THOMPSON, Thomas, philanthropist, born in Boston, Massachusetts, 27 August, 1798; died in New York city, 28 March, 1869. He was graduated at Harvard in 1817, and studied divinity under William Ellery Channing, but abandoned it to devote himself to the fine arts. His first collection of pictures, which was said to be the finest in Boston at that time and valued at 892,000, was destroyed in the burning of Tremont Temple in 1852. He gathered another collection worth $500,000, and, besides this, possessed property valued at nearly $1,000,000. He had bequeathed this to form a fund the income of which should be used to aid poor needle-women of Boston, but because his property was taxed in that city at what he thought an exorbitant rate, he removed to New York about 1860, cancelled his will, and made another in favor of the needle-women of Brattleboro', Vermont, and Rhinebeck, New York Mr. Thompson's mode of life was eccentric, and it is said that before his removal from Boston he had never travelled on a steamboat or a railroad.