12 JANUARY 1867, Page 3

Alexander Smith, the Scotch poet, died last Saturday of gastric

fever, at the age of only thirty-six years. His Life Drama was published when he was only twenty-three. His imagination had a wonderful fertility of metaphor, and single lines of extra- ordinary beauty studded here and there poems the general con- ception and substance of which were spasmodic. But he was undoubtedly a man of genius, and his single novel, Alfred Hagart's Household, deserved probably more credit than any other of his writings. He leaves a large family behind him.