True to his lifelong conviction, the preacher urges the sacredness of religious freedom.—

"I hope the Queen will love the National Church, and protect it; but it must be impressed upon her mind that every sect of Christians have as perfect a right to the free exercise of their worship as the Church itself—that there must be no invasion of the privileges of the other sects, and no contemptuous disrespect of their feelings—that the Altar is the very ark and citadel of Freedom.

* * * * *

"Though I deprecate the bad effects of fanaticism, I earnestly pray that our young Sovereign may evince herself to be a person of deep religious feeling: what other cure has she for all the arrogance and vanity which her exalted position must engender? for all the flattery and falsehood with which she must be surrounded? for all the soul-corrupting homage with which she is met at every moment of her existence? what other cure than to cast herself down in darkness and solitude before God—to say that she is dust and ashes—and to call down the pity of the Almighty upon her difficult and dangerous life. This is the antidote of kings against the slavery and the baseness which surround them; they should think often of death—and the folly and nothingness of the world, and they should humble their souls before the Master of masters, and the King of kings; praying to Heaven for wisdom and calm reflection, and for that spirit of Christian gentleness which exalts command into an empire of justice, and turns obedience into a service of love."

Thus he recapitulates and concludes:—

"A young Queen, at that period of life which is commonly given up to frivolous amusement, sees at once the great principles by which she should be guided, and steps at once into the great duties of her station. The importance of educating the lower orders of the people is never absent from her mind; she takes up this principle at the beginning of her life, and in all the change of servants, and in all the struggle of parties, looks to it as a source of permanent improvement. A great object of her affections, is the preservation of peace; she regards a state of war as the greatest of all human evils; thinks that the lust of conquest is not a glory, but a bad crime; despises the folly and miscalculations of war, and is willing to sacrifice every thing to peace but the clear honour of her land.

"The patriot Queen, whom I am painting, reverences the National Church—frequents its worship, and regulates her faith by its precepts; but she withstands the encroachments, and keeps down the ambition natural to establishments, and, by rendering the privileges of the Church compatible with the civil freedom of all sects, confers strength upon, and adds duration to, that wise and magnificent institution. And then this youthful Monarch, profoundly but wisely religious, disdaining hypocrisy, and far above the childish follies of false piety, casts herself upon God, and seeks from the Gospel of His blessed Son a path for her steps, and a comfort for her soul. Here is a picture which warms every English heart, and would bring all this congregation upon their bended knees before Almighty God to pray it may be realized. What limits to the glory and happiness of our native land, if the Creator should in His mercy have placed in the heart of this Royal Woman the rudiments of wisdom and mercy; and if, giving them time to expand, and to bless our children's children with her goodness, He should grant to her a long sojourning upon earth, and leave her to reign over us till she is well stricken in years? What glory! what happiness! what joy! what bounty of God! I of course can only expect to see the beginning of such a splendid period: but, when I do see it, I shall exclaim with the pious Simeon, 'Lord, now lettest Thou Thy servant depart in peace, for mine eyes have seen Thy salvation.'"

We turn now from ecclesiastical to social life. Though Sydney Smith still retained his beautiful Rectory of Combe Florey, and lived there a good deal in the summer, he spent more and more of his year in London, He held that the parallelogram between Oxford Street, Piccadilly, Regent Street, and Hyde Park, "enclosed more intelligence and ability, to say nothing of wealth and beauty, than the world had ever collected in such a space before." He frankly admitted that the summer and the country had no charms for him. His sentiments on this head found poetical expression in a parody of Paradise Lost. He felt

"As one who, long in rural hamlets pent, (Where squires and parsons deep potations make, With lengthen'd tale of fox, or timid hare, Or antler'd stag, sore vext by hound and horn), Forth issuing on a winter's morn, to reach In chaise or coach the London Babylon Remote, from each thing met conceives delight;— Or cab, or car, or evening muffin-bell, Or lamps—each city-sight, each city-sound"

"I do all I can to love the country, and endeavour to believe those poetical lies which I read in Rogers and others, on the subject; which said deviations from truth were, by Rogers, all written in St. James's Place." "I look forward anxiously to the return of the bad weather, coal fires, and good society in a crowded city." "The country is bad enough in summer, but in winter it is a fit residence only for beings doomed to such misery for misdeeds in another state of existence." "You may depend upon it, all lives lived out of London are mistakes, more or less grievous—but mistakes." "I shall not be sorry to be in town. I am rather tired of simple pleasures, bad reasoning, and worse cookery."

