200 Alfred Charles Smith—In Memoriam. 
all through his life—gaining more and more the mastery over him ~ 
and obliging him for years before his death to lead the life of an 
invalid. Thus for the last ten years or more he was very much 
withdrawn from public view, and to understand what the position - 
was which he occupied in the county during a great part of his 
life it is necessary to go back twenty years. At that time few men 
were better known in North Wilts than he was. Yatesbury was 
always a small parish—though the population when he became 
Rector was almost double what it is now, since the laying down 
of very much of the arable land to pasture has caused an even 
larger proportional diminution of the population here than it 
has in the neighbouring parishes—and it was in those days a good 
deal more remote from railways and centres of population than it — 
is now. Indeed few places, even on the downs, could be in amore ~ 
remote position—but the Rector was not one to be buried alive. 
He loved the place, he loved the open stretches of the downs, and 
he found there the leisure to carry on the work which made him 
for so many years no inconsiderable factor in the intellectual life 
of the county. A consistent High Churchman all his life through, 
he never neglected the duties of his office or the interests of his 
parish. Neither in dress, in manners, or in habits of thought was 
he in any way ‘“‘a secular parson.’ His first care on coming to 
Yatesbury was to replace the miserable erection of the last century — 
which served as a chancel with a new building in accordance 
with the architecture of the rest of the Church—the restoration of 
which he also carried out in 1854. That this restoration was not — 
in all points directed as it would have been at the present day was 
no fault of his—all work done at that time shared in the same 
mistakes. He himself in after years often expressed this opinion. 
On the completion of this restoration he undertook a work which 
occupied him for a long while—the painting of the walls of the — 
new chancel with his own hands. 
But, though he did good work in his parish, and was known and 
loved by his parishioners for his kindness and his goodness, it was _ 
not as the Rector of Yatesbury, but as the Secretary of the Wilts 
Archeological Society, and as the Editor of its Magazine, that he 
es & 
pees 
