172 SMITH [ALEXANDER- From this time he gradually relinquished his medical work for the more congenial occupation of light literature. He was associated with Punch from its beginning, and was also a regular contributor to Jlentley's Miscellany, in whose pages his first and best book, The Adventures of Mr Ledbury, first appeared. His other books were A History of Evening Parties, Christopher Tadpole, issued in monthly parts, Pottleton's Legacy, and, as a series of so- called natural histories, The Gent, The Ballet Girl, The Idler upon Town, and The Flirt. Albert Smith also wrote extravaganzas and adapted some of Charles Dickens's stories for the stage. He conducted too for a time a magazine called The Man in the Moon, which was discontinued in 1849. In 1851 he visited the Alps and ascended Mont Blanc, and the year after produced the descriptive enter- tainment before referred to. "China," a similar enter- tainment, was afterwards produced, but less successfully. Smith married in 1859 a daughter of Keeley, the comedian. He died at Fulham, Middlesex, on 23d May 1860, from an attack of apoplexy. SMITH, ALEXANDER (1830-1867), was the most pro- minent representative of the so-called "spasmodic" school of poetry, whose peculiarities first gained for it a hasty repu- tation, and then, having suffered under closer critical exa- mination, it almost as speedily dropped out of mind again. Smith has never yet perhaps had his true position assigned to him. His first book, A Life Drama and other Poems (1853), which made his name, was a work of real promise. Although deficient in dramatic grasp of subject, in restraint of expression, in metrical quality, and although showing too obviously the influence of Keats and Tennyson in certain exaggerations of epithet and phrase, the book yet contains evidence of a poetic faculty which might, under more fortunate conditions, have developed into genuine power. Alexander Smith was one of those writers who require the critical safeguards of the schools to chasten their somewhat importunate energies ; and for want of these academic restrictions he wasted his powers in discursive experiments of not much abiding value. Born at Kilmarnock on the last day of 1830, he received the usual schooling common at that time ; and, his parents being too poor to send him to college, he was placed in a linen factory to follow his father's trade of a pattern designer. His literary pro- clivities, however, soon showed themselves, and from time to time his early poems appeared in the Glasgow Citizen, in whose editor, James Hedderwick, he found a sympathiz- ing and appreciative friend. His poems, having attracted the attention also of the Rev. George Gilfillan, found through him an opening in the London Citizen. A Life Drama and other Poems, published in 1853, speedily ran through several editions, and gained Smith the appoint- ment of secretary to Edinburgh university in 1854. In the same year Sydney Dobell, whose name is now familiarly associated with Smith's, came to Edinburgh, and an ac- quaintanceship at once sprang up between the two, which resulted in their collaboration in a book of War Sonnets, inspired by the Crimean War, which was published in 1855. The volumes of verse issued independently by Alexander Smith in the ensuing years did not receive much attention; their author then turned himself to prose, after publishing City Poems in 1857 and Edwin of Deira, a Northumbrian epic poem, in 1 86 1 . His first prose work was Dreamthorpe, 1863; it was followed in 1865 by A Summer in Skye, which contains his best prose writing, and is full of a quiet charm and true sympathy with nature. His last work was an experiment in fiction, Alfred Hagart's Household (1866), which ran first through Good Words. In this the same faults of construction, conjoined with the same in- cidental grace of description, that show themselves in his larger poems are repeated. The strain produced by his literary and other work began to tell towards the end of 1866, and his death followed on 5th January 1867. A memoir of Smith by P. P. Alexander is prefixed to a volume of remains, entitled Last Leaves, in which will be found a fairly complete account of his life and writings. SMITH, COLVIN (1795-1875), portrait painter, was born at Brechin, Scotland, in 1795. He studied in London in the schools of the Royal Academy and worked in Nolle- kens's studio. He then proceeded to Italy, where he exe- cuted some fine copies from Titian ; and at Antwerp he made studies from the works of Rubens. Returning to Scotland in 1827, he settled in Edinburgh, occupying the house and studio which had formerly belonged to Raeburn. Soon he attained a wide practice as a portrait-painter, and among his sitters were Lord Jeffrey, Henry Mackenzie, author of The Man of Feeling, and many of the most cele- brated Scotsmen of the time. His portrait of Sir Walter Scott was so popular that he executed some twenty replicas of it, for seven of which he received fresh sittings. His works are distinguished by excellent draftsmanship, by directness and simplicity of treatment, and by well-marked individuality. He died in Edinburgh on 21st July 1875. SMITH, HENRY JOHN STEPHEN (1826-1883), mathema- tician, was born in Dublin on 2d November 1826 and was the fourth child of his parents. When Henry Smith was just two years old his father died, whereupon his mother left Ireland for England. Mrs Smith taught her children herself, and until Henry was over eleven he was under her exclusive care and teaching; after that he was educated by private tutors till he went to Rugby in 1841. Whilst under the first of these tutors, in nine months he read all Thucydides, Sophocles, and Sallust, twelve books of Tacitus, the greater part of Horace, Juvenal, Persius, and several plays of ^Eschylus and Euripides. He also got up six books of Euclid and some algebra, besides reading a considerable quantity of Hebrew and learning the Odes of Horace by heart. On the death of his elder brother in September 1843 Henry Smith left Rugby, and in the end of 1844 gained a scholarship at Balliol College, Oxford. He won the Ireland scholarship in 1848 and obtained a first class in both the classical and the mathematical schools in 1849. He gained the senior mathematical scholarship in 1851. He was elected fellow of Balliol in 1850 and Savilian professor of geometry in 1861, and in 1874 was appointed keeper of the university museum. He was elected F.R.S. in 1861, and was an LL.D. of Cambridge and Dublin. He served on various royal com- missions, and from 1877 was the chairman of the managing body of the meteorological office. He died at Oxford on 9th February 1883. After taking his degree he wavered between classics and mathe- matics, but finally chose the latter. After publishing a few short papers relating to theory of numbers and to geometry, he devoted himself to a thorough examination of the writings of Gauss, Le- jeune-Dirichlet, Rummer, &c., on the theory of numbers. The main results of these researches, which occupied him from 1854 to 1864, are contained in his Report on the Theory of Numbers, which appeared in the British Association volumes from 1859 to 1865. This report contains not only a complete account of all that had been done on this vast and intricate subject but also original con- tributions of his own. Some of the most important results of his discoveries were communicated to the Royal Society in two memoirs upon Systems of Linear Indeterminate Equations and Congruences and upon the Orders and Genera of Ternary Quadratic Forms (Phil. Trans., 1861 and 1867). He did not, however, confine himself to the consideration of forms involving only three indeterminates, but succeeded in establishing the principles on which the extension to the general case of n indeterminates depends, and obtained the general formulae, thus effecting what is probably the greatest ad- vance made in the subject since the publication of Gmss's Disquisi- tioncs Arithmetical. A brief abstract of Smith's methods and re- sults appeared in the Proc. Roy. Soc. for 1864 and 1868. In the second of these notices he gives the general formulae without de- monstrations. As corollaries to the general formulae he adds the formulae relating to the representation of a number as a sum of five
