indeed he deserved to live. We cannot recollect that he wrote anything in the book line except his contributions to the "Rejected Addresses," unless he had a hand in such stuff as "Jokeby," or "Horace in London." His magazine papers in the New Monthly were rather monotonous; and his continually quoting of them for years afterwards has contributed in a great measure towards getting him, so generally as he is, considered to be a bore. But let him have his praise. His single talent was a good talent, and there is no reason why he should wrap it up in a napkin. We have already alluded to the universal diffusion of his name among us English folk, and its trite and ordinary sound in our ears. It is perhaps more congruous on that account with the station which he has chosen to hold in our literature. His place there is of the Smiths, Smithish.- MAGINN, WILLIAM, 1834, James Smith, Fraser's Magazine, vol. 10, p. 538.

A fair, stout, fresh-coloured man, with round features, he used to read us trim verses, with rhymes as pat as butter.-HUNT, LEIGH, 1850, Autobiography, ch. x.

James Smith, was very different from his brother Horace in all the qualities and attributes of his mind and intellectual character, with the exception of his lively wit, amiable and popular manners, and singularly gentlemanly bearing and personal appearance. In this latter respect James Smith was all his life a model; and this, although he had been bred and brought up in the city, and passed nearly the whole of his life there. I have never seen a man on whom was more legibly and eloquently written that comprehensive title, "Gentleman.” . . . James Smith, though certainly not possessing a larger

amount of wit and humour than his brother Horace, was essentially and emphatically "a wit"-in the old-fashioned sense of the age of Anne and her immediate successor. Had he lived in those days, he would have been among the favourite habitués of Button's and Wills's, and would have manfully asserted and maintained his station among the best of that brilliant day. As it was-though, like his brother, associating with the highest and most cultivated spirits of the day in which he lived, and fully qualified to take a

distinguished place among them-unlike that gentle and genial spirit, he preferred those lower and more limited circles in which his intellectual pretensions were paramount and his supremacy undisputed: he preferred the green-rooms of Covent Garden and Drury Lane to Holland House; and so anxious and determined was he to succeed in establishing the social reputation at which he aimed in both these circles, that I'm afraid there is little doubt of his having made it no unimportant part of the business of his life to manufacture beforehand the appliances and means proper to his success; so that you could never be sure of any one of his droll anecdotes, lively sallies, bitter jests, or biting repartees, that it was not fait à loisir. -PATMORE, P. G., 1854, My Friends and Acquaintance, vol. II, pp. 239, 241.

The nervous terror which I experienced when singing or playing before my mother was carried to a climax when I was occasionally called upon to accompany the vocal performances of our friendly acquaintance, James Smith (one of the authors of the "Rejected Addresses"). He was famous for his humorous songs and his own capital rendering of them, but the anguish I endured in accompanying him made those comical performances of his absolutely tragical to me; the more so that he had a lion-like cast of countenance, with square jaws and rather staring visaged only to me; while he sang everyeyes. But perhaps he appeared so sternbody laughed, but I perspired coldly and felt ready to cry, and so have but a lugubrious impression of some of the most amusing productions of that description, heard to the very best advantage (if I could have listened to them at all) as executed by their author.-KEMBLE, FRANCES ANN, 1879, Records of a Girlhood, p. 86.

GENERAL

A conversational wit of high rank, and beyond comparison the best epigrammatist of the day. His reputation may

well rest upon the "Rejected Addresses," of which he contributed the larger portion; a series of poems, &c., which, as a fellow-traveller once gravely informed him, did not appear so very bad-he did not think that they ought all to have been rejected!-BARHAM, R. H. DALTON, 1848, The Life and Remains of Theodore Edward Hook, pp. 162, 163.

Spencer and Praed were not more felicitous in their poetry of fashion than James Smith. The topics show the man and his associations, and his poems are so many finished daguerreotypes of London society in the first half of the nineteenth century. In this light they will always be interesting and amusing and may be admitted into collections of British poetry, from which similar sketches by Swift and Prior, of a grosser period, aught to be excluded. -SARGENT, EPES, 1871, Rejected Addresses and Other Poems by James Smith and Horace Smith, Preface, p. iii.

