the terms on which he was engaged to write, and thinking I was doing him good. I hoped his wits would soon return to him. Mine returned to me, and I wrote in _The Universal Visitor_ no longer.' Smart at last was called to pay the penalty of his blended labour and dissipation. In 1763 he was shut up in a madhouse. His derangement had exhibited itself in a religious way: he insisted upon people kneeling down along with him in the street and praying. During his confinement, writing materials were denied him, and he used to write his poetical pieces with a key on the wainscot. Thus, 'scrabbling,' like his own hero, on the wall, he produced his immortal 'Song to David.' He became by and by sane; but, returning to his old habits, got into debt, and died in the King's Bench prison, after a short illness, in 1770. The 'Song to David' has been well called one of the greatest curiosities of literature. It ranks in this point with the tragedies written by Lee, and the sermons and prayers uttered by Hall in a similar melancholy state of mind. In these cases, as well as in Smart's, the thin partition between genius and madness was broken down in thunder,--the thunder of a higher poetry than perhaps they were capable of even conceiving in their saner moments. Lee produced in that state--which was, indeed, nearly his normal one--some glorious extravagancies. Hall's sermons, monologised and overheard in the madhouse, are said to have transcended all that he preached in his healthier moods. And, assuredly, the other poems by Smart scarcely furnish a point of comparison with the towering and sustained loftiness of some parts of the 'Song to David.' Nor is it loftiness alone,--although the last three stanzas are absolute inspiration, and you see the waters of Castalia tossed by a heavenly wind to the very summit of Parnassus,--but there are innumerable exquisite beauties and subtleties, dropt as if by the hand of rich haste, in every corner of the poem. Witness his description of David's muse, as a 'Blest light, still gaining on the gloom, The more _than Michal of his bloom_, The _Abishag of his age_! The account of David's object-- 'To further knowledge, silence vice, And plant perpetual paradise, When _God had calmed the world_.' Of David's Sabbath-- ''Twas then his thoughts self-conquest pruned, And heavenly melancholy tuned, To bless and bear the rest.' One of David's themes-- 'The multitudinous abyss, Where secrecy remains in bliss, And wisdom hides her skill.' And, not to multiply instances to repletion, this stanza about gems-- 'Of gems--their virtue and their price, Which, hid in earth from man's device, Their _darts of lustre sheath_; The jasper of the master's stamp, The topaz blazing like a lamp, Among the mines beneath.'