James Smithson 21 



world he believed should have been his, and, in the void 

 places of father, brother, or family, he seems to look for some 

 object of affection, and to find only an old servant (whom he 

 remembers with thoughtful liberality) and a nephew, to whom 

 he bequeaths his property. He has provided for the continu- 

 ance of the property to any possible heir to this nephew, and 

 there seems to remain nothing more. 



But there must have remained, in the retrospect of such a 

 life as his, a sense of failure of that purpose with which he 

 entered it, when he hoped, with youthful ambition, to create 

 a greater name than that which birth had denied him, and 

 when he wrote, " My name shall live in the memory of man 

 when the titles of the Northumberlands and the Percys are 

 extinct and forgotten," and there must have come up on such 

 an occasion the question whether this was, indeed, the end of 

 hope and the time only for renunciation. 



We see that he has not utterly renounced this hope even 

 now ; but it is so faint that he writes between a clause which 

 concerns a legacy to a servant and one which concerns an 

 investment in the funds, and, as it were, almost casually, the 

 words which have perpetuated his name. 



Probably no man ever made a more remunerative invest- 

 ment in the direction in which he would like best to see a 

 return than was brought out by these words of Smithson, 

 for we now all know that his bequest, when accepted by the 

 United States Government, formed the initial step in the 

 creation of an institution whose position has been altogether 

 exceptional, for it is likely to remain without successor, as 

 without precedent, in perpetuating, as it does, the fame 

 of a private individual, whose wishes have been adopted 

 and carried into effect by a great nation, which has con- 

 sented to take the position of a guardian to a ward in the 

 care of his property, and which has subsequently made his 