His life in London, free from these kindred evils, was full of enjoyment. He dined out as often as he liked, and entertained his friends at breakfast, luncheon, and dinner. He admits that he "sometimes talked a little," and "liked a hearty laugher,"

"I talk only the nonsense of the moment from the good humour of the moment, and nothing remains behind."

"I like a little noise and nature, and a large party, very merry and happy."

Here are some of his invitations:—

"Will you come to a philosophical breakfast on Saturday?—ten o'clock precisely? Nothing taken for granted! Everything (except the Thirty-Nine Articles) called in question."

"I have a breakfast of philosophers to-morrow at ten punctually; muffins and metaphysics, crumpets and contradiction. Will you come?"

"Pray come and see me. I will give you very good mutton chops for luncheon,[115] seasoned with affectionate regard and respect."

"I give two dinners next week to the following persons, whom I enumerate, as I know Lady Georgiana loves a little gossip. First dinner—Lady Holland, Eastlake, Lord and Lady Monteagle, Luttrell, Lord Auckland, Lord Campbell, Lady Stratheden, Lady Dunstanville, Baring Wall, and Mr. Hope. Second dinner—Lady Charlemont, Lord Glenelg, Lord and Lady Denman, Lord and Lady Cottenham, Lord and Lady Langdale, Sir Charles Lemon, Mr. Hibbert, Landseer, and Lord Clarendon."

This period is marked by one domestic incident which caused the Smiths lasting happiness. In the spring of 1834 their elder daughter, Saba, was married to Dr., afterwards Sir Henry, Holland. Sydney thus expressed his joy:—

"The blessing of God be upon you both, dear children; and be assured that it makes my old age much happier to have placed my daughter in the hands of so honourable and amiable a son."

A few years later he wrote from Combe Florey:—

"We expect Saba and Dr. Holland the end of this month. I am in great hopes we shall have some 'cases': I am keeping three or four simmering for him. It is enough to break one's heart to see him in the country."

In November 1834, the King dismissed the Whig Government, and sent for Sir Robert Peel. A General Election took place at Christmas. In the spring of 1835 Peel's Government was displaced by a vote of the House of Commons, and a Whig Government was formed again under Lord Melbourne. Henry Labouchere,[116] M.P. for Taunton, accepted office, and thereby vacated his seat. On seeking re-election, he was opposed, unsuccessfully, by Benjamin Disraeli. "The Jew spoke for an hour The boys called out 'Old Clothes' as he came into the town, and offered to sell him sealing-wax and slippers."[117]

As soon as the Election was over, the country relapsed into its normal calm. On the 3rd of June Sydney wrote:—

"We are going through our usual course of jokes and dinners. One advantage of the country is that a joke once established is good for ever; it is like the stuff which is denominated everlasting, and used as pantaloons by careful parents for their children."

In the following autumn the Smiths paid a flying visit to France, The crossing from Dover was terrific; but Sydney comforted himself with the reflection that, "as I had so little life to lose, it was of little consequence whether I was drowned, or died, like a resident clergyman, from indigestion."

France gave him the same pleasure as it had always given him.—

"Paris is very full. I look at it with some attention, as I am not sure I may not end my days in it. I suspect the fifth act of life should be in great cities: it is there, in the long death of old age, that a man most forgets himself and his infirmities."

"I care very little about dinners, but I shall not easily forget a matelote at the Rochers de Cancale, an almond tart at Montreuil, or a poulet a la Tartare at Grignon's, These are impressions which no changes in future life can obliterate."

Before the year ended, he was established in London. The remaining ten years of his life saw him, in spite of some bodily infirmities, at the summit of his social fame. An immense proportion of the anecdotes relating to his conversation belong to this period. "It was," wrote Mr. Gladstone in 1879, "in the year 1835 that I met Mr. Sydney Smith for the first time at the table of Mr. Hallam. After dinner Mr. Smith was good enough to converse with me, and he spoke, not of any general changes in the prevailing tone of doctrine, but of the improvement which had then begun to be remarkable in the conduct and character of the clergy. He went back upon what they had been, and said, in his vivid and pointed way of illustration, 'Whenever you meet a clergyman of my age, you may be quite sure he is a bad clergyman.'"[118]

In 1836 the Ecclesiastical Commission was established by Act of Parliament as a permanent institution for the management of business relating to the Church. Its constitution and recommendations were very distasteful to Sydney Smith; and, as time went on, he found it impossible to restrain himself from public criticism. At the beginning of the Session of 1837, he published his "First Letter to Archdeacon Singleton."[119] The Letter begins with an attack on the constitution of the Commission. It was stuffed with Bishops. Deans and Canons and Rectors and Vicars and Curates had no place upon it. The result was that all interests, not episcopal, had been completely overlooked, and that the reforms, though perhaps theoretically sound, were practically unworkable. Further, the reforms had been far too extensive. The plan of making a Central Fund from the proceeds of confiscated Prebends,[120] and enriching the smaller livings with it, was chimerical. The whole income of the Church, equally divided among all its clergy, would only give each man the wages of a nobleman's butler. The true method in all professions was the method of Blanks and Prizes. But for the chance of those Prizes, men of good birth and education would not "go into the Church"; and an uneducated clergy would inevitably become fanatical.—

