ation of his circumstances." The
most curious discovery, however, which we have been able to make is
recorded in the following entry:

"Nov. 27, 1753.--Ordered that the dividend assigned to Mr. Smart be
deposited in the Treasury till the Society be satisfied that he has a
right to the same; it being credibly reported that he has been married
for some time, and that notice be sent to Mr. Smart of his dividend
being detained."

As a matter of fact, Smart was by this time married to a relative of
Newbery, the publisher, for whom he was doing hack work in London. He
had, however, formed the habit of writing the Seatonian prize poem,
which he had already gained four times, in 1750, 1751, 1752, and 1753.
He seems to have clutched at the distinction which he brought on
his college by these poems as the last straw by which to keep his
fellowship, and, singular to say, he must have succeeded; for on the
16th of January 1754, this order was recorded:

"That Mr. Smart have leave to keep his name in the college books
without any expense, so long as he continues to write for the premium
left by Mr. Seaton."

How long this inexpensive indulgence lasted does not seem to be known.
Smart gained the Seatonian prize in 1755, having apparently failed in
1754, and then appears no more in Pembroke records.

The circumstance of his having made Cambridge too hot to hold him
seems to have pulled Smart's loose faculties together. The next five
years were probably the sanest and the busiest in his life. He had
collected his scattered odes and ballads, and published them, with his
ambitious georgic, _The Hop Garden_, in the handsome quarto before
us. Among the seven hundred subscribers to this venture we find "Mr.
Voltaire, historiographer of France," and M. Roubilliac, the great
statuary, besides such English celebrities as Gray, Collins,
Richardson, Savage, Charles Avison, Garrick, and Mason. The kind
reception of this work awakened in the poet an inordinate vanity,
which found expression, in 1753, in that extraordinary effusion, _The
Hilliad_, an attempt to preserve Dr. John Hill in such amber as Pope
held at the command of his satiric passion. But these efforts, and an
annual Seatonian, were ill adapted to support a poet who had recently
appended a wife and family to a phenomenal appetite for strong waters,
and who, moreover, had just been deprived of his stipend as a fellow.
Smart descended into Grub Street, and bound himself over, hand