MR. BROWNING'S NEW VOLUME.—CHRISTOPHER SMART.
[To ma Emma or ma "Srscreroa."] Bra,—The following " parleying of certain people of importance in his day " about poor Christopher Smart may be of some interest, now that Mr. Browning has summoned him from the grave to parley with him :—Says Dr. Barney to Dr. Johnson : "How does poor Smart do, Sir ; is he likely to recover P" (He was in a madhouse.) Johnson "It seems as if his mind had ceased to struggle with the disease, for he grows fat upon it." Barney : "Perhaps, Sir, that may be from want of exercise." Johnson: "No, Sir; he has partly as much exercise as he used to have, for he digs in the garden. Indeed, before his confine- ment he used for exercise to walk to the alehouse ; but he was -carried back again. I did not think he ought to be shut up: his infirmities were not noxious to society. He insisted on people praying with him; and I'd as lief pray with Kit Smart -as any one else. Another charge was that he did not love clean linen ; and I have no passion for it."
Of him, on another occasion, Dr. Johnson said :—" My poor friend Smart showed the disturbance of his mind by falling upon his knees, and saving his prayers in the street, or in any other unusual place. Now, although, rationally speaking, it is a greater madness not to pray at all than to pray as Smart did, I am afraid there are so many people who do not pray, that their understanding is not called in question."
It was Smart who let himself to " old Gardner, the bookseller," on a lease of ninety-nine years, to write in the Universal Visitor, a monthly magazine of the day, and to write nothing else. Grab Street could never have produced a stranger curiosity of literature than that solemnly signed and sealed contract. It may perhaps be because he found even the confinement of the madhouse less galling than the tyranny of the bookseller and the alehouse, that it was only in the madhouse that Smart could rise to the height of what your reviewer rightly calls " that true poem, ' A Song to David.' " (By the way, your reviewer calls it, "The Song of David," which is not right.) It mast be, I think, with mixed feelings that poor Christopher Smart comes back to earth, even though it be to talk with Mr. Browning ; for verily he might have stood (or ought I to say ." lain ?") for the subject of Goldsmith's epitaph on one- " Who long was a bookseller's hack, He led such a damnable life in this world, I don't think hen wish to come back."
—I am, Sir, Asc.,
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