Page:Biographia Hibernica volume 2.djvu/560

556 SMITH. books of drawings, and three thousand five hundred and sixteen manuscripts, besides a multitude of prints, and the latter containing about twenty-three thousand coins and medals, and (according to the general view of its contents, published the year before his death) upwards of thirty-six thousand six hundred subjects of natural his tory, exclusive of plants, he directed in his will that they should be offered to the public for 20,000l., declaring at the same time that they had cost him upwards of 50,000l. The offer was readily accepted, and an act of parliament for their purchase, together with the collection of MS. formed by Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford, and then offered to the public by his daughter, the Duchess of Portland, and for placing them, together with the Cottonian collec tion, in one general repository, was passed in 1753. For this purpose Montague House was purchased, and the several collections having been deposited there, and regu lations for the proper government of the institution having been formed, it was opened to the public, subject to those regulations, in 1759, under the title of the British Museum. EDWARD SMITH, Bishop of Down and Connor, a learned divine and phi losopher, was born at Lisburn, in the county of Antrim, in 1665, and was educated in the university of Dublin, of which he was elected a fellow in 1684, in the nineteenth year of his age. He soon afterwards took his degree of D. D. During the troublesome times in 1689, he retired for safety to England, where he was recommended to the Smyrna Company, and appointed chaplain to their fac tories at Constantinople and Smyrna. Here he remained four years, and in 1693, returned to England, and was made chaplain to King William III. whom he attended four years in Flanders. His first promotion was to the deanery of St. Patrick's, Dublin, in 1695, from whence he was advanced to the bishopric of Down and Connor in 1.