GRAY ON HIMSELF. Too poor for a bribe, and too proud to importune, Could love and could hate, so was thought something odd A post or a pension he did not desire, But left church and state to Charles Townshend and Squire. END OF GRAY'S POEMS. THE LIFE OF TOBIAS SMOLLETT. THE combination of a great writer and a small poet, in one and the same person, is not uncommon. With not a few, while other, and severer branches of study are the laborious task of the day, poetry is the slipshod amusement of the evening. Dr Parr calls Johnson probabilis poeta-words which seem to convey the notion that the author of "The Rambler," who was great on other fields, was in that of poetry only respectable. This term is more applicable to Smollett, whose poems discover only in part those keen, vigorous, and original powers which enabled him to indite "Roderick Random" and "Humphrey Clinker." Yet the author of "Independence," and "The Tears of Scotland," must not be excluded from the list of British poets-an honour to which much even of his prose has richly entitled him. The incidents in Smollett's history are not very numerous, and some of them are narrated, under faint disguises, with inimitable vivacity and vraisemblance in his own fictions. Tobias George Smollett was born in Dalquhurn House, near the village of Renton, Dumbartonshire, in 1721. His father, a younger son of Sir James Smollett of Bonhill, having died early, the education of the poet devolved on his grandfather. The scenery of his native place was well calculated to inspire his early genius. It is one of the most beautiful regions in Scotland. A fine hollow vale, pervaded by the river Leven, and surrounded by rich woodlands and bold hills, stretches up from Dumbarton, with its double peaks and ancient castle, to the magnificent Loch Lomond; and in one of the loops of this winding vale was the great novelist born and bred. He called his native region, in "Humphrey Clinker," the "Arcadia of Scotland," and has sung the Leven in one of his small poems. He was sent to the Grammar School of Dumbarton, and thence to Glasgow College. He was subsequently placed apprentice to one M. Gordon, a medical practitioner in Glasgow; and from thence, according to some of his biographers, he proceeded to study medicine in Edinburgh. When he was about nineteen years of age, his grandfather expired, without having made any provision for him; and he was compelled, in 1739, to repair to London, carrying with him a tragedy entitled "The Regicide," the subject being the assassination of James the First of Scotland,—which he had written the year before, and which he in vain sought to get presented at the theatres. He had letters of introduction to some eminent literary characters, who, however, either could not or would not do anything for him; and he found no better situation than that of surgeon's mate in an eighty-gun ship. He continued in the navy for six or seven years, and was present at the disastrous siege of Carthagena, in 1741, which he has described in a Compendium of Voyages he compiled in 1756, and with still more vigour in "Roderick Random." His long acquaintance with the sea furnished ample materials for his genius, although it did not improve his opinion of human nature. Disgusted with the service, he quitted it in the West Indies, and lived for some time in Jamaica. Here he became acquainted with Miss Lascelles, a beautiful lady whom he afterwards married. She sat for the portrait of Narcissa, in "Roderick Random." In 1746 he returned to England. He found the country ringing with indignation at the cruelties inflicted by Cumberland on the Highland rebels, and he caught and crystalised the prevalent emotion in his spirited lyric, "The Tears of Scotland." He published the same year his "Advice,”—a |