daughters, the latest surviving died in 1837. The son, JOHN PYE SMITH, whose history is now to be detailed, was born May 25, 1774, in a house which was long ago pulled down to widen that part of the town of Sheffield.

A single anecdote has been preserved of the period of his mere childhood-that at the age of five years he declared himself a man, and therefore, in his style of "putting away childish things," he plunged a knife into his drum, thus throwing it aside as a toy which no longer comported with his sense of maturity. A very early inaptitude for play, no doubt, characterized him. Born and nurtured as he was among books, and probably bringing with him into the world a strong predisposition for using them, his opening impulses would soon diverge from the common pastimes of a child. It is, however, not a little singular to observe how this remarkably premature avowal of his manliness was sustained by the freedom and vigour of his pursuits in after life.

For one whose learning was so extensive and accurate, the degree in which he was self-educated, even from his earliest years, will appear surprising. From the magnitude and solidity of the finished structure, the foundations might be supposed to have been laid with consummate skill, under the superintendence of the best masters. There is, however, no evidence whatever that this was the case; on the contrary, all existing means of forming an opinion unite in pointing to the fact, that books, and not living teachers, were his early, as they continued to be throughout life, his prime and almost his sole guides in the acquisition of knowledge. His native town had, indeed, in his boyhood a grammar school, but his name has been sought for in vain among the list of scholars: nor is there the slightest reason to suppose that he ever went to a distance from home, until as a young man he entered Rotherham academy; nor is he known ever to have referred to any master from whom he received regular lessons, except one who taught him writingan omission not likely to have happened to so good a memory and grateful a heart as his, if indeed there had been anything of the kind to recollect and acknowledge.

In his eighteenth year, a friend wrote to him from London, urging this question on his notice-"What are your thoughts respecting the work of the ministry?" The answer, of which there is a rough copy in Pye Smith's handwriting, states, on

the one side, the considerations which he deemed favourable to his entertaining the question, and on the other the unfavourable circumstances are given. Among the former, this occurs:-"I have been providentially distinguished in a manner very peculiar. Not only blest with a facility of receiving instruction, but I have had most unusually favourable opportunities and providential occurrences for the attainment of useful learning, as perhaps very few have enjoyed, and the greatest part of these was before I had any acquaintance with (I humbly trust) experimental religion."

This phraseology leads the mind to incidents and aids, such as could scarcely have been expected from his original position in life; and thus, while agreeing with a well-known sense of the word providential, we can easily understand how his entire silence respecting any regular course of classical instruction under good masters, either at school or at home, arose from the fact, that at that period the son of a Nonconformist bookseller in a country town, would be deemed quite out of the reach of the advantages of what was called "grammar learning."

One of the considerations which he enumerates as unfavourable to his entering the ministry, in reply to his London friend, is thus expressed :-" In my present station, I find that some acquaintance with the languages is almost indispensably necessary. Besides, I appear to be fixed in this situation of life. I am become so necessary to my father, as to have almost the entire management of one of the most important parts of his business; and if Providence should disable my father from personal attendance on trade, he has no other that could carry it on." At the time when he thus wrote, whatever his real attainments were, or promised to be, there would appear to have been no disposition to draw them away from the interests of the business. He was evidently not educated for any of the learned professions.

The anecdotes and traditions of that early time agree in their testimony to these facts. Thus the Letter of 1838, already quoted, goes on to say, that "the Rev. Jehoiada Brewer, then the pastor at Queen-street chapel, and Mr. Smith senior, were most intimate friends; and as a small compensation for having a regular peep at the few periodicals of that day, undertook to teach his son, John, the Latin language, his pupil being then

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probably about ten or twelve years old." Mr. Brewer continued for many years to take a deep interest in everything relating to this pupil, and the latter returned the feeling with an ardour of gratitude and affection which might almost be called intense. It was not, however, without difficulty that the somewhat desultory course of classical reading was persisted in. The boy had to go on errands, and at such times he would occasionally forget what he had to do, owing to the claims of a book or a lesson, over which he would be seen poring by the road side. A conflict which he had with his Virgil is also among the most current of the anecdotes of that part of his life. Some word or passage resisted his utmost efforts to find out the meaning; he became excited, fell into a passion, threw the well-bound volume on the floor, and was not satisfied until he had kicked it almost to pieces. But in this instance, reaction answered to action; the stroke rebounded so as powerfully to affect himself. He grew patient and plodding, and for the future was careful to bring his judgment, and not his temper, to bear upon difficulties; and thenceforth he went on his way as one who had secured the secret of victory.

