Page:History of the University of Pennsylvania - Montgomery (1900).djvu/418

You will observe that this Collection was solicited and given to raise a Capital and that the Bishops and commissioners in the Brief have desired Mr Penn's assurance as well as mine that it shall be properly laid out as such for the Payment of Salaries, a thing we had no difficulty to promise, knowing it to be the full intention of the Trustees, for should we spend this we could not beg a second time. We cannot follow Dr. Smith's steps through his busy wanderings in pursuit of his collections; we would find in them a most interesting itinerary, and would be afforded a clear picture of the customs prevailing in such cases. Nothing was left undone by him in his zeal for the furtherance of his mission ; untiring in journeyings, in visits, in solicitations, in correspond- ence, his energies did not seem to flag. On 1 2 September he writes : Jay and I are just setting out from the New York Coffee House and hope to be at Holyhead as soon as the Lord Lieutenant, and at Dublin by Saturday night But I do not know that I shall stay more than three or four weeks in Ireland, for we are told that in the present situation of that Kingdom, we can hope for little but in Dublin, Cork, and Derry. But shortly after his arrival in Dublin he was taken ill, and the anxieties of his friends were great lest he should not recover ; here he was detained in enforced idleness for many weeks ; but in convalescence he measur- ably resumed his activities, and sought the society of the learned in Dublin and those influential in the work of educa- tion. Trinity College bestowed a Doctorate upon him, his diploma bearing date 9 January, 1764. He was detained here until 28 January, when he returned to England, proceeding to Stoke, the seat of the Penns, where he remained under the kind care of Mr. Penn and his wife for a fortnight, and reached Lon- don in the first week of February. He wrote to the Trustees on II February, 1764, a few days after his arrival there, an account of his most dangerous situation in Dublin, having been ten weeks confined to Bed of Fever both Bilious and Nervous which from the beginning had very bad symptoms, and for some time brought me to a State in which no hopes were entertained of a possibility of recovery. Sir James Jay attended me at first, but soon declared the matter to be too serious for him to take the whole