Smart, CHRISTOPHER, a hapless English poet, was born at Shipbourne in Kent, April 11, 1722, and was educated at Maidstone, Durham, and Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, of which he was elected fellow in 1745. He won the Seatonian prize for an English poem on the attributes of the Supreme Being five times, and left college on his marriage to a step-daughter of John Newbery’s in 1752. He now became a bookseller’s hack, and made for some years a hard living betwixt improvidence, dissipation, and the expense of wife and children. His mind at last gave way, yet he lived on, with a few brief intervals of sanity, till his death in the rules of the King’s Bench, on the 21st May 1771. Smart was assisted by Samuel Johnson in his monthly publication, The Universal Visitor, and the moralist preserved a kindly feeling for him in his misfortunes. ‘I did not think he ought to be shut up,’ he said to Burney. ‘His infirmities were not noxious to society. He insisted on people praying with him; and I’d as lief pray with Kit Smart as any one else. Another charge was that he did not love clean linen: and I have no passion for it.’
Smart’s works include a number of feeble epigrams, birthday odes, and occasional poems; the Hilliad—a heavy satire in answer to a criticism of [Sir] John Hill’s; a bald prose translation of Horace (1756), well known to schoolboys; a poor poetical translation of Phædrus (1765), and a still poorer metrical version of the Psalms (1765), of the Parables (1768). His poems were collected in 1791, but the editor was careful to exclude the only thing that now claims a notice, A Song to David (printed 1763; new ed. 1895), some of the stanzas of which are said to have been scratched with a key on the walls of his madhouse. The poem extends to a hundred stanzas, and is marred by repetitions, and grievous defects of rhythm and structure, but it shows a genuine spark of true poetic inspiration not common in its age, and it is not too much to say that the poor poet here for once ‘had reached the zenith from his madhouse cell.’ Rossetti called it ‘the only great accomplished poem of the last century . . . A masterpiece of rich imagery, exhaustive resources, and reverberant sound;’ but the praise is extravagant. Smart is one of the figures with whom Browning holds his Parleyings, and supplies a chapter to Mr Gosse in his Gossip in a Library (1892).