"You will have a set of ranting, raving Pastors, who will wage-war against all the innocent pleasures of life; vie with each other in extravagance of zeal; and plague your heart out with their nonsense and absurdity. Cribbage must be played in caverns, and sixpenny whist take refuge in the howling wilderness. In this way low men, doomed to hopeless poverty and galled by contempt, will endeavour to force themselves into station and significance."

Then again there was the difficulty of oaths. The property of Cathedrals could only be confiscated at the expense of violated vows.—

"The Archbishop of Canterbury, at his enthronement, takes a solemn oath that he will maintain the rights and liberties of the Church of Canterbury; as Chairman, however, of the New Commission, he seizes the patronage of that Church, takes two thirds of its Revenues, and abolishes two thirds of its Members. That there is an answer to this I am very willing to believe, but I cannot at present find out what it is; and this attack upon the Revenues and Members of Canterbury is not obedience to an Act of Parliament, but the very Act of Parliament, which takes away, is recommended, drawn up, and signed by the person who has sworn he will never take away; and this little apparent inconsistency is not confined to the Archbishop of Canterbury, but is shared equally by all the Bishop-Commissioners, who have all (unless I am grievously mistaken) taken similar oaths for the preservation of their respective Chapters. It would be more easy to see our way out of this little embarrassment, if some of the embarrassed had not unfortunately, in the parliamentary debates on the Catholic Question, laid the greatest stress upon the King's oath, applauded the sanctity of the monarch to the skies, rejected all comments, called for the oath in its plain meaning, and attributed the safety of the English Church to the solemn vow made by the King at the altar to the Archbishops of Canterbury and York.

* * * * *

"Nothing can be more ill-natured among politicians, than to look back into Hansard's Debates, to see what has been said by particular men upon particular occasions, and to contrast such speeches with present opinions—and therefore I forbear to introduce some inviting passages upon taking oaths in their plain and obvious sense, both in debates on the Catholic Question and upon that fatal and Mezentian oath which binds the Irish to the English Church."

The gist of all these reforms, actual and projected, was that the Bishops were enormously increasing their own power and patronage at the expense of the Deans and Chapters. Sydney Smith, as a member of a Chapter, protested, and then the friends of the Bishops cried out that all such protests were indecent, and even perilous.—

"We are told that if we agitate these questions among ourselves, we shall have the democratic Philistines come down upon us, and sweep us all away together. Be it so; I am quite ready to be swept away when the time comes. Everybody has his favourite death: some delight in apoplexy, and others prefer marasmus. ... I would infinitely rather be crushed by democrats than, under the plea of the public good, be mildly and blandly absorbed by Bishops."

With Bishops as a body, and allowing for some notable exceptions, Sydney Smith seems to have had only an imperfect sympathy. He held that they could not be trusted to deal fairly and reasonably with men, subject to their jurisdiction, who dared to maintain independence in thought and action.—

"A good and honest Bishop (I thank God there are many who deserve that character!) ought to suspect himself, and carefully to watch his own heart. He is all of a sudden elevated from being a tutor, dining at an early hour with his pupil (and occasionally, it is believed, on cold meat), to be a spiritual Lord; he is dressed in a magnificent dress, decorated with a title, flattered by Chaplains, and surrounded by little people looking up for the things which he has to give away; and this often happens to a man who has had no opportunities of seeing the world, whose parents were in very humble life, and who has given up all his thoughts to the Frogs of Aristophanes and the Targum of Onkelos. How is it possible that such a man should not lose his head? that he should not swell? that lie should not be guilty of a thousand follies, and worry and tease to death (before he recovers his common sense) a hundred men as good, and as wise, and as able as himself?"

On all accounts, therefore, both public and private, it was very good for Bishops to hear the voice of candid criticism, and their opportunities of enjoying that advantage were all too rare.—

"Bishops live in high places with high people, or with little people who depend upon them. They walk delicately, like Agag. They hear only one sort of conversation, and avoid bold reckless men, as a lady veils herself from rough breezes."

