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 Horace Walpole who had written the anonymous book that everybody was talking about, adding that he had discovered the secret through the author's own carelessness, three of the characters being taken from a comedy shown him by a young clergyman at Magdalen College, Cambridge. This was the Rev. Francis Coventry, then some twenty-five years of age. The discovery of the authorship made Coventry a nine-days' hero, while his book went into a multitude of editions. It was one of the most successful _jeux d'esprit_ of the eighteenth century.