“Why should Honesty fly to some safer retreat, From attorneys and barges?--’od rot ’em! For the lawyers are _just_ at the top of the street, And the barges are _just_ at the bottom.” James Smith, the intellectual hero of this street, the son of a solicitor to the Ordnance, was born in 1775. In 1802 he joined the staff of the _Pic-Nic_ newspaper, with Combe, Croker, Cumberland, and that mediocre poet, Sir James Bland Burgess. It changed its name to the _Cabinet_, and died in 1803. From 1807 to 1817 James Smith contributed to the _Monthly Mirror_ his “Horace in London.” In 1812 came out the _Rejected Addresses_, inimitable parodies by himself and his brother, not merely of the manner but of the very mode of thought of Wordsworth, Cobbett, Southey, Coleridge, Crabbe, Lord Byron, Scott, etc. The copyright, originally offered to Mr. Murray for £20, but declined, was purchased by him in 1819, after the sixteenth edition, for £131; so much for the foresight of publishers. The book has since deservedly gone through endless editions, and has not been approached even by the talented parody writers of _Punch_. Those who wish to see the story of this publication in detail, must hunt it up in the edition of the _Addresses_ illustrated by George Cruickshank. Mr. Smith was the chief deviser of the substance of the _Entertainments_ of the elder Charles Mathews. He wrote the _Country Cousins_ in 1820, and in the two succeeding years the _Trip to France_ and the _Trip to America_. For these last two works the author received a thousand pounds. “A thousand pounds!” he used to ejaculate, shrugging his shoulders, “and all for nonsense.”[247] James Smith was just the man for Mathews, with his slight frameworks of stories filled up with songs, jokes, puns, wild farcical fancies, and merry conceits, and here and there among the motley, with true touches of wit, pathos, and comedy, and faithful traits of life and character, such as only a close observer of society and a sound thinker could pen. He was lucky enough to obtain a legacy of £300 for a complimentary epigram on Mr. Strahan, the king’s printer. Being patted on the head when a boy by Chief-Justice Mansfield, in Highgate churchyard, and once seeing Horace Walpole on his lawn at Twickenham, were the two chief historical events of Mr. Smith’s quiet life. The four reasons that kept so clever a man employed on mere amateur trifling were these--an indolent disinclination to sustained work, a fear of failure, a dislike to risk a well-earned fame, and a foreboding that literary success might injure his practice as a lawyer. His favourite visits were to Lord Mulgrave’s, Mr. Croker’s, Lord Abinger’s, Lady Blessington’s, and Lord Harrington’s.