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 Rh the first and ultimately reached enormous dimensions. The Apollinaris water sold largely not only in England, but in America, Europe, India, and in the British colonies. The unexpected success of the venture very sensibly augmented Smith's resources. The money he had invested in it amounted to a very few thousand pounds, and this small sum yielded for more than twenty years an increasingly large income which altogether surpassed the returns from his other enterprises. In 1897 the business was profitably disposed of to a public company.

In 1880 Smith lightened his responsibilities in one direction by handing over the 'Pall Mall Gazette' to Mr. Henry Yates Thompson, who had lately married his eldest daughter. Thenceforth the paper was wholly controlled by others. During the late seventies the pecuniary promise of the journal had not been sustained. It continued, however, to be characterised by good literary style, and to attract much literary ability, and it still justified its original aims of raising the literary standard of journalism and of observing a severer code of journalistic morality than had before been generally accepted. In 1870 Charles Reade contributed characteristically polemical sketches on social topics which were remunerated at an unusually high rate. In 1871 Matthew Arnold contributed his brilliantly sarcastic series of articles called 'Friendship's Garland.' Richard Jefferies's 'The Gamekeeper at Home' and others of the same writer's rural sketches appeared serially from 1876 onwards. Almost all Jefferies's books were published by Smith. At the same time other writers on the paper gave him several opportunities of gratifying his taste for fighting actions for libel. Dion Boucicault in 1870, Hepworth Dixon in 1872, and Mr. W. S. Gilbert in 1873, all crossed swords with him in the law courts on account of what they deemed damaging reflections made upon them in the 'Pall Mall Gazette;' but in each instance the practical victory lay with Smith, and he was much exhilarated by the encounters. At length, during the crisis in Eastern Europe of 1876 and the following years, the political tone of the paper became, under Mr. Greenwood's guidance, unflinchingly conservative. Smith, although no strong partisan in politics, always inclined to liberalism; and his sympathies with his paper in its existing condition waned, so that he parted from it without much searching of heart.

To the end of his life Smith continued to give the freest play to his instinct of hospitality. After 1872, when he gave up his houses both at Hampstead and at Brighton, he settled in South Kensington, where he rented various residences from time to time up to 1891. In that year he purchased the Duke of Somerset's mansion in Park Lane, which was his final London home. From 1884 to 1897 he also had a residence near Weybridge. Of late years he usually spent the spring in the Riviera, and on more than one occasion visited a German watering-place in the summer. Wherever he lived he welcomed no guests more frequently or with greater warmth than the authors and artists with whom he was professionally associated. His fund of entertaining reminiscence was unfailing, and his genial talk abounded in kindly reference to old friends and acquaintances. The regard in which he was held