Early modern printed texts made liberal use of italics. To distinguish my own added emphasis from original italics, I indicate my emphasis within quotations by underlining; all italics in quotations are original.

While most quotations retain the original seventeenth-century spelling, in the interests of readability some spellings with the potential to be especially distracting or confusing have been modernised (e.g. ‘bin’ for ‘been’, ‘then’ for ‘than’).

In nearly every case where John Smith quotes an ancient source without a citation, I have relied upon the invaluable work of Roger Howard (Smith (Reference Smith and Howard2017) in the bibliography), whose online edition identifies the source and location of most of Smith’s quotations.

Unless otherwise indicated, dates of matriculation and degree attainment for students at Cambridge are taken from A Cambridge Alumni Database (ACAD), the online version of the Venn’s Alumni Cantabrigienses.

All quotations to Platonic dialogues are from Cooper (Reference Cooper1997).