And for the Whig Government, which was consenting to all these attacks on the Church and the Chapters, Sydney had his parting word of reminiscent rebuke.—

"I neither wish to offend them nor any body else. I consider myself to be as good a Whig as any amongst them. I was a Whig before many of them were born—and while some of them were Tories and Waverers.[121] I have always turned out to fight their battles, and when I saw no other Clergyman turn out but myself—and this in times before liberality was well recompensed, and therefore in fashion, and when the smallest appearance of it seemed to condemn a Churchman to the grossest obloquy, and the most hopeless poverty. It may suit the purpose of the Ministers to flatter the Bench; it does not suit mine. I do not choose in my old age to be tossed as a prey to the Bishops; I have not deserved this of my Whig friends."

It is perhaps not surprising that the Whig Ministers should have remained impervious to arguments thus enforced. On the 10th of February, Sydney Smith wrote to Lord John Russell (whom he addressed as "My dear John"):—

"You say you are not convinced by my pamphlet I am afraid that I am a very arrogant person; but I do assure you that, in the fondest moments of self-conceit, the idea of convincing a Russell that he was wrong never came across my mind. Euclid would have had a bad chance with you if you had happened to have formed an opinion that the interior angles of a triangle were not equal to two right angles. The more poor Euclid demonstrated, the more you would not have been convinced."

In 1838 Sydney Smith published a second Letter to the same Archdeacon:—

"It is a long time since you heard from me, and in the mean time the poor Church of England has been trembling from the Bishop who sitteth upon the throne, to the Curate who rideth upon the hackney horse. I began writing on the subject in order to avoid bursting from indignation; and, as it is not my habit to recede, I will go on till the Church of England is either up or down—semianimous on its back or vigorous on its legs.... If what I write is liked, so much the better; but, liked or not liked, sold or not sold, Wilson Crokered or not Wilson Crokered, I will write."[122]

He now returns to the "Prebends" which the Commissioners propose to confiscate. Some of these, he says, are properties of great value. He instances one which will soon be worth between L40,000 and L60,000 a year. Some of them are held by non-residentiary Prebendaries, who never come near the Cathedral, and who have no duty except to enjoy their incomes. Those prebends Sydney Smith, as a real though temperate reformer, would now surrender, and make from them a fund to enrich poor livings. But for the prebends of the Residentiaries, who perform the daily duties of the Cathedral, he will fight to the death. With splendid courage he asserts that these great estates, held for life by ecclesiastical officers, are as well managed, and as profitably employed, with a view to the general interests of the community, as the lands of any peer or squire.—

"Take, for instance, the Cathedral of Bristol, the whole estates of which are about equal to keeping a pack of foxhounds. If this had been in the hands of a country gentleman; instead of Precentor, Succentor, Bean, and Canons, and Sexton, you would have had huntsman, whippers-in, dog-feeders, and stoppers of earths; the old squire, full of foolish opinions and fermented liquids, and a young gentleman, of gloves, waistcoats, and pantaloons: and how many generations might it be before the fortuitous concourse of noodles would produce such a man as Professor Lee,[123] one of the Prebendaries of Bristol, and by far the most eminent Oriental scholar in Europe."

Then he reverts to his familiar argument that the abolition of these ecclesiastical prizes would lower the social character of the clergy as a body.—

"To get a stall, and to be preceded by men with silver rods, is the bait which the ambitious squire is perpetually holding out to his second son.... If such sort of preferments are extinguished, a very serious evil (as I have often said before) is done to the Church—the service becomes unpopular, further spoliation is dreaded, the whole system is considered to be altered and degraded, capital is withdrawn from the Church, and no one enters into the profession but the sons of farmers and little tradesmen, who would be footmen if they were not vicars—or figure on the coach-box if they were not lecturing from the pulpit.

* * * * *

"If you were to gather a Parliament of Curates on the hottest Sunday in the year, after all the services, sermons, burials, and baptisms of the day, were over, and to offer them such increase of salary as would be produced by the confiscation of the Cathedral property, I am convinced they would reject the measure, and prefer splendid hope, and the expectation of good fortune in advanced life, to the trifling improvement of poverty which such a fund, could afford. Charles James, of London, was a Curate; the Bishop of Winchester[124] was a Curate; almost every rose-and-shovel man has been a Curate in his time. All Curates hope to draw great prizes.

* * * * *

"One of the most foolish circumstances attending this destruction of Cathedral property is the great sacrifice of the patronage of the Crown: the Crown gives up eight Prebends of Westminster, two at Worcester, L1500 per annum at St. Paul's, two Prebends at Bristol, and a great deal of other preferment all over the kingdom: and this at a moment when such extraordinary power has been suddenly conferred upon the people, and when every atom of power and patronage ought to be husbanded for the Crown. A Prebend of Westminster for my second son would soften the Catos of Cornhill, and lull the Gracchi of the Metropolitan Boroughs. Lives there a man so absurd, as to suppose that Government can be carried on without those gentle allurements? You may as well attempt to poultice off the humps of a camel's back as to cure mankind of these little corruptions.

