[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