Thomas Smith

“ We whose names are subscribed, having seen specimens of drawings by John Thomas Smith, are of opinion that he is qualified for the office of drawing-master in the school of Christ’s Hospital.
I not only think him qualified as an artist, but greatly to be respected as a man. ”

“ We observe also that his choice of a man to fill the chair at Cambridge fell on one who was eminently qualified to represent in his own person that triad of the three R’s—Renaissance, Reformation and Reception. We know Professor Thomas Smith as a humanist, an elegant scholar with advanced opinions about the pronunciation of Greek. We know the Reverend Thomas Smith as a decided, if cautious, protestant whose doings are of some interest to those who study the changeful history of ecclesiastical affairs. ”

“ That Smythe was a man of considerable importance, may be inferred as well from his matrimonial alliances, as from the inscription on his monument, in which he is described, 'a pueritiâ suâ aulicus.' In the College of Arms there is a grant to Thomas Smith, by Christopher Barker, dated Boulogne 1544, and afterwards confirmed by Gilbert Dethick, from which it appears that he was at Boulogne in that year; probably attendant on the court there. Elizabeth, the first wife of Thomas Smith, was daughter and coheir of Eustace Fitzherbert, and relict of Edward Smith, of Cresing Temple, Co. ”

“ Don’t make rash promises to women; but if you will do so, don’t make them in writing.’”
Had John Thomas Smith been granted the scriptural span of life, he might have read the Pickwick Papers. But the implacable call came in March 1833, and he left various enterprises unfinished. He had collected the materials for a gossipping history of Covent Garden; these have never been edited. The well-known Antiquarian Rambles in the Streets of London, published in 1846, originated in Smith’s notes, but four-fifths of the book was certainly written by its editor, Dr. ”

“ Trusler, and Letitia Hawkins. It is remarkable how John Thomas Smith’s own books supplement each other. His Nollekens and his Times is an inexhaustible budget of facts, and its usefulness has been increased by the index provided in Mr. Gosse’s edition of 1895.
It should be remembered that the year-dates which Smith uses as chapter headings do not represent the times at which the respective chapters were written. I judge that Smith was engaged on the Rainy Day only in the last three years of his life. His chronology is rather happy-go-lucky. For example, it must not be supposed that Dr. ”

“ He used, according to the elder Alison (Sinclair, Old Times and Distant Places, p. 9) , to watch some particular student of expressive countenance, and be guided by such hearer's attentiveness or listlessness. The lectures became famous, especially after Smith's publication of the ‘Moral Sentiments.’ Lord Shelburne sent his younger brother Thomas to study under Smith, and Voltaire's friend, Theodore Tronchin, a physician at Geneva, sent a son for the same purpose in 1761.
Smith, as Mr. Rae shows from the college records, took a very active part in business during his professorship. ”

“ A successor of Becket was foremost among the refractory magnates who obtained that charter which secured the privileges both of the Norman barons and of the Saxon yeomanry. How great a part the Roman Catholic ecclesiastics subsequently had in the abolition of villenage we learn from the unexceptionable testimony of Sir Thomas Smith, one of the ablest Protestant counsellors of Elizabeth. When the dying slaveholder asked for the last sacraments, his spiritual attendants regularly adjured him, as he loved his soul, to emancipate his brethren for whom Christ had died. ”

“ Smith’s first master, John Keyse Sherwin, had been a pupil of Bartolozzi. In his studio in St. James’s Street, he was patronised by the Duchesses of Devonshire and Rutland, Lady Jersey, and other ladies of rank, many of whom were eager to figure in his drawing of “The Finding of Moses,” in which the Princess Royal appeared as Pharaoh’s daughter. He was a wonderfully skilful portrait artist: “I have often seen him,” says Smith, “begin at the toe, draw upwards, and complete it at the top of the head in a most correct and masterly manner. ”

“ Those who would understand the Science of Foxhunting cannot do better than read The Life of a Fox in conjunction with The Diary of a Huntsman by the same Author. Professor Huxley said somewhere that Science is Organized Commonsense. The Science of Foxhunting is eminently a matter of Commonsense, and there is no wiser exponent of it than Mr. Thomas Smith. ”

