permitted to escape.

Both James and Horatio Smith were also contributors to the _Monthly
Mirror_, then the property of Mr. Thomas Hill, a gentleman who had
the good fortune to live familiarly with three or four generations of
authors; the same, in short, with whom the subject of this memoir thus
playfully remonstrated: "Hill, you take an unfair advantage of an
accident; the register of your birth was burnt in the great fire of
London, and you now give yourself out for younger than you are."

The fame of the Smiths, however, was confined to a limited circle until
the publication of the _Rejected Addresses_, which rose at once into
almost unprecedented celebrity.

James Smith used to dwell with much pleasure on the criticism of a
Leicestershire clergyman: "I do not see why they (the _Addresses_)
should have been rejected: I think some of them very good." This, he
would add, is almost as good as the avowal of the Irish bishop, that
there were some things in _Gulliver's Travels_ which he could not
believe.

Though never guilty of intemperance, James was a martyr to the gout;
and, independently of the difficulty he experienced in locomotion, he
partook largely of the feeling avowed by his old friend Jekyll, who used
to say that, if compelled to live in the country, he would have the
drive before his house paved like the streets of London, and hire a
hackney-coach to drive up and down all day long.

He used to tell, with great glee, a story showing the general conviction
of his dislike to ruralities. He was sitting in the library at a
country-house, when a gentleman proposed a quiet stroll into the
pleasure-grounds:--

"'Stroll! why, don't you see my gouty shoe?'

"'Yes, I see that plain enough, and I wish I'd brought one too,
but they're all out now.'

"'Well, and what then?'

"'What then? Why, my dear fellow, you don't mean to say that you
have really got the gout? I thought you had only put on that shoe
to get off being shown over the improvements.'"

His bachelorship is thus attested in his niece's album:

"Should I seek Hymen's tie,
As a poet I die,
Ye Benedicts mourn my distresses:
For what little fame
Is annexed to my name,
Is derived from _Rejected Addresses_."

The two following are amongst the best of his good things. A gentleman
with the same Christian and surname took lodgings in the same house. The
consequence was, eternal confusion of calls an