A more interesting resident was James Smith, one of the authors of the _Rejected Addresses_, who lived for many years at No. 27, where he died on December 24, 1839. This remarkable literary character, the son of a solicitor to the Ordnance, was born in 1775. At the age of twenty-seven he had made his mark in Fleet Street, and, from 1807 to 1817, the articles to the _Monthly Mirror_ entitled "Horace in London" were written by him. In 1812, with his younger brother, Horatio, he published the _Rejected Addresses_, in which Wordsworth, Southey, Coleridge, Lord Byron, Sir Walter Scott, and other writers were parodied with admirable felicity. He wrote many of the "Entertainments" for Charles Mathews the Elder, including _Country Cousins_ in 1820, and the _Trip to France_ and the _Trip to America_ in the two succeeding years. For the last two sketches he received a thousand pounds. "A thousand pounds!" he used to exclaim, with a shrug of the shoulders, "and all for nonsense."[68] He was lucky enough to obtain a legacy of £300 for a complimentary epigram on Mr Strachan, 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. Pretty Lady Blessington used to say of him, that "James Smith, if he had not been a _witty_ man, must have been a _great_ man. He died in his house in Craven Street, with the calmness of a philosopher, on the 24th of December, 1839, in the sixty-fifth year of his age."[69] It was on his own street that he wrote the well-known epigram: "In Craven Street, Strand, ten attorneys find place, And ten dark coal-barges are moor'd at its base; Fly, Honesty, fly! seek some safer retreat, For there's _craft_ in the river, and _craft_ in the street."[70] This satire led to a retort by Sir George Rose, the judge and well-known legal writer, in extemporaneous lines written at a dinner: "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." [Illustration: THE LION, NORTHUMBERLAND HOUSE.]