The Hilliad - Critical Response

Critical Response

One of the first responses to the poem was a notice by Murphy in his Gray's Inn Journal on 20 January 1753 that claimed The Hilliad as "an excellent Poem upon a very bad Subject", but also states that Smart was ill. The negative reaction to Smart's mock-epic were quick to come but not necessarily harsh: Samuel Derrick responded directly with a satirical poem, The Smartiad on February 1753; Arthur Murphy, like Derrick, criticized Smart for his personally attacking Hill; and Rules for Being a Wit tried to provoke further response from Smart. However, Smart stopped responding to either of these assaults.

Instead, Smart, in the prologue of Fielding's The Mock Doctor, claimed to "throw the mask aside" and to stop writing under pseudonyms or responding in his previous manner. The prologue was not allowed to be performed with The Mock Doctor from an order by the Lord Chamberlain's office after it almost caused a riot, but it was printed in the Public Advertiser. Regardless, once the prologue was actually published, Smart gave up his career in satirical writing. Soon after, Smart's works in The Midwife, and other papers in which he Smart contributed under a pseudonym, were soon discontinued and his major source of income was ended. There was very little contemporary reaction to follow, as Smart seemed to have disappeared from all mention. Later, in 1999, Bertelsen emphasized the importance of Smart's The Hilliad by claiming it as the "loudest broadside" during the "paper war". Likewise, Bertelsen was not afraid to point out Smart's gain at Hill's expense when he claims Hill was sent "sinking down to posterity in the canon of one of the more important poets of the eighteenth century."