"I am terribly alarmed by a committee of Cathedrals now sitting in London, and planning a petition to the Legislature to be heard by counsel. They will take such high ground, and talk a language so utterly at variance with the feelings of the age about Church Property, that I am much afraid they will do more harm than good. In the time of Lord George Gordon's riots, the Guards said they did not care for the mob, if the Gentlemen Volunteers behind would be so good as not to hold their muskets in such a dangerous manner. I don't care for popular clamour, and think it might now be defied; but I confess the Gentleman Volunteers alarm me. They have unfortunately, too, collected their addresses, and published them in a single volume!!!"[125]

And now he returns to one of the prominent topics of his first Letter, and reminds the Archbishop of Canterbury that he has sworn to protect the rights and possessions of the Metropolitical Church of Canterbury.—

"A friend of mine has suggested to me that his Grace has perhaps forgotten the oath; but this cannot be, for the first Protestant in Europe of course makes a memorandum in his pocket-book of all the oaths he takes to do, or to abstain. The oath, however, may be less present to the Archbishop's memory, from the fact of his not having taken the oath in person, but by the medium of a gentleman sent down by the coach to take it for him—a practice which, though I believe it to have been long established in the Church, surprised me, I confess, not a little. A proxy to vote, if you please—a proxy to consent to arrangements of estates if wanted; but a proxy sent down in the Canterbury Ply, to take the Creator to witness that the Archbishop, detained in town by business or pleasure, will never violate that foundation of piety over which he presides—all this seems to me an act of the most extraordinary indolence ever recorded in history. If an Ecclesiastic, not a Bishop, may express any opinion on the reforms of the Church, I recommend that Archbishops and Bishops should take no more oaths by proxy; but, as they do not wait upon the Sovereign or the Prime Minister, or even any of the Cabinet, by proxy, that they should also perform all religious acts in their own person ... I have been informed, though I will not answer for the accuracy of the information, that this vicarious oath is likely to produce, a scene which would have puzzled the Dudor Dubitantiim. The attorney who took the oath for the Archbishop is, they say, seized with religious horrors at the approaching confiscation of Canterbury property, and has in vain tendered back his 6s. 8d. for taking the oath. The Archbishop refuses to accept it; and feeling himself light and disencumbered, wisely keeps the saddle upon the back of the writhing and agonized scrivener. I have talked it over with several Clergymen, and the general opinion is, that the scrivener will suffer."

And next lie turns his attention to a foolish Bishop who has argued in a pamphlet that, if a fund for the improvement of poor benefices was to be created, it must be drawn from the property of the Cathedrals, because the Bishops' incomes had already been pruned.

"This is very good Episcopal reasoning; but is it true? The Bishops and Commissioners wanted a fund to endow small Livings; they did not touch a farthing of their own incomes, only distributed them a little more equally; and proceeded lustily at once to confiscate Cathedral Property. But why was it necessary, if the fund for small Livings was such a paramount consideration, that the future Archbishops of Canterbury should be left with two palaces, and L15,000 per annum? Why is every future Bishop of London to have a palace in Fulham, a house in St. James's Square, and L10,000 a year? Could not all the Episcopal functions be carried on well and effectually with the half of these incomes? Is it necessary that the Archbishop of Canterbury should give feasts to Aristocratic London; and that the domestics of the Prelacy should stand with swords and bag-wigs round pig, and turkey, and venison, to defend, as it were, the Orthodox gastronome from the fierce Unitarian, the fell Baptist, and all the famished children of Dissent? I don't object to all this; because I am sure that the method of prizes and blanks is the best method of supporting a Church which must be considered as very slenderly endowed, if the whole were equally divided among the parishes; but if my opinion were different—if I thought the important improvement was to equalize preferment in the English Church—that such a measure was not the one thing foolish, but the one thing needful—I should take care, as a mitred Commissioner, to reduce my own species of preferment to the narrowest limits, before I proceeded to confiscate the property of any other grade of the Church.... Frequently did Lord John meet the destroying Bishops; much did he commend their daily heap of ruins; sweetly did they smile on each other, and much charming talk was there of meteorology and catarrh, and the particular Cathedral they were pulling down at each period; till one fine day the Home Secretary,[126] with a voice more bland, and a look more ardently affectionate, than that which the masculine mouse bestows on his nibbling female, informed them that the Government meant to take all the Church property into their own hands, to pay the rates out of it and deliver the residue to the rightful possessors. Such an effect, they say, was never before produced by a coup de theatre. The Commission was separated in an instant, London clenched his fist. Canterbury was hurried out by his chaplains, and put into a warm bed. A solemn vacancy spread itself over the face of Gloucester. Lincoln was taken out in strong hysterics. What a noble scene Serjeant Talfourd[127] would have made of all this? Why are such talents wasted on Ion and The Athenian Captive?"

