Horace Smith

“ It is perhaps stranger that he ignored the novel than that he ignored theology, for the novel was then a very rising and popular literary form, and Smith began life as a professed literary critic. His mind seems to have been too positive to care much for tales. On the other hand, of the Greek and Latin classics he not unfrequently had several different editions. He had eight, for example, of Horace, who seems to have been an especial favourite.
Like most men who are fond of books, he seems to have bound them well, and often elegantly. ”

“ We want to listen to the call of the poet,
“Come forth into the light of things,
Let nature be your teacher.”
It is nature that mellows and softens the distance, and brings out sharply the lights and shadows of the foreground, and the artist must follow her if he would succeed. It is nature who warbles softly in the love notes of the bird, and who elevates the soul by the roar of the cataract and the pealing of the thunder. To her the musician and the poet listen, and imitate the great teacher. ”

“ Wonder like ours, when thro' the wilderness
Where London stood, holding the Wolf in chace,
He meets some fragment huge, and stops to guess
What powerful but unrecorded race
Once dwelt in that annihilated place. ”

“ His steel gray eyes sparkled with friendship or shot sparks, and his brown hair fairly bristled when he was angry. He impressed one as being altogether a man, the soul of loyalty, a perfect friend, and brave to the last drop of his blood. ”

“ James Smith died at his house, No. 27, Craven Street, Strand, on the 24th December, 1839, in the 65th year of his age; and was buried in the vaults of the church of St. Martin’s in the Fields. Horace died at Tunbridge Wells, on the 12th of July, 1849, in the 70th year of his age, and was buried in the churchyard of Trinity Church, Tunbridge Wells.
P. C.
p. vPREFACE TO FIRST EDITION.
On the 14th of August, 1812, the following advertisement appeared in most of the daily papers:—
“Rebuilding of Drury Lane Theatre. ”

“ O fountains, fields, and groves!
Sights, sounds, and odours rare,
Which my yearning spirit loves.
Thus I feel, and only steal
From visions so enchanting,
In tuneful lays to sing your praise—
What charm of life is wanting? ”

“ My attacks on the British flag have been few—in fact I have given timely assistance to many more English ships than I have robbed, and hundreds of their passengers and sailors owe their lives to me, but I have preyed on the natural pirates of these waters as ardently, perhaps, as did my father. Yet I have no greater moral right to take from them what they have stolen than I have to rob a British or an American ship, nor can I excuse myself for the loss of life that goes with my attacks on them. ”

“ Can anything be more awful than a public dinner—the waste, the extravagance, the outrageous superfluity of everything, the enormous waste of time, the solemn gorging, as if the whole end and aim of life were turtle and venison. I do not know whether to dignify such proceedings by the name of luxury. But what shall I say of gentlemen’s clubs. They are the very hotbed of luxury. By merely asking for it you obtain almost anything you require in the way of luxury. ”

“ I had brooded over the death of the Beautiful White Devil, for love of whom I was willing to give up my old ways and become a quiet and orderly person, until I had interpreted it to mean that the unseen and unknown directing force of my career had no sympathy with my reformatory resolutions and had taken that brutal way of making plain the command that I was to remain a homeless adventurer. ”

“ To embody the flying colours of folly, to arrest evanescence, to give to bubbles the globular consistency as well as form, to exhibit on the stage the piebald denizen of the stable, and the half-reasoning parent of combs, to display the brisk locomotion of Columbine, or the tortuous attitudinizing of Punch;—these are the occupations of others, whose ambition, limited to the applause of unintellectual fatuity, is too innocuous for the application of satire, and too humble for the incitement of jealousy. ”

