multifarious concern it was,' writes my cousin, Professor Swan, 'of
tinsmiths, coppersmiths, brass-founders, 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