Page:Dictionary of National Biography, Second Supplement, volume 3.djvu/331

 a civil list pension of 10l. (raised in 1886 to 25l., with a donation of 50l. from the Royal Bounty Fund) was largely due. On 24 June 1889 Skipsey and his wife were appointed custodians of Shakespeare's birthplace at Stratford-on-Avon on the recommendation of Browning, Tennyson, Burne-Jones, John Morley, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Morris, and other literary men of eminence. But he soon grew impatient of the drudgery of acting as cicerone to miscellaneous tourists, and he resigned the post on 31 Oct. 1891 (cf. story, 'The Birthplace,' in The Better Sort, 1903, which was suggested by a vague report of Skipsey's psychological experience at Stratford-on-Avon). Thenceforth Skipsey and his wife subsisted in the north on his pension and the assistance of his children, with whom they lived in turns. Visits to the English Lakes and to Norway (with Newcastle friends, Dr. and Mrs. Spence Watson) varied the seclusion of his last years. He died at Gateshead, in the house of his son Cuthbert, on 3 Sept. 1903, and was buried in Gateshead cemetery. In 1854 he married Sara Ann (daughter of Benjamin and Susan Hendley), the proprietress of the boarding-house at which he was staying in London. His wife died in August 1902. Two out of five sons and the eldest of three daughters survived him.

Skipsey's poems were mainly lyrical, although he occasionally attempted more sustained flights, and they show the influence of Burns and Heine. He is at his best in the verse which was prompted by his own experience as a pitman. He acquired the habit of carefully revising his work, but he failed to conquer a native ruggedness of diction. De Chatelain translated his 'Fairies' Parting Song' and other shorter poems in his 'Beautés de la poesie anglaise,' vol. iii. A projected 'History of Æstheticism' proved beyond his powers. For a time he put faith in spiritualism, conceiving himself to be a clairvoyant, and he left some unpublished writings on the subject.

A portrait of Skipsey was painted by a German artist for Wigham Richardson, a member of a firm of shipbuilders of Walker-on-Tyne, and hangs in the Mechanics' Institute there.  SLANEY, WILLIAM SLANEY KENYON- (1847–1908), colonel and politician. [See ]

SMEATON, DONALD MACKENZIE (1846–1910), Anglo-Indian official, born at St. Andrews on 9 Sept. 1846, was eldest of the twelve children of David James Smeaton, schoolmaster of Letham House, Fife, and Abbey Park, St. Andrews, by his wife Elizabeth, daughter of Capt. Donald Mackenzie of the 42nd Black Watch, who fought through the Peninsular war and at Waterloo. His ancestors included Thomas Smeton [q. v.], the first principal of Glasgow University, and John Smeaton, the engineer [q. v.]. His next brother, Robert Mackenzie (1847–1910), was his colleague in the civil service of the North-West provinces of India and a member of the local legislative council.

Smeaton was educated at his father's efficient school. Abbey Park, St. Andrews, and at the university there, where he graduated M.A. He passed second in the Indian civil service examination of 1865, and arriving in India in November 1867, served in the North-West provinces as assistant magistrate and collector, and from May 1870 in the settlement department. He won a medal and 100l. for proficiency in oriental languages. In 1873 he published an annotation of the revenue act of the provinces, and in 1877 a useful monograph on Indian currency. In April 1879 he was sent to Burma to organise the land revenue administration there, and in May 1882 he was appointed secretary in that department and director of agriculture.

After serving as director of agriculture and commerce in the North-West provinces from May 1886, he returned in April 1887 to Burma, on the annexation of the upper province, as officiating chief secretary to the chief commissioner. Sir Charles Bernard [q. v. Suppl. II]. In Upper Burma he closely studied the hill races of the new province, and he embodied his inquiries in 'Loyal Karens of Burma' (1887), which is the standard work on its theme. In May 1888 he became commissioner of the central division of Upper Burma, and his vigorous work in suppressing dacoits gained him the Burma medal with two clasps. Smeaton's interest in the people and mastery of their vernaculars 