The laurels with the winter strive;
The crocus burnishes alive
Upon the snow-clad earth;
* * * * *
For Adoration ripening canes
And cocoa's purest milk detains
The westering pilgrim's staff;
Where rain in, clasping boughs inclos'd,
And vines with oranges dispos'd,
Embower the social laugh.
For Adoration, beyond match,
The scholar bulfinch aims to catch
The soft flute's ivory touch;
And, careless on the hazle spray,
The daring redbreast keeps at bay
The damsel's greedy clutch_.
To quote at further length from so fascinating, so divine a poem, would be "purpling too much my mere grey argument." Browning's praise ought to send every one to the original. But here is one more stanza that I cannot resist copying, because it seems so pathetically applicable to Smart himself as a man, and to the one exquisite poem which was "the more than Abishag of his age":
His muse, bright angel of his verse,
Gives balm for all the thorns that pierce,
For all the pangs that rage;
Blest light, still gaining on the gloom,
The more than Michal of his bloom,
The Abishag of his age.
POMPEY THE LITTLE
THE HISTORY OF POMPEY THE LITTLE; or, the Life and Adventures of a
Lap-Dog. London: Printed for M. Cooper, at the Globe in Paternoster
Row, MDCCLI.
In February 1751 the town, which had been suffering from rather a dreary spell since the acceptable publication of Tom Jones, was refreshed and enlivened by the simultaneous issue of two delightfully scandalous productions, eminently well adapted to occupy the polite conversation of ladies at drums and at the card-table. Of these one was The Memoirs of a Lady of Quality, so oddly foisted by Smollett into the third volume of his Peregrine Pickle. This was recognised at once as being the work of the frail and adventurous Lady Vane, about whom so many strange stories were already current in society. The other puzzled the gossips much longer, and it seems to have been the poet Gray who first discovered the authorship of Pompey the Little. Gray wrote to tell Horace Walpole who had written the anonymous book that everybody was talking about, adding that he had discovered the secret through the author's own carelessness, three of the characters being taken from a comedy shown him by a young clergyman at Magdalen College, Cambridge. This was the Rev. Francis Coventry, then some twenty-five years of age. The discovery of the authorship made Coventry a nine-days' hero, while his book went into a multitude of editions. It was one of the most successful jeux d'esprit of the eighteenth century.
The copy of the first edition of Pompey the Little, which lies before me, contains an excellent impression of the frontispiece by Louis Boitard, the fashionable engraver-designer, whose print of the Ranelagh Rotunda is so much sought after by amateurs. It represents a curtain drawn aside to reveal a velvet cushion, on which sits a graceful little Italian lap-dog with pendant silky ears and sleek sides spotted like the pard. This is Pompey the Little, whose life and adventures the book proceeds to recount. "Pompey, the son of Julio and Phyllis, was born A.D. 1735, at Bologna in Italy, a place famous for lap-dogs and sausages." At an early age he was carried away from the boudoir of his Italian mistress by Hillario, an English gentleman illustrious for his gallantries, who brought him to London. The rest of the history is really a chain of social episodes, each closed by the incident that Pompey becomes the property of some fresh person. In this way we find ourselves in a dozen successive scenes, each strongly contrasted with the others. It is the art of the author that he knows exactly how much to tell us without wearying our attention, and is able to make the transition to the next scene a plausible one.