Page:Archaeologia volume 38 part 1.djvu/124

 lot Additions to the Biographies of It is thus again from the materials of this fanciful science that we are presented with valuable biographical information. As the basis of his astrological calcula- tions, Sir Thomas Smith sat down, in chronological array, the principal events of his past career ; and as these memoranda, resting upon the best authority, were unknown to Strype when he wrote the life of Smith,* and have not yet been interwoven into his biography, I shall now submit them to your notice. The notes are chronologically arranged according to the years of the writer's age ; and they commence from his earliest infancy. After stating the date of his birth on the 23d of December, 1513, and which in itself is remarkable, as Strype discusses the question whether Smith was born in 1514, 1518, or 1512, he com- mences by relating that in the first and second years of his life he was lively, playful, and prattling, admired above other infants, esteemed a child of the greatest promise, and especially the delight of his father; but when his third year was completed, or thereabouts, after a nightmare in his sleep, he fell into an exceed- ingly severe fever, which held him for two or three years, with little hope of life, and from the effects of which ho never seemed perfectly relieved until he was twenty-one or twenty-two. During all that time he was low-spirited, seldom laughing, never playing, yet strongly addicted to reading history, to painting, writing, and even carving ; and throughout the same period, almost up to his twenty-fourth year, he was full of eruptions, pimples, and sores, with tooth-ache, and continual weak health ; yet in literature and the knowledge of languages he always learned more than his masters were able to teach him. In the tenth and eleventh years of his age ho had somewhat better health, and therefore, before the end of his eleventh year, about the feast of Michaelmas 1525, he was sent to the university of Cambridge. Of the five following years he mentions no particulars ; but in his Kith year, when journeying in Norfolk, he was seized with another violent fever, which terminated in a dropsical affection, his face swelling at morning, and his feet at night. About the middle of the following February, when he was scarcely recovered from that fever, he was elected fellow of his college, and took his bachelor's degree. He was still slender and thin, and almost continually ill from too much bile and phlegm. In his 20th year he became master of arts at Midsummer; and before Michaelmas, having been appointed a public reader or professor, he taught natural philosophy 1 Some of Strype's MS. notes to his Life of Smith, printed in the last Oxford Edition, seem to have been derived from this source, but without making reference to it. Mr. Cooper in his Athciue Cuntabr. ha mentioned the existence of Smith's manuscript volume, but without having examined it.