as commissioner for Oude, he was made a major-general in November, 1855, and a K.C.B. in January, 1856, while he was on his way to England, after forty-eight years of service. He died during the voyage home, in February, 1856. He was the author of the "Rambles of an Indian Official," published in 1840—one of the earliest books to give a vivid picture of the life and duties of the class by which our vast dependency of Hindostan is governed. Not till 1858 was published his "Journey through the Kingdom of Oude in 1849-50"—a work of great value in the controversy respecting the annexation of Oude, and the proper mode of reorganizing it when annexed.—F. E.
SLEIDAN, John, was born in 1506 at Sleidan, a small town in the vicinity of Cologne. In his youth he studied with his townsman John Sturmius, and subsequently visited France, where he entered in 1525 into the service of the cardinal-archbishop John du Bellay, who employed him in several negotiations. In 1542 he retired to Strasbourg, and there with the assistance of James Sturmius and the co-operation of his friends he began his great work entitled "De statu religionis et reipublicæ, Carolo V. Cæsare," in twenty-five books, containing a history of his own times, from 1517, when Luther began his crusade against the papacy, to 1555, the year in which it was published. The book gained him great credit with protestants, but catholics have charged him with partiality. De Thou speaks of it as a work written "exacta fide et diligentia." On the death of his wife in 1555, grief for her loss deprived him of memory, and in the following year he died in the deepest melancholy. In addition to his commentaries Sleidan made a Latin translation of the History of Philip de Comines, and an abridgment of Froissart's Chronicles.—W. J. P.
SLINGELANDT, Peter van, a celebrated Dutch painter, was born at Leyden in 1640. He was the scholar and imitator of Gerard Dow, whose minute finish he successfully rivalled. Houbraken relates that he was engaged on his small picture of Meerman and his family without intermission for three years, and that a ruff cost him a month's constant labour. Another noted picture by him is a kitchen, with a man playing a violin, in the Amsterdam museum. The most celebrated of all, however, is a kitchen in the collection of the earl of Ellesmere, painted in 1685. It surpasses all other examples of his pencil, in his characteristic quality of microscopic detail and finish. There are two good specimens in the royal collection at Buckingham palace. Slingelandt died in 1691.—J. T—e.
* SLINGENEYER, Ernest, a Belgian painter, was born May 29, 1823, at Loochristi near Ghent. He studied under M. Wappers in the Antwerp academy, but ranks among the followers of M. Gallait. M. Slingeneyer's subjects are chiefly historical episodes, or biographical incidents. Among his best-known pictures are—the "Death of Jacobsen," in the collection of the king of the Belgians; the "Death of Claessens," in that of the king of Holland; the "Death of Nelson;" "An Episode in the Massacre of St. Bartholomew," &c. In the International Exhibition of 1862, his pictures of the "Physician Vésale following the Army of Charles V.," from the Musée Royal, Brussels, and "A Christian Martyr under Diocletian," attracted general notice—the latter especially, on account of some effects of sunlight, which were rather tricks of art than belonging to the legitimate province of painting of an elevated order. He was created a knight of the order of Leopold in 1850.—J. T—e.
SLOANE, Sir Hans, Bart., an eminent physician and collector, to an offer in whose will we owe the British museum, was born, of Scotch extraction, at Killileagh in the county of Down, on the 16th of April, 1660. At nineteen he proceeded to London to qualify himself for the profession of medicine, and his zeal for science, natural and physical, procured him the acquaintance of Ray and Boyle. After further studying for a year or so in France, he returned in 1684 to England, where he became an inmate of Sydenham's house, and that illustrious physician warmly forwarded his professional views. In 1685 he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society, and in 1687 a fellow of the College of Physicians. Sacrificing his immediate professional prospects to his love of knowledge, he accepted, in the year of his admission into the college, the appointment of physician to the duke of Albemarle, the new governor of Jamaica, and remained in that island fifteen months, studying its little-known fauna and flora. On his return to England he settled in London as a physician, and soon attained great success and eminence in his profession, while his scientific acquirements procured him other distinctions. In 1694 he was elected physician to Christ's hospital; on the accession of George I. he was created a baronet, the earliest English instance of hereditary honours conferred for medical eminence; in 1727 he was appointed physician to George II., having previously been physician-general to the army, and elected in 1719 president of the College of Physicians. The highest of English scientific honours was bestowed on him, when in 1727 he was chosen to succeed Sir Isaac Newton in the presidency of the Royal Society. Sir Hans Sloane made a beneficent use both of his wealth and his influence. He was charitable to the indigent cultivators of literature and science, and was an active promoter of a dispensary for the poor. The last eleven years of his life were spent in hospitable retirement among his books and curiosities at Chelsea, where he received visitors of every rank, and almost every country. He died there on the 11th of January, 1752. His chief work was his "Voyage to the islands Madeira, Barbadoes, Nevis, St. Christophers, and Jamaica, with the Natural History of the herbs and trees, four-footed beasts, fishes, birds," &c., 2 vols. folio, 1706-25. Of his contributions to the Philosophical Transactions there is a list in the well-written memoir of him contained in volume second of Dr. Pulteney's Historical and Biographical Sketches of the progress of Botany in England; London, 1790. From an early period Sir Hans Sloane had begun to form a library and a museum of natural history and curiosities, the latter receiving valuable contributions from his visit to Jamaica. Augmented in 1702 by the stores of his friend Courten's museum, and steadily added to through his long life, Sir Hans Sloane's collections were estimated in his will as worth more than £80,000. In this document they were offered to the nation for £20,000, and the government accepted the offer. By an act passed in 1753, the Sloane collections were secured, and with the addition of the Harleian MSS. and the Cottonian library, as well as of the Royal library, presented in 1757, they formed the original contents of the British museum, opened in 1759. Sir Hans Sloane's books in the museum are estimated to number fifty thousand, and his MSS. forty-one thousand volumes.—F. E.
SMALBROKE, Richard, born at Birmingham in 1672, was educated at Magdalen college, Oxford. In 1722 he was consecrated bishop of St. David's, and in 1730 he was translated to the see of Lichfield and Coventry. His chief work is "A Vindication of our Saviour's Miracles," in answer to Woolston's discourses. He died December 22, 1749.—D. W. R.
SMALRIDGE, George, a learned prelate, born at Lichfield in 1663, was indebted for his education to Ashmole the antiquary, who sent him to Westminster school in 1678, whence he was elected to Christ church, Oxford, in 1682. He was consecrated bishop of Bristol in 1714, and died in 1719.—D. W. R.
SMART, Christopher, poet and translator, was born of a respectable family at Shipbourne in Kent in 1722. Educated at Maidstone, Durham, and Pembroke hall, Cambridge, he obtained a fellowship, and gained five times the Seatonian prize by a series of poems on the attributes of the Deity, which contain some very fine passages. In 1753 he married, quitted college, and threw himself upon the world of London as an author by profession. The work of his which made most noise was "The Hilliad," 1753, a satire on Sir John Hill (q.v.). Anxiety and dissipation impaired his intellect, and Smart had to be confined in a madhouse, where, strange enough, some of his best verses were written. He died in 1770 in the king's bench, where he had been imprisoned for debt. There are some interesting notices of him in Boswell, for Johnson liked and befriended him. His prose translation of Horace (1757) is still a standard "crib." His poems were collected and published, with a memoir, in 1791.—F. E.
SMEATON, John, the great engineer, was born at Austhorpe Lodge, near Leeds, on the 18th of June, 1724, and died there on the 28th of October, 1792. He was the son of a respectable and affluent attorney, who, notwithstanding his own wish that his son should devote himself to the legal profession, wisely allowed him to indulge and cultivate the natural bent which he showed towards mechanical pursuits, and that even although the experiments of the young Smeaton were attended with inconvenient results; for example, when a miniature atmospheric steam-engine of his making proved so successful on being first set to work, that it pumped the fish-pond dry in a few hours. At the age of sixteen Smeaton entered his father's office at Leeds, whence, about two years afterwards, he went to London
