ballads, his psalms and satires, his masques and his
georgics, are not bad, but they are mediocre. Here and there the very
careful reader may come across lines and phrases that display the
concealed author of the _Song to David_, such as the following, from
an excessively tiresome ode to Dr. Webster:

_When Israel's host, with all their stores,
Passed through_ the ruby-tinctured crystal shores,
The wilderness of waters and of land.

But these are rare. His odes are founded upon those of Gray, and the
best that can be said of them is that if they do not quite rise to the
frozen elegance of Akenside, they seldom sink to the flaccidity of
Mason. Never, for one consecutive stanza or stroke, do they approach
Collins or Gray in delicacy or power. But the _Song to David_--the
lyric in 516 lines which Smart is so absurdly fabled to have scratched
with a key on the white-washed walls of his cell--this was a portent
of beauty and originality. Strange to say, it was utterly neglected
when it appeared, and the editor of the 1791 edition of Smart's works
expressly omitted to print it on the ground that it bore too many
"melancholy proofs of the estrangement of Smart's mind" to be fit for
republication. It became rare to the very verge of extinction, and is
now scarcely to be found in its entirety save in a pretty reprint of
1819, itself now rare, due to the piety of a Rev. R. Harvey.

It is obvious that Smart's contemporaries and immediate successors
looked upon the _Song to David_ as the work of a hopelessly deranged
person. In 1763 poetry had to be very sane indeed to be attended to.
The year preceding had welcomed the _Shipwreck_ of Falconer, the year
to follow would welcome Goldsmith's _Traveller_ and Grainger's _Sugar
Cane_, works of various merit, but all eminently sane. In 1763
Shenstone was dying and Rogers was being born. The tidy, spruce, and
discreet poetry of the eighteenth century was passing into its final
and most pronounced stage. The _Song to David_, with its bold mention
of unfamiliar things, its warm and highly-coloured phraseology, its
daring adjectives and unexampled adverbs, was an outrage upon taste,
and one which was best accounted for by the tap of the forefinger
on the forehead. No doubt the poem presented and still may present
legitimate difficulties. Here, for instance, is a stanza which it is
not for those who run to read:

_Increasing days their reign exalt,
Nor in the pink and mottled va