Six small note-books remain, the dates of which, as given by Pye Smith himself, show them to have been written from the twelfth to the sixteenth year of his age; that is, during the time usually set apart for a classical education. A brief account of the contents of these will not only supply important aid for settling the question of his early training, but the future man will be seen in miniature in this likeness of the boy.

The first of the series, 1786, begins with "A Chronological List of Men eminent for Learning or Genius, from the earliest Ages to those of Gothic ignorance and darkness." The page is divided into three columns: the first for the age when the authors flourished; the second contains the name of each, and the work or service for which he was celebrated; and the third is allotted to the "names of the best English translators." Homer, in large capitals, is at the head of the list, and Procopius at the end, reaching from B.c. 907 to A.D. 529. The whole was probably copied from some printed catalogue; but the correctness of the spelling and the care in punctuation could scarcely have been greater in his later life; nor is there the slightest trace of any pen except his own. This list is followed by upwards of twenty pages of passages from Ovid and Virgil,

the choice of which seems to have depended on beauty of sentiment, pregnancy of expression, or occasionally on some peculiarity of idiom. Next, from the article "Grammar," in Chambers's Dictionary, he copied the account of ancient and modern grammars for sixteen different languages. On a subsequent page he transcribed a number of Latin epigrams, "from the blank leaves of an old book." Here we meet with the earliest specimen of his critical skill:-" Concerning the above epigrams, it is observable-1st, That those which I have marked 1 and 2 seem to be written by the same person, and that 3, 4, and 5 seem all to be written by a different person, and No. 6 by another person; 2nd, That the last word on the second and last lines of No. 2 are written in such a manner as to be, to me, not legible; accordingly, I have made as good a fac simile of them as I was able." Three of the prime qualities for all investigations, whether of words or things, are singularly apparent in this brief passage from the note-book of a boy under thirteen years of age:-a careful discrimination of his materials;-accuracy and modesty of statement, in not calling the words which he could not decipher illegible, but in simply saying "they are not legible to me;"-and a determination to make the best use he could of such means as he had at hand, waiting for further light upon difficulties, for he retains a fac simile of the words he could not read, "as good as he was able"-pains-taking, indeed, but not over-confident.

Coming to 1788, there is a note-book, which has the following among other papers: "Of the different Ages, relating to the Purity of the Latin Tongue," copied from a quarto volume of the posthumous works of William Bowyer, a very learned printer of the last century; a paper from the Adventurer, No. 105, on the style and beauties of the poet Menander, with the Greek illustrative passages inserted; an account of Bond, the commentator on Horace, and of Des Cartes, from the Encyclopædia Britannica; the Greek Epistle to the Laodiceans, transcribed from the Philologus Hebræo-Græcus Generalis of Leusden; the written characters of the German alphabet; four or five pages from an old French history of England; followed by nearly two and a half from the Epistola Critica of Toup to Warburton. Another book of the same date contains a list of more than fifty works on the Greek language, including gram

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mars, works on the accents, the particles, on quantity and pronunciation; and although some of these may have been mentioned as a guide to books which might be sought after and purchased in the business, yet when we find the lad writing several pages of extracts respecting the use of the Greek accents, his interest evidently appears to have been a literary one.

Nearly the whole of one book for 1789, is occupied with Richard Bentley's emendations of Horace, placed side by side with the text as it stood before the critic's time. Two pages follow containing "a list of the works of William Emerson, the Mathematician": and two or three more relating to the life of Dr. John Jortin, "abridged from the Universal Magazine for 1787." Another book for the same year, and the last which we shall notice, begins with an account of some editions of Horace, copied from the Analytical Review, for May, 1789; then there is a passage describing the way of getting admission to the Reading Room of the British Museum; several pages follow from Blair's Lectures and Knox's Essays, on the characteristic qualities of the Greek and Latin authors; a list of books recommended by Dr. Cotton Mather is transcribed; this is followed by some curious quotations from the Disputationes Theologica of the elder Voetius: and towards the close there is an index of some of the Homeric verbs, copied from Bowyer's Posthumous Tracts already mentioned.

The very miscellaneous nature of the contents of these books -considering them to have been made between the twelfth and sixteenth year of Pye Smith's age-greatly confirms the evid ence elsewhere adduced, that he was not able to secure the advantages of a regular education in classical learning. No such variety of works would have been within his reach at any public school: and if these had been at hand, such a use as he made of them would have been inconsistent with his drilling according to rule: nor would a domestic tutor have been justified, on more accounts than one, in thus allowing a pupil to wander away completely at will in so many directions. The bookseller's shop was his high-school; in which many works were being accumulated, not, indeed, of very ready sale at that early day in the town of Sheffield, but which served to furnish some new stimulus to the reading propensities of the boy, and in this