Professor Henry J. S. Smith of Oxford, whose death has already been announced, was a precocious student in childhood. He was able to read English at two years of age, and at four he began, unaided, the study of Greek. From then until his eleventh year his only tutor was his mother. He entered Rugby at fifteen, in the last year of Dr. Arnold's head-mastership, and was at once placed in the next to the highest form, and would have been placed in the highest had the rules of the school allowed a new student that rank. At eighteen he gained the Balliol scholarship, and, in spite of a year's illuess, carried off the Ireland scholarship, and took his degree, an old-fashioned "Double-First," at the age of twenty-four.
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