And then Sydney Smith went on to a stricture on his friend Lord John Russell, which has been quoted in a thousand forms from that day to this. It is only fair both to the critic and to the criticized that this stricture should be read in connexion with its history.

When, in November 1834, Lord Althorp's removal to the House of Lords vacated the Leadership of the House of Commons, Lord Melbourne and the rest of the Cabinet decided that Lord John must take it. He doubted his fitness for the post, but said that even if he were called to take command of the Channel Fleet, he supposed he must obey the call and do his best, Sydney Smith heard of this modest and patriotic saying, and wove it into his most celebrated passage,—

"There is not a better man in England than Lord John Russell; but his worst failure is that he is utterly ignorant of all moral fear; there is nothing he would not undertake, I believe he would perform the operation for the stone—build St. Peter's—or assume (with or without ten minutes' notice) the command of the Channel Fleet; and no one would discover by his manner that the patient had died—the Church tumbled down—and the Channel Fleet been knocked to atoms. I believe his motives are always pure, and his measures often able; but they are endless, and never done with that pedetentous pace and pedetentous mind in which it behoves the wise and virtuous improver to walk. He alarms the wise Liberals; and it is impossible to sleep soundly while he has the command of the watch."

Once again, in 1839, Sydney Smith returned to the same subject through the same medium. He rejoiced in great improvements which had been introduced into the measures of the Commissioners, claimed some credit for these improvements, and pointed out that they materially affected the well-being of the parochial clergy. But, as regards the dealings of the Commission with Chapters and Cathedrals, he remains convinced that they were rash, foolish, and dangerous to the Church, "Milton asked where the nymphs were when Lycidas perished? I ask where the Bishops are when the remorseless deep is closing over the head of their beloved Establishment."

One of the Bishops had emerged from silence and security to rebuke the correspondent of Archdeacon Singleton, and now he had his reward.—

"You must have read an attack upon me by the Bishop of Gloucester,[128] in the course of which he says that I have not been appointed to my situation as Canon of St. Paul's for my piety and learning but because I am a scoffer and a jester. Is not this rather strong for a Bishop, and does it not appear to you, Mr. Archdeacon, as rather too close an imitation of that language which is used in the apostolic occupation of trafficking in fish? Whether I have been appointed for my piety or not, must depend upon what this poor man means by piety. He means by that word, of course, a defence of all the tyrannical and oppressive abuses of the Church which have been swept away within the last fifteen or twenty years of my life; the Corporation and Test Acts; the Penal Laws against the Catholics; the Compulsory Marriages of Dissenters, and all those disabling and disqualifying laws which were the disgrace of our Church, and which he has always looked up to as the consummation of human wisdom. If piety consisted in the defence of these—if it was impious to struggle for their abrogation, I have indeed led an ungodly life.... To read, however, his Lordship a lesson of good manners, I had prepared for him a chastisement which would have been echoed from the Segrave who banqueteth in the castle,[129] to the idiot who spitteth over the bridge at Gloucester."

But the Bishop had made a rather misplaced appeal for compassion, on account of his failing eyesight; and Sydney, flinging him contemptuously on one side, passed on to the more formidable Bishop of London.—

"I was much amused with what old Hermann says of the Bishop of London's AEschylus. 'We find,' he says, 'a great arbitrariness of proceeding, and much boldness of innovation, guided by no sure principle'; here it is: qualis ab incepto. He begins with AEschylus, and ends with the Church of England; begins with profane, and ends with holy innovations—scratching out old readings which every commentator had sanctioned; abolishing ecclesiastical dignities which every reformer had spared; thrusting an anapaeest into a verse, which will not bear it; and intruding a Canon into a Cathedral, which does not want it; and this is the Prelate by whom the proposed reform of the Church has been principally planned, and to whose practical wisdom the Legislature is called upon to defer. The Bishop of London is a man of very great ability, humane, placable, generous, munificent; very agreeable, but not to be trusted with great interests where calmness and judgment are required: unfortunately, my old and amiable school-fellow, the Archbishop of Canterbury, has melted away before him, and sacrificed that wisdom on which we all founded our security.... Whatever happens, I am not to blame. I have fought my fight. Farewell"

A little later he wrote to an old friend:—

"I don't like writing to the Bishop of London: it is making a fuss, and looks as if I regretted the part I had taken on Church Reform, which I certainly do not—but I should be much annoyed if the Bishop were to consider me as a perpetual grumbler against him and his measures—I really am not: I like the Bishop and like his conversation—the battle is ended, and I have no other quarrel with him and the Archbishop but that they neither of them ever ask me to dinner. You see a good deal of the Bishop, and as you have always exhorted me to be a good boy, take an opportunity to set him right as to my real dispositions towards him, and exhort him, as he has gained the victory, to forgive a few hard knocks."

