Christopher Smart, poet, scholar, and prose writer, was an eccentric individual, but of such undoubted ability as to challenge the admiration and win the friendship of Dr. Johnson, who wrote his biography. His habits finally became very bad, so that, delirium setting in, it was found necessary to confine him in an asylum. While there he wrote a very remarkable religious poem entitled the "Song of David," produced in his rational moments, which exhibited sublimity and power, and is still considered one of the curiosities of English literature. Smart improved in health and was discharged with his full reason restored, but was soon after committed to the King's Bench prison for debt; and there he died, poverty-stricken and neglected, in 1770. Samuel Boyle was a contemporary of Smart, and was possessed of equal genius whether with the pen or the bottle. Poor fellow! he got an indifferent living as a fag author, though he was capable of fine literary work. His poem entitled the "Deity" fully proved this. Ogle, the London publisher, used to employ Boyle to translate some of Chaucer's tales into modern English, which he did with much excellence and spirit, and for which he received threepence per printed line. The poor genius sank lower and lower, lived in a miserable garret, wearing a blanket about his shoulders, having no vest or coat, and was at last found famished to death with a pen in his hand. "Hunger and nakedness," says Carlyle, "perils and revilings, the prison, the cross, the poison-chalice, have in most times and countries been the market price the world has offered for wisdom, the welcome with which it has greeted those who have come to enlighten and purify it. Homer and Socrates and the Christian apostles belong to old days; but the world's Martyrology was not completed with them." Richard Payne Knight, the Greek scholar and antiquary, was a remarkable genius in his way. His gift of ancient coins, bronzes, and works of art presented to the British Museum was valued at fifty thousand pounds. He was a poet of more than ordinary ability, and wrote, among other prose works, "An Analytical Enquiry into the Principles of Taste." He was for a number of consecutive years a member of Parliament. He had singular attacks of melancholy, and finally developed such a loathing of life that he destroyed himself with poison.