concern called the Greenside Company's Works--"a multifarious
concern it was," writes my cousin, Professor Swan, "of tinsmiths,
coppersmiths, brassfounders, blacksmiths, and japanners." He was also,
it seems, a shipowner and underwriter. He built himself "a land"--Nos.
1 and 2 Baxter's Place, then no such unfashionable neighbourhood--and
died, leaving his only son in easy circumstances, and giving to his
three surviving daughters portions of five thousand pounds and upwards.
There is no standard of success in life; but in one of its meanings,
this is to succeed.

In what we know of his opinions, he makes a figure highly characteristic
of the time. A high Tory and patriot, a captain--so I find it in my
notes--of Edinburgh Spearmen, and on duty in the Castle during the Muir
and Palmer troubles, he bequeathed to his descendants a bloodless sword
and a somewhat violent tradition, both long preserved. The judge who sat
on Muir and Palmer, the famous Braxfield, let fall from the bench the
_obiter dictum_--"I never liked the French all my days, but now I hate
them." If Thomas Smith, the Edinburgh Spearman, were in court, he must
have been tempted to applaud. The people of that land were his
abhorrence; he loathed Buonaparte like Antichrist. Towards the end he
fell into a kind of dotage; his family must entertain him with games of
tin soldiers, which he took a childish pleasure to array and overset;
but those who played with him must be upon their guard, for if his side,
which was always that of the English against the French, should chance
to be defeated, there would be trouble in Baxter's Place. For these
opinions he may almost be said to have suffered. Baptised and brought up
in the Church of Scotland, he had, upon some conscientious scruple,
joined the communion of the Baptists. Like other Nonconformists, these
were inclined to the Liberal side in politics, and, at least in the
beginning, regarded Buonaparte as a deliverer. From the time of his
joining the Spearmen, Thomas Smith became in consequence a bugbear to
his brethren in the faith. "They that take the sword shall perish with
the sword," they told him; they gave him "no rest"; "his position became
intolerable"; it was plain he must choose between his political and his
religious tenets; and in the last years of his life, about 1812, he
returned to the Church of his fathers.

August 1786 was the date of his chief advancement, when, having designed
a system of oil lig