The best of the thing was that there was no gall in the ink of which the happy parodists made use; their satire was of such genial character that it "procured for the authors,"-as they boasted,"the acquaintance, and conciliated the good-will of those whom they had the most audaciously burlesqued." Sir Walter Scott said to one of them that he certainly must have written himself the piece that bears his initials, "though he forgot on what occasion;" William Spencer, when warned by Lydia White, a notorious feeder of London lions, that he would meet at her table "one of those men who made that shameful attack," replied that this "was the very man upon earth he should like to know;" and Lord Byron wrote to Murray from Italy, "Tell him we forgive him, were he twenty times our satirist, adding that the Imitations were "the best things after the 'Rolliad.'"' Indeed, the only people offended or discontented were, as Mr. Hayward says, those who were left out! Few books are better known, even at the present day, than this of which I have been speaking; and I should not have felt it necessary to say so much about it, if I had not learnt by experience that, in re literariâ at least, it is more satisfactory to assume the ignorance than the knowledge of one's readers. The book, indeed, has more than one point of attraction. Collectors prize it for the exquisite

woodcut illustrations by George Cruikshank which are to be found in the later editions; lovers of wit and humour for the truly attic salt wherewith it is savoured; while all that know it will readily endorse the opinion of Jeffrey, who says, "I take the 'Rejected Addresses' to be the very best imitations, and often of difficult. originals, that ever were made."-BATES, WILLIAM, 1874-98, The Maclise Portrait Gallery of Illustrious Literary Characters, p. 279.

The honours of the authorship were pretty fairly divided between James and Horace. The parodies on Wordsworth, Crabbe, Southey, and Coleridge, and the first stanza of the parody on Byron, were contributed by James. He was especially happy in burlesquing Wordsworth and Crabbe. James Smith wrote a

number of verses, which were collected after his death by his brother, but he is only remembered for his parodies.WHYTE, WALTER, 1894, The Poets and the Poetry of the Century, Humour, Society, Parody and Occasional Verse, ed. Miles, pp. 102, 103.

James Smith's contributions to these famous parodies were perhaps the best, though not the most numerous, but he appeared contented with the celebrity they had brought him, and never again produced anything considerable. Universally known, and everywhere socially acceptable, "he wanted," says his brother, "all motive for further and more serious exertion." . He also produced much comic verse and prose for periodicals, not generally of a very high order, but occasionally including an epigram turned with point and neatness. His reputation rather rested upon his character as a wit and diner-out; most of the excellent things attributed to him, however, were, in the opinion of his biographer in the "Law Magazine," impromptus faits à loisir.GARNETT, RICHARD, 1898, Dictionary of National Biography, vol. LIII, p. 58.

PERSONAL

He was a thorough gentleman, of handsome person and refined manners. His talent did not approach genius, but he hit the popular taste, and his verses, wedded to simple music, long delighted ears not over-fastidious. He is one of the numerous worthies whose names are intimately associated with Bath; for, in addition to his having been born there, all, or nearly all, his most popular songs were written in that pleasant city.-HALL, SAMUEL CARTER, 1883, Retrospect of a Long Life, p. 408.

Mr. T. H. Bayly was a dandy, who wore white kid gloves in the day time. He was a gentleman; had been a man of fortune; but I suspect that like Dogberry, he had had losses.-SALA, GEORGE AUGUSTUS, 1894, Things I have Seen and People I have Known, vol. II, p. 150.

GENERAL

An English critic supposes that he is indebted for much of his popularity to his former position in society; but the estimation in which his compositions are held in this country, where his personal history was unknown, shows the opinion to be erroneous. It is not always easy to discover the true causes of an author's success. Bayly was certainly not one of the first poets of his time-the century in which more true and enduring poetry was written than in any other since the invention of letters; and if he had essayed any thing of a more ambitious character than the simple ballad, doubtless he would have failed; but by her who dallies with a coronet and the maiden at her spinning-wheel, by the soldier, the student, and the cottage Damon, his melodies are sung with equal feeling and admiration. Many have written "songs," exquisitely beautiful as poems, which are never sung; and others, like Dibdin, have produced songs for particular classes; but Bayly touches the universal heart. He is never mawkish, never obscure, and rarely meretricious; his verse is singularly harmonious; every word seems chosen for its musical sound; and his modulation is unsurpassed. Our rough English flows from his pen as smoothly as the soft Italian from that of

Our

Bojardo or Metastasio.-GRISWOLD, RUFUS W., 1844, The Poets and Poetry of England in the Nineteenth Century, p. 312.

