Page:A biographical dictionary of eminent Scotsmen, vol 7.djvu/142

278 college, Aberdeen, was soon afterwards chosen by the Kirk Session of St Andrews; but this election produced no more favourable result.

Principal Smeton attended the following General Assembly (October 1583), and was again employed in some of its most important business. But the course of honour and usefulness on which he had now entered was destined to be of very short duration. Soon after his return to Glasgow, he was seized with a high fever, and died, after only eight days' illness, on the 13th of December, 1583. About six weeks earlier, his friend Arbuthnot, with whom he had been so long and intimately connected, had been cut off in his 46th year, and thus was the country at once bereaved cwf two of its greatest lights at a period of no common difficulty. That was indeed "a dark and heavie wintar to the kirk of Scotland."

The habits and acquirements of Smeton must have peculiarly adapted him for the charge of a literary, and, more particularly, of a theological seminary. While the latter were unquestionably inferior to those of his predecessor in the principalship of Glasgow college, his manners were of a milder and more conciliatory character. Yet even his learning was greatly beyond that of the mass of his brethren. He wrote Latin with elegance and facility, and was a Greek and Hebrew scholar. Nor had he, like many of our travelled countrymen, neglected the study of his native tongue, in which he wrote with great propriety. His knowledge of controversial divinity, derived most probably from the circumstances attending his conversion to the Protestant faith, is represented as superior to that of almost any of his contemporaries. Of the works which he has left behind him the best known is his reply to Hamilton, which was published at Edinburgh in 1579, with the following title: "Ad Virulentum Archibaldi Hamiltonii Apostatas Dialogum de Confusione Calvinianze Sectae apud Scotos impie conscriptum Orthodoxa Kesponsio, Thoma Smetonio Scoto auctore, in qua Celebris ilia quaestio de Ecclesia, de Vniversalitate, Successione, et l'ouiani Episcopi Primatu breviter, dilucide, et accurate, tractatur: adjecta est vera Historia extremae vita', et obitus eximii viri Joan: Knoxii Ecclesiae Scoticanae instauratoris fidelissimi," 8vo. The General Assembly held in April, 1581, ordered the method of preaching and prophecying by ... "to be put in Scotish be their brother Mr Thomas Smetone;" but if this supposed translation of Hyperius De formandis Concionibus was ever printed, it has escaped the researches of all our bibliographers. The Dictates of principal Smeton, that is, the notes which he dictated to his students. were preserved in archbishop Spotswood's time, and are said by that author to have been highly esteemed. Dempster also ascribes to Smeton " Epitaphium Metallani, lib. i."

Principal Smeton adopted the advice of his excellent friend, Edmond Hay, and " married a wyff," but at what time is uncertain. We are equally uncertain whether he left any children behind him. The name of Smeton, and in one or two instances that of Thomas Smeton, occur in the records of the university of Glasgow in the early part of the seventeenth century, and, as the name was by no means common, these persons were not improbably his descendants.

SMITH,, LL.D. and F.R.S. both of London and Edinburgh, one of the brightest ornaments of the literature of Scotland, was born on the 5th of June, 1723, at the town of Kirkaldy, in the county of Fife. He was the only child of Adam Smith, comptroller of the customs at Kirkaldy, and Mar-