PREFACE. THE present is the first American edition of the collected poems of HORACE SMITH. Many of them have been printed in our newspapers and magazines, and not a few are favorites familiar to all true lovers of poetry. No one can read them without admitting the just claim of their author to a high place among the sons of song. His humorous pieces, too, are neat and lively versifications of anecdotes that usually carry with them a point if not a moral. While as a poet HORACE SMITH was incomparably superior to his brother, the latter, in his vers de societé, may claim perhaps equal merit. SPENCER and PRAED were not more felicitous in their poetry of fashion than JAMES SMITH. The topics show the man and his associations, and his poems are so many finished daguerreotypes of London society in the first half of the nineteenth century. In this light they will always be interesting and amusing-and may be admitted into collections of British poetry, from which similar sketches by Swift and Prior, of a grosser period, ought to be excluded. It is no small virtue of the popular writers whose poems are contained in our present volume, that, though wits and satirists, they are always gentlemen. It is to the Rejected Addresses that these ingenious brothers are mainly indebted for their celebrity; and this work still retains its popularity undiminished. It is admitted to be in all respects unique, and perfect after its fashion. Indeed, it well deserves the high praise bestowed on it by the most fastidious, if not the most able critic of his day-the critic who had sat in judgment on nearly all the authors imitated in this remarkable volume. The literary world had never before witnessed such an exhibition of the peculiar talent, which could be paralleled only by the marvellous execution of the mocking-bird. Our reprint of this work is from the twenty-third London edition, and the notes inclosed in brackets are from the pen, we believe, of Mr. Peter Cunningham. The prefatory memoir is compiled from a variety of sources, and claims no credit beyond that of judicious condensation and arrangement of materials. For so much of it as relates to JAMES SMITH we have relied generally upon the biographical sketch prefixed to his collected miscellanies. A series of papers in the New Monthly Magazine have also been freely used without special acknowledgment. They are entitled A Greybeard's Gossip, and are reminiscences of his literary contemporaries, by HORACE SMITH. Other sources of information are mentioned in the text. |