He possessed a playful fancy, a practised ear, a refined taste, and a sentiment which ranged pleasantly from the fanciful to the pathetic, without, however, strictly attaining either the highly imaginative or the deeply passionate.-MOIR, D. M., 1851-52, Sketches of the Poetical Literature of the Past Half-Century, p. 289.

He is now mostly known for his exquisite songs, which for sweetness and elegance are second only-if they are second-to those of Burns and Moore; showing the playful fancy, the practised ear, and the refined taste of the author. They are simple, natural and graceful, and tenderdescriptive of the feelings of all, in a language which all can appreciate and understand. It is doubtful if any songs in the English language ever attained the popuarity of "Oh no, we never mention her!" "I'd be a Butterfly," and the "Soldier's Tear." Other of his songs, as "Why don't the Men propose?" and "My married Daughter could you see," show a different kind of power-that the author possessed that knowledge of human nature, and those powers of keen and delicate satire, which can lay bare the secret workings of the heart of a vain daughter or of a silly. mother for the amusement of the world. -CLEVELAND, CHARLES D., 1853, English Literature of the Nineteenth Century, p.369.

There is no lofty strain in any of Bayly's productions, but in nearly all there is lightness and ease in expression, which fully account for their continued popularity. SMITH, G. BARNETT, 1885, Dictionary of National Biography, vol. III, p. 452.

If to be sung everywhere, to hear your verses uttered in harmony with all pianos and quoted by the world at large, be fame, Bayly had it. He was an unaffected poet. He wrote words to airs, and he is almost absolutely forgotten. To read him is to be carried back on the wings of music to the bowers of youth; and to the bowers of youth I have been wafted, and to the old booksellers. You do not find on every stall the poems of Bayly; but a

copy in two volumes has been discovered, edited by Mr. Bayly's widow (Bentley, 1844). They saw the light in the same year as the present critic, and perhaps they ceased to be very popular before he was breeched. . Of his poems the inevitable criticism must be that he was a Tom Moore of much lower accomplishments. His business was to carol of the most vapid and obvious sentiment, and to. string flowers, fruits, trees, breeze, sorrow, to-morrow, knights, coal-black steeds, regret, deception, and so forth, into fervid anapæstics. Perhaps his success lay in knowing exactly how little sense in poetry composers will endure and singers will accept. . . How does Bayly manage it? What is the trick of it, the obvious, simple, meretricious trick, which somehow, after all, let us mock as we will, Bayly could do, and we cannot? He really had a slim, serviceable, smirking, and sighing little talent of his own; andwell, we have not even that. Nobody forgets

"The lady I love will soon be a bride." Nobody remembers our cultivated epics

.

and esoteric sonnets, oh brother minor poet, mon semblable, mon frère! The moral of all this is that minor poetry has its fashions, and that the butterfly Bayly could versify very successfully in the fashion of a time simpler and less pedantic than our own. On the whole, minor poetry for minor poetry, this artless singer, piping his native drawingroom notes, gave a great deal of perfectly harmless, if highly uncultivated, enjoyment.-LANG, ANDREW, 1891, Essays in Little, pp. 36, 42, 46, 47.

It was as a song writer that Bayly attained his greatest success, and some of his songs, partly on their own account, and partly from the felicity of their setting at the hands of musical composers, and of their popularity with vocalists, have been among the most sung songs of the century. His songs and vers de société are, however, the more characteristic productions of the Butterfly bard.-MILES, ALFRED H., 1894, The Poets and the Poetry of the Century, Humour, Society, Parody and Occasional Verse, pp. 242, 243.

PERSONAL

I am quite taken with his conversation: he appears to me to possess a fund of diversified and miscellaneous information, and to have gradually formed the acquisition not only with the vigour of an original and reflecting mind, but with the temper of a mind happily harmonised and free from all the shackles of theory as well as of prejudice. This information is likewise communicated not only with the most unaffected ease, and with an air of perfect liberality and candour, but with a mixed sensibility and pleasantry which I have seldom seen so well blended together.HORNER, FRANCIS, 1801, Memoirs and Correspondence, vol. 1, p. 154.

It is long since I was at Edinburgh, and when I was there nothing of importance was a-doing. I heard Alison preach.

