the authorship of Pompey the Little.  Gray wrote to tell