to understand, if not to share their
raptures. For a time Smith was deliberately pitted against Tennyson by
"the younger sort" as Dennis says of the faction for Settle against
Dryden in his days at Cambridge. The reaction which, mercifully for the
chances of literature if not quite pleasantly for the poet, always comes
in such cases, was pretty rapid, and Smith, ridiculed in _Firmilian_,
was more seriously taxed with crudity (which was just), plagiarism
(which was absurd), and want of measure (which, like the crudity, can
hardly be denied). Smith, however, was not by any means a weakling
except physically; he could even satirise himself sensibly and
good-humouredly enough; and his popularity had the solid result of
giving him a post in the University of Edinburgh--not lucrative and by
no means a sinecure, but not too uncongenial, and allowing him a chance
both to read and to write. For some time he stuck to poetry, publishing
_City Poems_ in 1857 and _Edwin of Deira_ in 1861. But the taste for his
wares had dwindled: perhaps his own poetic impulse, a true but not very
strong one, was waning; and he turned to prose, in which he produced a
story or two and some pleasant descriptive work--_Dreamthorpe_ (1863),
and _A Summer in Skye_ (1865). Consumption showed itself, and he died on
8th January 1867.

It has already been said that there is much less of a distinct
brotherhood in Dobell and Smith, or of any membership of a larger but
special "Spasmodic school," than of the well-known and superficially
varying but generally kindred spirit of periods and persons in which
and in whom poetic yearning does not find organs or opportunities
thoroughly suited to satisfy itself. Dobell is the more unequal, but the
better of the two in snatches. His two most frequently quoted
things--"Tommy's Dead" and the untitled ballad where the refrain--

Oh, Keith of Ravelston,
The sorrows of thy line!

occurs at irregular intervals--are for once fair samples of their
author's genius. "Tommy's dead," the lament of a father over his son, is
too long, it has frequent flatnesses, repetitions that do not add to the
effect, bits of mere gush, trivialities. The tragic and echoing
magnificence of the Ravelston refrain is not quite seconded by the text:
both to a certain extent deserve the epithet (which I have repudiated
for Beddoes in another place) of "artificial." And yet both have the
fragmentary, not to be analysed, almost uncanny cha