ied him, and it was a change for the better when (in 1889), on the
death of his friend, William Wright, he became Professor of
Arabic.[49] His efforts to build up a school of Oriental studies on
the foundations laid by Wright, and with the help of an eminent Syriac
scholar, Bensley, were proving successful, and a considerable number
of able young men were gathering round him, when (in 1890) the hand of
disease fell upon him, obliging him first to curtail and afterwards to
intermit his lectures. The last year of his life was a year of
suffering, borne with uncomplaining fortitude.

What with work on the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_, with the distractions
of his prolonged trial, with the time spent in oral teaching, and with
the physical weakness of his latest years, Smith's leisure available
for literary production was not large, and the books he has left do
not adequately represent either his accumulated knowledge or his
faculty of investigation. The earlier books--_The Old Testament in the
Jewish Church_ and _The Prophets of Israel_ (the latter a series of
lectures delivered at Glasgow)--are comparatively popular in handling.
The two later--_Kinship and Marriage in Early Arabia_ and _The
Religion of the Semites_--are more abstruse and technical, and also
more original, dealing with topics in which their author was a
pioneer, though he had been influenced by, and acknowledged in the
amplest way his obligations to, his friend John F. Maclennan, the
author of _Primitive Marriage_. _The Religion of the Semites_, though
masterly in plan and execution, and though it has excited the
admiration of the few Oriental scholars competent to appraise its
substantial merit, suffers from its incompleteness. Only the first
volume was published, for death overtook the author before he could
put into final shape the materials he had collected for the full
development of his theories. As the second volume would have traced
the connection between the primitive religion of the Arab branches of
the Semitic stock (including Israel) and the Hebrew religion as we
have it in the earlier books of the Old Testament, the absence of this
finished statement is a loss to science. Changes had passed upon his
views since he wrote the incriminated articles, and he said to me (I
think about 1888) that he would no longer undertake any clerical
duties. He had a sensitive conscience, and held that no clergyman
ought to use language in the pulpit which did not