never liked the French all my days, but now I hate
them.’ If Thomas Smith, the Edinburgh
Spearman, were in court, he must have been tempted
to applaud. The people of that land were his
abhorrence; he loathed Buonaparte like Antichrist.
Towards the end he fell into a kind of dotage; his
family must entertain him with games of tin soldiers,
which he took a childish pleasure to array and overset;
but those who played with him must be upon their guard,
for if his side, which was always that of the English
against the French, should chance to be defeated, there
would be trouble in Baxter’s Place. For
these opinions he may almost be said to have suffered.
Baptised and brought up in the Church of Scotland,
he had, upon some conscientious scruple, joined the
communion of the Baptists. Like other Nonconformists,
these were inclined to the Liberal side in politics,
and, at least in the beginning, regarded Buonaparte
as a deliverer. From the time of his joining
the Spearmen, Thomas Smith became in consequence a
bugbear to his brethren in the faith. ’They
that take the sword shall perish with the sword,’
they told him; they gave him ’no rest’;
‘his position became intolerable’; it was
plain he must choose between his political and his
religious tenets; and in the last years of his life,
about 1812, he returned to the Church of his fathers.
August 1786 was the date of his chief advancement,
when, having designed a system of oil lights to take
the place of the primitive coal fires before in use,
he was dubbed engineer to the newly-formed Board
of Northern Lighthouses. Not only were his fortunes
bettered by the appointment, but he was introduced
to a new and wider field for the exercise of his abilities,
and a new way of life highly agreeable to his active
constitution. He seems to have rejoiced in the
long journeys, and to have combined them with the
practice of field sports. ’A tall, stout
man coming ashore with his gun over his arm’—so
he was described to my father—the only
description that has come down to me by a light-keeper
old in the service. Nor did this change come
alone. On the 9th July of the same year, Thomas
Smith had been left for the second time a widower.
As he was still but thirty-three years old, prospering
in his affairs, newly advanced in the world, and encumbered
at the time with a family of children, five in number,
it was natural that he should entertain the notion
of another wife. Expeditious in business, he
was no less so in his choice; and it was not later
than June 1787—for my grandfather is described
as still in his fifteenth year—that he
married the widow of Alan Stevenson.