“ SMITH, THOMAS (1817–1906) , missionary and mathematician, born at Symington manse on 8 July 1817, was eldest son in a family of ten children of John Smith, parish minister of Symington, Lanarkshire, by his wife Jean Stodart. After attending the parish school, he matriculated at thirteen at Edinburgh University, where he took the highest honours in mathematics and physics. ”

“ Smith has been an industrious and hence a successful man, and his example cannot fail to prove an incentive to many a young Canadian now setting out to battle with the world. He married, in 1863, Jane Reeves, of Toronto, and has now a family of eight children.
Cairns, Thomas, Postmaster, Perth, county of Lanark, Ontario, is an Irishman by birth, having been born on the 4th of May, 1828, in the county of Fermanagh. He was educated in a private school in his native place, and in 1851 he came to Canada, and settled in Perth. ”

“ Smith was a thoughtful preacher, catholic in his sympathies, and of rather advanced opinions for the Free Church of his time, though in the end his influence was felt in broadening its outlook. Two ‘Discourses’ that he published in 1866, advocating more liberal views in regard to Sunday observance than those then prevailing in Scotland, came under the ban of his Presbytery, and he was ‘affectionately admonished’ by the General Assembly in June 1867. In 1876 he was translated to the Free High Church, Edinburgh. ”

“ Before this event occurred Smith was, at Dorset Garden, the original Pierre in Otway's ‘Venice Preserved,’ Sir Charles Kinglove in D'Urfey's ‘Royalist,’ King Harry in Banks's ‘Virtue Betrayed, or Anna Bullen,’ Don Carlos in Mrs. Behn's ‘False Count,’ and Ramble in Ravenscroft's ‘London Cuckolds.’ After the union he was, at the Theatre Royal, Grillon in Dryden's ‘Duke of Guise.’
In the memorandum of agreement, 14 Oct. 1682, the name of Smith is joined with those of Dr. Charles D'Avenant [q. v.] and Thomas Betterton [q. v.] on the one side, as against Charles Hart (d. 1683) [q. v.] ”

“ At this period Smith practised as an itinerant portrait painter, a branch of art which then had its vogue, and was to number William Hazlitt among its professors. At Edmonton it was that he “profiled, three-quartered, full-faced, and buttoned up the [xviii] retired embroidered weavers, their crummy wives and tight-laced daughters.” At Edmonton, too, he watched the reception of his first book, the Antiquities of London and its Environs. Smith’s career for the next thirty years may be conveniently sketched in a list of his residences and the work he accomplished in each. ”

“ Smith says in his Nollekens that he met many people who recollected seeing him as High Constable of Westminster, “dressed in black, with a large, nine-storey George the Second’s wig highly powdered, with long flowing curls over his shoulder, a high three-cornered hat, and his black baton tipped with silver at either end, riding on a white horse to Tyburn with the malefactors.” A long and warm friendship existed between Saunders Welch and Dr. Johnson. “Johnson, who had an eager and unceasing curiosity to know human life in all its variety, told me that he attended Mr. ”

“ The green hills appear beneath; with the graves of the blessed, which are seen bursting with their births of immortality; parents and children embrace and arise together, and in exulting attitudes tell each other, that the New Jerusalem is ready to descend upon earth; they arise upon the air rejoicing; others newly awaked from the grave, stand upon the earth embracing and shouting to the Lamb, who cometh in the clouds with power and great glory. ”

“ Away flew Smith to see the procession, and to record it, in his old age, in the Rainy Day.
As a youth, Smith wished to learn engraving under Bartolozzi, but the great Italian declined a pupil, and it was through the influence of Dr. Hinchliffe, Bishop of Peterborough, one of his father’s patrons, that he entered the studio of John Keyse Sherwin, the engraver. Here he received his kiss from the beautiful “Perdita” Robinson; and when Mrs. Siddons sat to Sherwin for her portrait as the Grecian Daughter, he raised and lowered the window curtains to obtain the effect of light desired by his master. ”

