I had then for the first time read Bailey's "Festus," and found some passages therein very similar to Alexander's; thereafter, other little bits from some other poets (I think Tennyson was one) struck me.

Little wonder, then, that I heard no more of Smith,--who clearly had thought himself found out,--and so received my first ignorance of his plagiaristic tendency as if I had known all about it: and years after Aytoun had (as I was told) avenged justice by that cleverest of spasmodic poetries, "Firmilian, by Percy Jones"-- a burlesque on Alexander Smith, and a book which the world has too willingly let die.

Let no one, however, after all this, fancy that I am unaware of Alexander Smith's true merit.

He very neatly fitted into his mosaic word-pictures the titbits he had culled in his commonplace-book out of many poets, and so utilised them.

A self-made and self-taught man, "elbow to elbow," as he told me, "with Jack, Tom, and Harry in a workshop," as a designer of patterns, he had well and wisely made the most of his scant opportunities of culture, and it is only a pity that he did not allude to something of this in a preface.
It is not for me to recall here much about the inevitable hospitalities of an old country house, to which a not unkindly host often invited English and foreign friends, whom something to do with authorship had made celebrities.