“ Feel that I have no stomach left for entertainment military.
OMNES.
Round let us bound, for this is Punch’s holyday,
Glory to Tomfoolery, huzza! huzza!
[Exeunt dancing.
THE END.
LONDON:
PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED,
STAMFORD STREET AND CHARING CROSS.
FOOTNOTES
[0a] See Note at p. xiv.
[0b] 12mo., 1833. The first published by Mr. Murray. The “Preface” was written by Horace Smith; the “Notes” to the Poems by James Smith.
[0c] Samuel Whitbread, M.P. He died by his own hand in 1815.
[0d] This was Horatio, the writer of the present Preface. ”

“ I saw Norton go down and fought my way to him, to find that he had only slipped in a red pool. He had been singing a loud requiem of profane abuse over those who met his sword and he resumed it where he had left off, hardly missing a note. We kept the pirates in front of us and steadily forced our way forward. Every time one of our own men fell it made us fight the harder. The Chinkies cut and slashed with all of their desperate savagery but it was impossible for them to stand before the fury of our men and, though they outnumbered us four or five to one, they finally began to give way. ”

“ Then, with the small boats forming a cortege alongside, we opened her seacocks, pulled a short distance away, and watched her slowly sink to her grave, tenderly lowered by her own mother, the sea. We had taken our revolvers along for that particular purpose, our protection being a secondary consideration, and as the waves that her broken heart had warmed caressed the topmost flag we fired another salute in her honor, as the final tribute of a love that, long smouldering and not understood, had been fanned into full flame by her burial, and she was gone. ”

“ Ward, secretary to the theatre, exactly six weeks before the night when the opening Address was to be spoken. The hint thus p. ivthrown out was eagerly adopted. The brothers arranged what authors they should respectively imitate; and James executed his portion in London, and Horace the remainder at Cheltenham. James supplied the imitations of Wordsworth, Southey, Coleridge, Crabbe, and Cobbett, and Nos. 14, 16, 18, 19, and 20. The Byron was a joint effusion—James contributing the first stanza, and Horace the remainder. The Fitzgerald, the Sir Walter Scott, &c., were by Horace. ”

“ On the other hand, the sale of arms to rebels is forbidden, regardless of the fact that there can be no revolution without a rebellion, and that it is only through revolution, which is simply evolution, that mankind has advanced out of the so-called dark ages, even though they may have been, after all, the best. ”

“ Porkington looked in timidly to see how work was progressing, to assist in the classics, and to disentangle the mathematics; but the liberal sciences were so besmothered with tobacco smoke and so bespattered with beer, that the poor little man did not even dare to come to their assistance ”

“ The fact that they steal from others gives us no shadow of right to steal from them. Perhaps it is a good thing to kill them, but I hold no commission and draw no salary for that sort of thing. If the world wants them put out of the way, let the world attend to it. The world has never done anything for me that should make me want to assume the whole contract. If it is a public service to slay pirates, I have certainly killed my share, and directed the slaughter of enough more of them to absolve all of my most distant relatives from any further responsibility in the matter. ”

“ In the guise of a peaceful trader, with nothing about us to arouse suspicion, we loafed along the slave coast until we had a good line on the manner in which the Arabs conducted their operations and knew the general routine of the movements of the watching warships. With a satisfactory understanding of the general situation we signed on, at Mozambique, seventy-five additional men, who were ready for any service, equipped ourselves with such paraphernalia as we required, and launched out into the business of snatching slaves. ”

“ Being patted on the head when a boy by Chief-Justice Mansfield, in Highgate churchyard, and once seeing Horace Walpole on his lawn at Twickenham, were the two chief historical events of Mr. Smith’s quiet life. The four reasons that kept so clever a man employed on mere amateur trifling were these—an indolent disinclination to sustained work, a fear of failure, a dislike to risk a well-earned fame, and a foreboding that literary success might injure his practice as a lawyer. His favourite visits were to Lord Mulgrave’s, [Pg 141] Mr. ”

