Both James and Horatio Smith were also contributors to the Monthly Mirror, then the property of Mr. Thomas Hill, a gentleman who had the good fortune to live familiarly with three or four generations of authors; the same, in short, with whom the subject of this memoir thus playfully remonstrated: “Hill, you take an unfair advantage of an accident; the register of your birth was burnt in the great fire of London, and you now give yourself out for younger than you are.”
The fame of the Smiths, however, was confined to a limited circle until the publication of the Rejected Addresses, which rose at once into almost unprecedented celebrity.
James Smith used to dwell with much pleasure on the criticism of a Leicestershire clergyman: “I do not see why they (the Addresses) should have been rejected: I think some of them very good.” This, he would add, is almost as good as the avowal of the Irish bishop, that there were some things in Gulliver’s Travels which he could not believe.
Though never guilty of intemperance, James was a martyr to the gout; and, independently of the difficulty he experienced in locomotion, he partook largely of the feeling avowed by his old friend Jekyll, who used to say that, if compelled to live in the country, he would have the drive before his house paved like the streets of London, and hire a hackney-coach to drive up and down all day long.
He used to tell, with great glee, a story showing the general conviction of his dislike to ruralities. He was sitting in the library at a country-house, when a gentleman proposed a quiet stroll into the pleasure-grounds:—
“ ‘Stroll! why, don’t you see my gouty shoe?’
“ ‘Yes, I see that plain enough, and I wish I’d brought one too, but they’re all out now.’
“ ‘Well, and what then?’
“ ‘What then? Why, my dear fellow, you don’t mean to say that you have really got the gout? I thought you had only put on that shoe to get off being shown over the improvements.’ ”
His bachelorship is thus attested in his niece’s album: