by those with whom he worked has been often indicated in the course of this memoir. It was conspicuously illustrated by the dying words of his lifelong friend Millais, who, when the power of speech had left him during his last illness in 1896, wrote on a slate the words, 'I should like to see George Smith, the kindest man and the best gentleman I have had to deal with.' The constancy which characterised his intimacies is well seen, too, in his relations with Mrs. Bryan Waller Procter. Thackeray had introduced him in comparatively early days to Procter and his family, and the daughter Adelaide, the well-known poetess, had excited his youthful admiration. When Procter was disabled by paralysis, and more especially after his death in 1874, Smith became Mrs. Procter's most valued friend and counsellor. He paid her a weekly visit, and thoroughly enjoyed her shrewd and pungent wit. She proved her confidence in him and her appreciation of the kindness he invariably showed her by presenting him with a volume of autograph letters that Thackeray had addressed to her and her husband, and finally she made him executor of her will. She died in 1888. To the last Smith's photograph always stood on her writing-table along with those of Robert Browning, James Russell Lowell, and Mr. Henry James, her three other closest allies. Another friend to whom Smith gave many proofs of attachment was Tom Hughes. Hughes was not one of Smith's authors. He had identified himself in early years too closely with the firm of Macmillan & Co. to connect himself with any other publisher. But he wrote occasionally for the 'Pall Mall Gazette;' he knew and liked Smith personally, and sought his counsel when the failure of his settlement at Rugby, Tennessee, was causing him great anxiety.
In 1878 Smith's mother died at the advanced age of eighty-one, having lived to see her son achieve fame and fortune. His elder sister died two years later, and his only surviving sister, the youngest of the family, was left alone. Mainly in this sister's interest, Smith entered on a venture of a kind different from any he had yet essayed. He had made the acquaintance of Canon Barnett, vicar of St. Jude's, who was persuading men of wealth to help in solving the housing question in the east end of London by purchasing some of the many barely habitable tenements that defaced the slums, by demolishing them, and by erecting on their sites blocks of model dwellings. It was one of the principles of Canon Barnett's treatment of the housing difficulty that the services of ladies should be enlisted as rent-collectors and managers of house property in poor districts. Under the advice of Canon Barnett, Smith, in 1880, raised a block of dwellings of a new and admirably sanitary type in George Yard in the very heart of Whitechapel. The block accommodated forty families, and the management was entrusted to his sister, who remained directress until her marriage, and was then succeeded by another lady. In carrying out this philanthropic scheme Smith proposed to work on business lines. He hoped to show in practice that capital might thus be invested at a fair profit, and thereby to induce others to follow his example. But the outlay somewhat exceeded the estimates, and, though a profit was returned, it was smaller than was anticipated. Smith, his wife, and his daughters took a warm interest in their tenants, whom for
