Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 53.djvu/84

 500l. a year in addition to his salary. He was re-sworn on the accession of George I as a baron of the English exchequer, although he performed none of the duties, and enjoyed both his English and his Scottish office until his death on 24 June 1726, at the age of sixty-nine. Smith was much attached to his native village of Frolesworth, where, by his will, he founded and endowed a hospital for fourteen poor widows of the communion of the church of England, who were each to have 12l. a year and a separate house.

[Nichols's Leicestershire; Foss's Judges of England; Foster's Gray's Inn Registers.]

 SMITH, JOHN (1652?–1742), mezzotint engraver, was born at Daventry, Northamptonshire, about 1652. He was articled to an obscure painter named Tillet in London, and studied mezzotint engraving under Isaac Beckett [q. v.] and Jan Vander Vaart [q. v.] He became the ablest and most industrious worker in mezzotint of his time, and the favourite engraver of Sir Godfrey Kneller, whose paintings he extensively reproduced, and in whose house he is said to have resided for some time. Smith's plates, which are executed in a remarkably brilliant and effective style, number about five hundred, and of these nearly three hundred are portraits of distinguished men and women of the period between the reigns of Charles II and George II, from pictures by Lely, Kneller, Wissing, Dahl, Riley, Closterman, Gibson, Murray, and others. The remainder are sacred, mythological, and genre subjects after Titian, Correggio, Parmegiano, C. Maratti, G. Schalken, E. Heemskerk, M. Laroon, and others. Previous to 1700 his plates were mostly published by Edward Cooper [q. v.], but about that date he established himself as a printseller at the Lyon and Crown in Covent Garden; he there published his own works and also reissued many of those by Beckett, Lens, Williams, and others, cleverly retouching them and erasing the original engravers' names. Smith's latest print appears to have been the portrait of the youthful Duke of Cumberland, after Highmore, dated 1729. On giving up business he retired to his native county, where he died on 17 Jan. 1742 at the age of ninety. He was buried in the churchyard of St. Peter's, Northampton, where there is a tablet to his memory and that of his wife Sarah, who died in 1717. The bulk of his copperplates eventually came into the hands of Boydell, who reprinted them in large numbers. A portrait of John Smith, in which he appears holding his engraving of Kneller, was painted and presented to him by that artist in 1696, and he executed a print from it in 1716; it has also been engraved by S. Freeman for Walpole's ‘Anecdotes.’ The original is now in the National Portrait Gallery.

[Walpole's Anecdotes of Painting (Dallaway and Wornum); Chaloner Smith's British Mezzotinto Portraits; Dodd's manuscript Hist. of Engravers in Brit. Mus. (Addit. MS. 33405).]

 SMITH, JOHN (fl. 1747), author of ‘Chronicon Rusticum-Commerciale, or Memoirs of Wool,’ was born about 1700, and educated at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. He was admitted pensioner of the college on 18 Dec. 1718, fellow-commoner on 31 Jan. 1721–22, and his name was taken off the books on 18 Dec. 1724 (Register of Trinity Hall). In 1725 he graduated LL.B. He entered the church, but devoted himself very largely to the study of the development of the woollen industry, especially in England. The result of these researches was published in 1747, in two octavo volumes, as ‘Chronicon Rusticum-Commerciale, or Memoirs of Wool.’ A second and more limited quarto edition was issued in 1757 (the library at Trinity College, Dublin, has a copy of the ‘second edition’ with the date 1765). Smith opposed the restrictions on the exportation of wool, and it was chiefly on this point that his conclusions were attacked by William Temple of Trowbridge, a zealous whig who wrote under the pseudonym of I. B., M.D. Smith replied to Temple's attack in a pamphlet ‘The Case of the English Farmer and his Landlord. In answer to Mr. Temple's (pretended) Refutation of one of the principal Arguments in “Memoirs of Wool.”’ This pamphlet was printed at Lincoln, and dedicated to the ‘nobility, gentry, and clergy’ of Lincolnshire. The dispute centres in the main round the question of the price of wool in England as compared with its value on the continent. Smith defends the statement in the ‘Memoirs’ (p. 516 of edit. of 1747) that ‘English wool in England is not sold to its intrinsic worth.’

In Lincolnshire Smith, according to his own statement, spent a great part of his life (‘Lincolnshire where I am most conversant,’ Review of the Manufacturer's Complaints against the Wool Grower, 1753, p. 7). He held, however, no living in Lincolnshire, and the date of his death is uncertain, unless he can be identified with the Rev. John Smith, who died in 1774, possessed of several livings in the south of England.

Smith's great work is a laborious compilation from many sources of facts bearing upon the history of the wool trade. He