Sir William Smith, the editor of the Quarterly, and the
compiler of innumerable dictionaries and class-books, died last Saturday at the age of eighty-one, from failure of the heart's action. Though not a great scholar in the sense of Bentley or Porson, his contribution towards scholarship was con- siderable, and his various dictionary publications formed "an encyclopaedia of antiquity," whose merits are universally admitted. He put equally sound, if equally uninspired, work into his Dictionaries of the Bible, of Christian Antiquities, and of Early Christian Biography, Literature, and Doctrine. His editorship of the Quarterly was, as might have been expected, unsensational, if not, indeed, uneventful. He never encouraged bad work either in history or literature, and sometimes obtained an essay of unusual merit; but he hardly managed to keep in touch with the movements of the public mind.
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