“ And so, though Smith was not at all the man Knight would have deliberately chosen as a friend—or even for one of a group of a dozen friends—he somehow was his friend. Circumstance, as usual, did it all. How many of us can say of our most intimate alter ego, leaving alone friends of the outer circle, that he is the man we should have chosen, as embodying the net result after adding up all the points in human nature that we love, and principles we hold, and subtracting all that we hate? ”

“ Smith’s valuable quality is his interest in the life he lived and saw lived. He was zealous to record those trivial facts of to-day which become piquant to-morrow, a habit that reveals itself in the way he mentions his birth as happening “whilst Maddox was balancing a straw at the Little Theatre in the Haymarket, and Marylebone Gardens re-echoed the melodious notes of Tommy Lowe.” In a friend’s album he wrote—
“I can boast of seven events, some of which great men would be proud of:
“I received a kiss when a boy from the beautiful Mrs. Robinson ”

“ Smith was a methodical man, and in the calmness partly bred of his naturally orderly habits, and partly bred of his despair, he seated himself at his desk, in company with a comforting cigar, to think of any possible men whom he might beat up at their homes as he went westward. ”

“ Smith early went into training to be a gossiping topographer. Old Nollekens, already a Royal Academician, and the most sought-after sculptor of portrait busts (“Well, sir, I think my friend Joe Nollekens can chop out a head with any of them,” was Dr. Johnson’s tribute to his genius) , often took his assistant’s little son for a ramble round the streets. One day he led Thomas to the Oxford Road to see Jack Rann go by on the cart to Tyburn, where he was to be hanged for robbing Dr. ”

“ Felpham is a sweet place for study, because it is more spiritual than London. Heaven opens here on all sides her golden gates; her windows are not obstructed by vapours; voices of celestial inhabitants are more distinctly heard, and their forms more distinctly seen, and my cottage is also a shadow of their houses. ”

“ Her abilities had not been dimmed by those of Garrick, Mrs. Siddons, and Miss Farren, and her private life was blameless. The resemblance she bore to Lady Sarah Lennox was such that George III., seeing her act late in her career, exclaimed to his queen, “She is like Lady Sarah still.” There is a fine story of her parting with Garrick. On June 8, 1776, his last appearance but one, when he was playing Lear to her Cordelia, Garrick said to her with a sigh: “Ah, Bess! this is the last time of my being your father; you must now look out for someone else to adopt you.” ”

“ But, alas! how fondly do we deceive ourselves! what was his chagrin, when, instead of hearing the name of Flaxman, that of Engleheart was pronounced as the successful candidate!
This timely lesson, he declared, so effectually operated upon his conceit, that he was determined ever after to talk less of his own talents, and to endeavour to do justice to those of others, who were also aspiring to the pinnacle of fame.—Sir Joshua Reynolds meeting Flaxman soon after he had received the hand of Miss Denman, in 1782, said to him, "So, Flaxman, you are married; there's no going to Italy now." ”

“ Its effect is so imposing, that when the spectator is standing at a little distance, this inestimable treasure, though unfinished, appears more like the commencement of a chiaro-oscuro picture, than a production in any kind of stone. ”

“ No one could be more blessed with the friendship of men of worth than Flaxman. Those highly esteemed characters William Hayley, Thomas Hope, and Samuel Rogers, were among his dear and inseparable friends ”

“ During the tumult which ensued amongst the gentlemen who had been hunting, an honest farmer, whose land surrounded the covert, came up and stated that a short time before he had found in a field close by a large trap exactly of the same sort, which had in it two of a fox’s toes. ”

“ This “Sack of Sand,” as Suett the actor generally called him, sat at the lower end of the table; and as he very seldom made purchases, few persons ventured to converse with him. He frequently much annoyed Hutchins by the loudest of all snoring; and now and then Doctor Wolcot would ask him a question, in order to indulge in a laugh at his mode of uttering an answer, which Peter Pindar declared to be more like the gobbling of a turkey-cock than anything human. He lived in a two-pair-of-stairs back room in St. James’s Market; and, after his death, Hutchins sold his furniture. ”

“ The liberality of the brothers Paul and Thomas Sandby, Royal Academicians, will be remembered by every person who had the pleasure of being acquainted with them; but more particularly by those who benefited by their disinterested communications and cheering encouragement in their art. ”