Smith, ALEXANDER, poet, was born 31st December 1830 at Kilmarnock, but was brought up at Paisley and Glasgow. He received the usual Scottish schooling, and then had to give up all thoughts of the ministry for his father's calling of pattern-designer in a Glasgow warehouse. Here he began to write verses, some of which gained admission to the Glasgow Citizen. Through George Gilfillan his Life Drama appeared in several issues of the London Critic (1851), and was reprinted the next year in a volume of which 10,000 copies sold in a very few months. A reaction, however, set in; and the author had scarcely found himself famous when he began to be fiercely assailed. The faults of his book were obvious enough; every page bore evidence of immaturity and its natural result, extravagance; while a somewhat narrow reading having made him passionately attached to a few modern poets, such as Keats and Tennyson, their turns of expression reappeared in his verse, and gave colour to the charge of plagiarism which was carried to an absurd length. Still, he has always a richness and originality of imagery that more than atone for all defects of taste and knowledge; and no poet since Shakespeare's day has written occasional lines with a more Shakespearian ring. In 1854 he was appointed secretary to the university of Edinburgh, and next year produced Sonnets on the War in conjunction with Sydney Dobell (q.v.), his brother-poet in the 'Spasmodic' school. He afterwards wrote City Poems (1857); the Northumbrian epic, Edwin of Deira (1861); and, in semi-poetic prose, Dreamthorp: a Book of Essays (1863); A Summer in Skye (1865); and Alfred Hagart's Household (1866), a simple and touching story of Scottish middle-class life. In 1857 he married Miss Flora Macdonald from Skye; and he died at Wardie, near Edinburgh, 8th January 1867.
See the Rev. T. Brisbane's Early Years of Alexander Smith (1869), and the Memoir by P. P. Alexander prefixed to his Last Leaves (1869).