In the summer of 1839 Courtenay Smith died suddenly, and left no will.[130] He had accumulated wealth in India, and a third part of it now passed to his brother Sydney. Referring to these circumstances four years later, Sydney wrote:—

"This put me at my ease for my few remaining years. After buying into the Consols and the Reduced, I read Seneca On the Contempt of Wealth. What intolerable nonsense!

"I have been very poor the greatest part of my life, and have borne it as well, I believe, as most people, but I can safely say that I have been happier every guinea I have gained."

His novel opulence did not paralyse his pen. In 1839 he published a vehement attack upon the Ballot, from which he foresaw no better results than the enfranchisement of every one, including women, universal corruption, systematic lying, and a victory for the "lower order of voters" over their "betters." Of the great advocate of the Ballot, George Grote,[131] he says—"Mr. Grote knows the relative values of gold and silver; but by what moral rate of exchange is he able to tell us the relative values of Liberty and Truth?"

The paper on the Ballot was included in a collection of reprints, mainly from the Edinburgh Review, which he published in 1839. The book sold so well that in 1840 he published an enlarged edition. The articles reprinted from the Edinburgh amount to sixty-five, and a memorandum by his daughter shows that twelve more were omitted from the reproduction, "probably because their subjects are already treated of in the extracted articles, or because they applied only to the period in which they were written," The complete list will be found in Appendix A.

In the preface to these collected pieces, which are styled The Works of the Rev. Sydney Smith, the author said, after recounting the circumstances under which the Edinburgh Review was founded:—

"To set on foot such a Journal in such times, to contribute towards it for many years, to bear patiently the reproach and poverty which it caused, and to look back and see that I have nothing to retract, and no intemperance and violence to reproach myself with, is a career of life which I must think to be extremely fortunate. Strange and ludicrous are the changes in human affairs. The Tories are now on the treadmill, and the well-paid Whigs are riding in chariots: with many faces, however, looking out of the windows (including that of our Prime Minister[132]), which I never remember to have seen in the days of the poverty and depression of Whiggism. Liberality is now a lucrative business. Whoever has any institution to destroy, may consider himself as a Commissioner, and his fortune as made; and, to my utter and never-ending astonishment, I, an old Edinburgh Reviewer, find myself fighting, in the year 1839, against the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London, for the existence of the National Church."

Some of the reprinted articles would be fairly ranked in the present day under the derogatory title of "Pot-boilers"; but others are among the most effective and entertaining pieces which the author ever penned. Some of these must be specified. There is the extraordinarily amusing, but quite unjust, attack on Methodism, under which convenient heading are grouped "the sentiments of Arminian and Calvinistic Methodists, and of the Evangelical clergymen of the Church of England." The fun in this article is chiefly gleaned from the pages of the Evangelical Magazine and the Methodist Magazine. Here we have the affecting story of the young man who swore, and was stung by a bee "on the tip of the unruly member," "one of the meanest of creatures" being thus employed "to reprove the bold transgressor." Not less moving are the reflections of the religious observer who saw a man driving clumsily in a gig.—"'What (I said to myself) if a single untoward circumstance should happen! Should the horse take fright, or the wheel on either side get entangled, or the gig upset,—in either case what can preserve them? And should a morning so fair and promising bring on evil before night,—should death on his pale horse appear,—what follows?' My mind shuddered at the images I had raised."

Very curious too is the case of the people who, desiring to go by sea to Margate, found the cabin occupied by a "mixed multitude who spoke almost all languages but that of Canaan"; and started a weekly hoy on which "no profane conversation was allowed." The advertisements are as quaint as the correspondence.—

"'Wanted, a man of serious character, who can shave.' 'Wanted, a serious young woman, as servant of all work.' 'Wants a place, a young man who has brewed in a serious family.'"

On these eccentricities of mistaken devotion, Sydney pounces with delighted malice; and his jokes, acrid as they are, seem to be the vehicles of a real conviction. He honestly believed that "enthusiasm" in religion tended to hysteria and insanity; that it sapped plain morality; and turned the simple poor into "active and mysterious fools." Something, he thought, "in the way of ridicule," might be done towards checking Methodism, and to that task he addressed himself with hearty goodwill.

