Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI | Page 2

writer, as he thinks it would have proved tedious and irritating to
the reader.
[2] See an eloquent but brief sketch, of W. Smith, in the _Law
Magazine_ for February 1846, by Mr. Phillimore, of the Oxford Circuit,
one of his most accomplished friends.
John William Smith, the eldest of eight children, was of a highly
respectable family: his father having died in 1835, Vice-treasurer and
Paymaster-general of the Forces in Ireland. Both his parents were
Irish--his mother having been a Miss Connor, the sister of a late Master
in Chancery, in Ireland. They lived, however, in London, where the
subject of this memoir was born, in Chapel Street, Belgrave Square, on
the 23d January, 1809. From the earliest period at which note could be
taken of their manifestation, he evinced the possession of superior
mental endowments. No one is less disposed than the writer of this
memoir, to set a high value upon precocious intellectual development.
Observatum fere est, says Quinctilian, in his passionate lamentation for
the death of his gifted son, _celerius occidere festinatam
maturitatem_.[3] The maturity, however, of John William Smith, far
more than realised his early promise, and renders doubly interesting
any well-authenticated account, and such I have succeeded in obtaining,
of his early childhood. When advanced not far from infancy, he appears
to have been characterised by a kind of quaint thoughtfulness, quick
observation, and a predilection for intellectual amusements. He was
always eager to have poetry read to him, and soon exhibited proofs of
that prodigious memory, by which he was all his life pre-eminently
distinguished, and which has often made the ablest of his friends
imagine that with him, forgetting was a thing impossible. Before he
knew a single letter of the alphabet, which he learnt far earlier,
moreover, than most children, he would take into his hand his little
pictured story-book, which had been perhaps only once, or possibly
twice, read over to him, and pretend to read aloud out of it: those
overlooking him scarcely crediting the fact of his really being unable to

tell one letter from the other; for he repeated the letterpress verbatim,
from beginning to end. This feat has been repeatedly witnessed before
he had reached his third year. To all the friends of Mr. Smith in
after-life, this circumstance is easily credible: for the quickness of his
memory was equalled by its tenacity, and both appeared to us almost
unequalled. When three years old, he read with the greatest facility all
such books as are usually put into the hands of children; and his delight
was to act, in the evening, the fable which he had read in the
morning--and a reader insatiate he even then appeared to be. Between
his third and sixth year, he had read, effectually, many books of history,
especially those of Greece, Rome, England, and France; acquiring with
facility what he retained with the utmost fidelity. He seems to have
been, at this time, conscious of possessing a strong memory, and
pleased at testing it. When not five years old, he one day put the parts
of a dissected map, consisting of a hundred pieces, into his father's
pocket, and then called for them again one by one, without having
made a single mistake, till he had finished putting them together on the
carpet. At this early period, also, he displayed another first-rate mental
quality, namely, the power of abstraction--one by which he was
eminently distinguished throughout his subsequent life. When a very
young child, he was frequently observed exercising this rare
power--lost to all around him, and evidently intent upon some one
object, to the exclusion of all others. Thus, for instance, he would often
be occupied with a play of Shakspeare, while sitting in the corner of the
drawing-room, in which were many persons engaged in conversation,
or otherwise doing what would have effectually interrupted one who
was not similarly endowed with himself. One of his brothers often
played at chess with him, with closed folding doors between them, the
former moving the chess-men for both, and the latter calling out the
moves, without ever making an erroneous one, and frequently winning
the game. His partiality to poetry, from almost his infancy, has been
already noticed: and it is to be added, that he was equally fond of
reading and writing verses. One of his relatives has at this moment in
her possession a "Poem" from his pen, in pencilled printed characters,
before he had learned, though he learned very early, to write, entitled,
"The Mariner's Return." Till very recently, also, the same lady
possessed another curious relic of this precocious child,--namely, a

prose story; the hero of which was a peasant boy, whom he took
through almost all the countries of Europe, and through many
vicissitudes, finally exalting him to