His elocution is clear-his style eleganthis ideas distinct rather than profound. Some person contrasting him and Chalmers, observed that the Prebendary of Sarum is like a glass of spruce beer,pure, refreshing, and unsubstantial-the minister of the Tron Kirk, like a draught of Johnnie Dowie's ale,-muddy, thick, and spirit-stirring.-CARLYLE, THOMAS, 1817, Early Letters, ed. by Charles Eliot Norton, p. 62.

To me he appears the best preacher I have ever heard.-EDGEWORTH, MARIA, 1823, Letters, vol. II, p. 101.

My earliest recollections of domestic life are those of the solitude and seclusion of an English parsonage-house. Though visited occasionally by the great, often by the learned, the greater part of our life, even in summer, and the whole

winter, was spent alone. A devoted worshipper of Nature, my father was firmly impressed with the conviction, so conspicuous in his writings, that the best feelings of the heart are to be drawn from her influences, and the purest enjoyments of life from her contemplation. He studied her works incessantly. The migration of birds, the changes of the seasons, the progress of vegetation, were the subjects of constant observation, and by keeping an accurate daily register, not only of the weather, but of the blooming of flowers and the changes of vegetation, he maintained a constant interest by comparing the progress of one season with another. Botany, zoology, and ornithology were in his hands not mere unmeaning sciences containing an artificial classification of objects and a dry catalogue of names, but a key to the secret interests of Nature, and commentaries on the wisdom and beneficence of its Author. White's "Natural History of Selborne" was the subject of his study and the object of his imitation. We all grew up with the same habits, and indelibly received the same impressions.-ALISON, SIR ARCHIBALD, 1867? Some Account of My Life and Writings, vol. I, p. 10.

GENERAL

He has never received fame enough for a book ["Principles of Taste"] which, with many faults, contains many beautiful thoughts and many charms in the writing. -HORNER, FRANCIS, 1805, Memoirs and Correspondence, vol. 1, p. 345.

The style of these "Sermons" is something new, we think, in the literature of this country. It is more uniformly elevated, more profusely figured-and, above all, more curiously modulated, and balanced upon a more exact and delicate rhythm, than any English composition in mere prose with which we are acquainted. In these, as well as in some more substantial characteristics, it reminds us more of the beautiful moral harangues that occur in the Telemaque of Fenelon, or of the celebrated Oraisons funebres of Bossuet, than of any thing of British growth and manufacture:-Nor do we hesitate at all to set Mr. Alison fairly down by the side of the last named of those illustrious Prelates. He is less lofty pernaps; but more tender and more varied-less splendid, but less theatrical-and, with fewer striking

reflections on particular occurrences, has unquestionably more of the broad light of philosophy, and the milder glow of religion. In polish and dignity we do not think him at all inferior-though he has not the advantage of enhancing the simple majesty of Christianity by appeals to listening monarchs, and apostrophes to departed princes.-JEFFREY, FRANCIS LORD, 1814, Alison's Sermons, Edinburgh Review, vol. 23, p. 424.

Alison denied that there is any intrinsic pleasure either in sound, in colour, or in form. He resolved the emotions of sublimity and beauty into associations with primitive sensibilities. primitive sensibilities. The "Essay" is written in a very readable style for a work of abstruse analysis.-MINTO, WILLIAM, 1872-80, Manual of English Prose Literature, p. 515.

The arrangement and manner of the work ["Principles of Taste"] are admirable. The style is distinguished by infinite grace, and is worthy of being compared to that of Addison:-indeed I am not sure if we have a more beautiful specimen of the last-century manner of composition, moulded on the "Spectator," the "Spectator," on the French classics, and the wits of Queen Anne. Every word is appropriate, and is in its appropriate place; and the sentences glide along like a silvery stream. The descriptions of natural scenery, which are very numerous, are singularly felicitous and graceful: that word graceful ever comes up when we would describe his manner. He does not seem to have had an equal opportunity of studying beauty in the fine arts, in architecture, statuary, and painting, though the allusions to the universally known models of these are always appreciative and discriminating.

McCOSH, JAMES, 1874, The Scottish Philosophy, p. 308.

Justly admired ["Sermons"] for the elegance and beauty of their language, and their gentle, persuasive inculcation of Christian duty. On points of doctrine. and controversy the author is wholly silent: his writings, as one of his critics remarked, were designed for those who "want to be roused to a sense of the beauty and the good that exist in the universe around them, and who are only indifferent to the feelings of their fellow-creatures and negligent of the duties they impose, for want of some persuasive monitor to