Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 52.djvu/398

 appreciation of the subtleties of advertising. Newbery reprinted two of Smart's poems on the attributes of the deity, to one of which the author added by way of preface a puff of Dr. James's fever powder. In the meantime, under the auspices of Newbery, and the pseudonym of Mary Midnight (a name probably borrowed from a booth in Bartholomew fair), Smart had been directing a threepenny journal, entitled ‘The Midwife, or the Old Woman's Magazine,’ which ran to three volumes between 1751 and 1753. Amid a great deal of buffoonery, often sufficiently coarse, Smart's hand is constantly revealed by the neatness of the verse, and especially of the Latin epigrams and fables. Many of his compositions appeared under his pseudonym of Pentweazle. Drawn by Newbery into the vortex of Grub Street animosities, Smart further conceived an ‘Old Woman's Dunciad,’ but he was anticipated in this by William Kenrick [q. v.], who used the idea to pay off a grudge against its originator, whereupon Smart abandoned the design (, Pasquinade, p. 20 n.) It is doubtful whether he had anything to do with ‘Mother Midnight's Miscellany’ (London, 1751), which looks like an unauthorised imitation, but he probably had a hand in ‘The Index of Mankind,’ a clever collection of proverbial maxims, and perhaps in some later enterprises of Newbery, such as the ‘Lilliputian Magazine’ [see, (1722–1786)]. The ascription of the ‘Index’ to Goldsmith is inadmissible, as he was in Ireland during the winter 1751–2. ‘The Nonpareil’ (1757) and ‘Mrs. Midnight's Orations … spoken at the Oratory in the Haymarket’ (1763) are merely selections from the original ‘Miscellany,’ the latter printed for Smart's benefit.

While the ‘Old Woman's Magazine’ was running, Newbery also published for Smart at the ‘Bible and Sun’ his ‘Poems on Several Occasions’ (1752, 8vo), which included in its list of subscribers Voltaire, Richardson, Gray, Collins, Garrick, and Roubiliac. Its chief feature was a georgic, ‘The Hop Garden,’ in which he describes the beauties of his native county of Kent. It was an adverse criticism of this volume in the ‘Monthly Review’ (followed by some anonymous abuse in an ephemeral print called ‘The Impertinent’ on 13 Aug. 1752) from the pen of ‘Sir’ John Hill (1716?–1775) [q. v.] that provoked Smart's pungent satire ‘The Hilliad: an epic poem—to which are prefixed copious prolegomena and Notes Variorum, particularly those of Quinbus Flestrin and Martinus Macularius, M.D.’ London, 1753, 4to. Hill admitted in a ‘Smartiad’ that he had betrayed Smart into the hackney's profession—‘hence the right to abuse me.’ This explanation was formally contradicted by Newbery. The satire is only memorable as having suggested the form of the ‘Rolliad.’

From the resignation of his fellowship, Smart's fortunes steadily declined. In 1756 he completed a prose translation of Horace, which became a mine of wealth to the booksellers, but seems to have brought him little profit, as in this year he engaged himself to the bookseller Gardener, in conjunction with Richard Rolt [q. v.], to produce a weekly paper, ‘The Universal Visiter,’ and nothing else, for one sixth of the profits. According to the somewhat apocryphal story, he leased himself to Gardener on these conditions for a term of ninety-nine years (cf., Essays, 1810, ii. 344; , Goldsmith, i. 382). Dr. Johnson, whose ‘Rambler’ Smart had been one of the first to praise, wrote a few pages for the ‘Visiter,’ which seems to have collapsed before 1759. On 3 Feb. in this year, Smart being much ‘reduced,’ Garrick gave for his benefit ‘Merope,’ together with his farce ‘The Guardian,’ himself playing Heartly (, iv. 547). For some years the poet appears to have been unable to maintain his wife and children, who had in consequence to take refuge with Mrs. Falkiner in Ireland. In 1763 he was once more immured in a madhouse (probably Bethlehem Hospital), where the story runs that his grand ‘Song to David’ was written, ‘partly with charcoal on the walls, or indented with a key on the panels of his cell’ (respecting the legend, which probably contains a nucleus of truth, cf. Notes and Queries, 2nd ser. iii. 433). The ‘Song’ was published in a thin quarto in the autumn of 1763 (it was reprinted in the poet's ‘Metrical Version of the Psalms,’ 1765, and separately, 1819, 12mo, and 1895, 8vo). Dr. Johnson visited Smart in his cell during the summer of 1763, and gave a pithy account of the poet's condition. He concluded that he ought never to have been shut up. ‘His infirmities were not noxious to society. He insisted upon people praying with him, and I'd as lief pray with Kit Smart as with any one else. Another charge was that he did not love clean linen; and I have no passion for it.’

The impulse which had produced the ‘Song to David’ remained with Smart to the end, but the inspiration was exhausted along with the ‘glorious’ stanzas which conclude that poem. In 1764 he wrote the libretto, ‘Hannah, an Oratorio;’ in 1765 metrical versions of Phædrus and of the Psalms, in many of which, says Orme, ‘Sternhold himself was out-Sternholded,’ and finally, in 1768,