Born in Queen Anne Street, Cavendish Square, London, on the 2nd of August, 1776, was the grandson of Thomas Assheton, Esq., of Ashley Hall, near Bowden, in Cheshire, who assumed the name of Smith on the death of his uncle, Captain William Smith, son of the Right Honourable John Smith, Speaker of the House of Commons in the first two Parliaments of Queen Anne, and Chancellor of the Exchequer in the preceding reign.
As Shakespeare, in his immortal history of the Seven Ages of Man, briefly described the first as "the infant, mewling, &c., in its nurse's arms," so of the childhood of Tom Smith the only occurrence we are enabled to record is that his mother, one day, found him lying on his nurse's lap, gasping like a tench just landed from a pond.
"_What's the matter with the child?_" she eagerly inquired.
"_Nothin_," replied the calm nurse; "_he's doing nicely_."
As regarded the present tense, this answer was the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Had, however, the question been "What _has been_ the matter with him?" with the same grammatical accuracy the reply would have been, "If you please, Ma'am, he has just thrown up a large pin," which, unperceived, he had managed to swallow.
On his reaching the second age of man--that is to say, when he was but seven years old--he was sent "with his satchel and shining morning face" to Eton, where, on his arrival, he found himself the youngest boy in the school.
The busy hive of the United Kingdom, we all know, is divided into cells, in each of which, at this moment, a raw material is being converted by labour into some particular description of manufactured goods. In one cell, a Minister of State is concocting, from crude evidence, a speech, a budget, or a despatch. In another cell, a young woman, with a protuberant cushion on her lap, covered by an intricate pattern, marked by pins with heads of various colours, is as indefatigably labouring for the welfare of her country by twirling, twisting, and twiddling innumerable bobbins of fine thread into Honiton lace. In other cells, workpeople are converting broadcloth into clothes, leather into shoes, horse-hair into wigs, medicine into pills, lead into bullets, brass and tin into cannon, iron into rifles, alkali and grease into soap. Within what is called a "scrap-mill," by the power of steam, controlled by a single man, broken bolts, bars, nuts, nails, screw-pins, &c., are made to revolve, until by rumbling, tumbling, rubbing, scrubbing, bruising, beating, hustling, and jostling each other, all are turned out clean and bright, fit to be welded together for any purpose that may be required.