“ The parents of two children who had died were moved by some phantasy to revisit their dead carcasses, “whose benumbed bodies reflected to the eyes of the beholders such delightful countenances as though they had regained their vital spirits.” This miracle drew a great part of the King's people to behold them, nearly all of whom died shortly afterward. These people spoke the language of Powhatan. Smith explored the bays, isles, and islets, searching for harbors and places of habitation. He was a born explorer and geographer, as his remarkable map of Virginia sufficiently testifies. ”

“ The hard voice found even softness too loud; and in the silence which fell between the two men, only the Commissioner's pen could be heard.
"You'll look in at the palace, perhaps, and see all is right," came the brogue, after a bit, "and give my love to old Smith. I'm not sure but that I'd rather have seen him behind the door than anything else, for it must have been the hardest job--"
"Considering the circumstances, yes!" put in the doctor; so, with the pith hat turning him into an animated mushroom, he passed out into the blaze of dry yellow sunshine, on that dry yellow sand. ”

“ It certainly was not Mr Smith, for he was out at his work; nor was it the doctor, our only other visitor, for he always came up two steps at a time, and his boots always squeaked. Who could our visitor be?
“Come in,” called Smith, as a knock sounded on the door.
To my utter astonishment and concern, Hawkesbury, with his sweetest smile, entered the room.
How had he found out my retreat? What did he want here? What would Jack Smith say? These were the questions which rushed through my mind as he closed the door behind him and walked into the room. ”

“ Smith was in doubt how to act and confided in me. He had found Professor Kellogg, in whose house he lived, trying to kiss the pretty help, Rose entirely against her will: Smith was emphatic on this point, the girl was struggling angrily to free herself, when by chance he interrupted them.
I relieved Smith's solemn gravity a little by roaring with laughter: the idea of an old Professor and clergyman trying to win a young girl by force filled me with amusement: "What a fool the man must be!" was my English judgment; Smith took the American high moral tone at first. ”

“ Smith found himself very wide awake indeed. Never in all his life did he remember being more so, not even in the hour of its great catastrophe, or when his godfather, Ebenezer, after much hesitation, had promised him a clerkship in the bank of which he was a director. His nerves seemed strung tight as harp-strings, and his every sense was painfully acute. Thus he could even smell the odour of mummies that floated down from the upper galleries and the earthy scent of the boat which had been buried for thousands of years in sand at the foot of the pyramid of one of the fifth dynasty kings. ”

“ Long before poor old Warner had clambered out of his cab, the thing we called Smith had dissolved into dew and light on this lawn. Once or twice more, by the mercy of God, we may feel the thing, but the man we shall never see. In a spring garden before breakfast we shall smell the smell called Smith. In the snapping of brisk twigs in tiny fires we shall hear a noise named Smith. ”

“ He rose quickly and began to pace the room. “You shall see all my cards in time,” he continued. “I need such a man as you—a man without heart or mercy. Some day I will tell you a great secret.”
“I will tell you your secret now,” said Smith speaking slowly, and pointed to the coat of arms above the mantelpiece. “Why are those arms in this house?” he asked. “Why is this cipher and these fleur-de-lis embroidered in your carpet, Mr. Valentine. I don't know whether you are a madman, or whether you're sane,” Smith spoke in that slow drawl of his. ”

“ His enemies during his life were not more bitter than his enemies have been since his death. The spirit animating the most persistent detractors of Smith has been at once puerile and ignoble. That this great man was egotistic and self-assertive, it is impossible to deny, but that he was brave, steadfast, sagacious, and far-seeing, no one will question who approaches the study of his career with the critical faculty free from all prejudice. ”

“ I thought, “if he does choose to form wrong conclusions, why should I afflict myself? No one was even speaking of him when he entered the office. What business of mine is it to put him right?”
And then, as usual, I forgot all about the injury I had done him, all my treachery, all my meanness, and instead felt rather aggrieved, and persuaded myself it was I, not he, who was the injured person.
At dinner-time I ostentatiously went out arm-in-arm with Hawkesbury, and when on returning I met Smith on the stairs I brushed past him as if I had not seen him. ”