Smith, GOLDWIN

Smith, GOLDWIN, son of a Berkshire physician, was born at Reading, 13th August 1823. He received his education at Eton and Oxford, where he had a brilliant career, completed by a first-class in classics in 1845. In 1847 he was elected Fellow of University College, and in the same year he was called to the bar at Lincoln's Inn. He was nominated assistant-secretary to the first, and secretary to the second Oxford University Commission, and served on the Popular Education Commission in 1858. He was regins professor of History at Oxford from 1858 till 1866. During the American civil war he was a strenuous upholder of the North, writing several pamphlets in support of the Federal cause, and in 1864 lectured in the United States. In 1868 he was elected to the chair of English and Constitutional History in the Cornell University at Ithaca, New York. In 1871 he settled in Canada, where he became a member of the senate of Toronto University. He edited the Canadian Monthly, 1872-74, and founded and for a time edited The Week and The Bystander. He regards the annexation of Canada to the United States as inevitable, and strongly advocates commercial union or complete reciprocity between the two. He has written much for periodicals, and has contributed to this Encyclopædia. Among his works are Irish History and Irish Character (1861); Lectures on the Study of History (1861); Rational Religion (1861); Empire (1863); The Civil War in America (1866); Three English Statesmen (Pym, Hampden, and Cromwell, 1867; new ed. 1882); A Short History of England (1869); The Political Destiny of Canada (1879); Couper (1880); Lectures and Essays (1881); Jane Austen (1890); The United States (1893); Questions of the Day (1894); &c.