Bare, bald, and tawdry, as a fingered moth
Is my poor life; but with one smile thou canst
Clothe me with kingdoms. Wilt thou smile on me?
Wilt bid me die for thee? Oh fair and cold!
As well may some wild maiden waste her love
Upon the calm front of a marble Jove.


Now this scrap is by no menus a fair average specimen of Mr. Smith's
verse. But is not the self-educated man who could teach himself,
amid Glasgow smoke and noise, to write such a distich as that
exquisite one which we have given in italics, to be judged lovingly
and hopefully?

What if he has often copied? What if, in this very scrap, chosen
almost at random, there should be a touch from Tennyson's "Two
Voices?" And what if imitations, nay, caricatures, be found in
almost every page? Is not the explanation simple enough, and rather
creditable than discreditable to Mr. Smith? He takes as his models
Shelley, Keats, and their followers. Who is to blame for that? The
Glasgow youth, or the public taste, which has been exalting these
authors more and more for the last twenty years as the great poets of
the nineteenth century? If they are the proper ideals of the day,
who will blame him for following them as closely as possible--for
saturating his memory so thoroughly with their words and thoughts
that he reproduces them unconsciously to himself? Who will blame him
for even consciously copying their images, if they have said better
than he the thing which he wants to say, in the only poetical dialect
which he knows? He does no more than all schools have done, copy
their own masters; as the Greek epicists and Virgil copied Homer; as