Equally unfair, and equally insensible to all the appeals of religious fervour, is the article on Indian Missions, for which, fifty years after, Archbishop Tait found it hard to forgive him.[133] Here again the artificial quaintness of religious phrase and thought gave him the necessary material for his fun. As he had found delight in the proper names of Methodist ministers—Shufflebottom and Ringletub[134]—so he delighted in lampooning "Ram Boshoo," and "Buxoo a brother," and "the Catechist of Collesigrapatuam." The saintly and scholarly Carey[135] ought to have been safe from his attacks, but the Baptist Missionary Society rather invited ridicule.—

"Brother Carey, while very sea-sick, and leaning over the ship to relieve his stomach from that very oppressive complaint, said his mind was even then filled with consolation in contemplating the wonderful goodness of God."

And Brother Carey's own journal was calculated to raise a smile.—

"1793. June 30. Lord's-day. A pleasant and profitable day: our congregation composed of ten persons."

"July 7. Another pleasant and profitable Lord's-day: our congregation increased with one. Had much sweet enjoyment with God."

"1794. Jan, 26. Lord's-day. Found much pleasure in reading Edwards's Sermon on the Justice of God in the Damnation of Sinners."

"April 6. Had some sweetness to-day, especially in reading Edwards's Sermon."

".1796. Feb. 6. I am now in my study; and oh, it is a sweet place, because of the presence of God with the vilest of men. It is at the top of the house; I have but one window in it."

In reply to Jeffrey, who as Editor of the Edinburgh Review rebuked his contributor for "levity of quotations," Sydney Smith wrote in 1808:—

"I do not understand what you mean. I attack these men because they have foolish notions of religion. The more absurd the passage, the more necessary it should be displayed—the more urgent the reason for making the attack at all."

This is at any rate an explanation, even if it does not amount to a justification; but what is lamentable is that, as in the case of the Methodists at home, he seems frankly unable to conceive of the passion for spreading the Gospel which drove men from all that is enjoyable in life to slave and die under Indian suns. He seems genuinely to believe that the spread of the Christian religion in India will produce a revolution, and he turns the ludicrous blunders of religious men into arguments for slothfulness in evangelization.—

"If there were a fair prospect of carrying the Gospel into regions where it was before unknown,—if such a project did not expose the best possessions of the country to extreme danger, and if it was in the hands of men who were discreet as well as devout, we should consider it to be a scheme of true piety, benevolence, and wisdom: but the baseness and malignity of fanaticism shall never prevent us from attacking its arrogance, its ignorance, and its activity. For what vice can be more tremendous than that which, while it wears the outward appearance of religion, destroys the happiness of man, and dishonours the name of God?"

In the second article on Methodism, he returns, as his manner was, to the ground formerly traversed, and claims the praise of all reasonable men for his previous strictures.—

"In routing out a nest of consecrated cobblers, and in bringing to light such a perilous heap of trash as we were obliged to work through, in our articles upon the Methodists and Missionaries, we are generally conceived to have rendered an useful service to the cause of rational religion."

But he had been rebuked by the admirers of the Cobblers, and now he turns upon his rebukers with characteristic vigour. Prominent among these was the Rev. John Styles, and Mr. Styles, unhappily for his cause and happily for his opponent, made a grotesque slip which Sydney turned to the best advantage.—

"In speaking of the cruelties which their religion entails upon the Hindoos, Mr. Styles is peculiarly severe upon us for not being more shocked at their piercing their limbs with kimes. This is rather an unfair mode of alarming his readers with the idea of some unknown instrument. He represents himself as having paid considerable attention to the manners and customs of the Hindoos; and, therefore, the peculiar stress he lays upon this instrument is naturally calculated to produce, in the minds of the humane, a great degree of mysterious terror. A drawing of the kime was imperiously called for; and the want of it is a subtle evasion, for which Mr. Styles is fairly accountable. As he has been silent on this subject, it is for us to explain the plan and nature of this terrible and unknown piece of mechanism. Kimes, then, are neither more nor less than a false print in the Edinburgh Review for knives; and from this blunder of the printer has Mr. Styles manufactured this Daedalean instrument of torture, called a kime! We were at first nearly persuaded by his argument against kimes; we grew frightened;—we stated to ourselves the horror of not sending missionaries to a nation which used kimes;—we were struck with the nice and accurate information of the Tabernacle upon this important subject:—but we looked in the errata, and found Mr. Styles to be always Mr. Styles—always cut off from every hope of mercy, and remaining for ever himself."

At the end of the article, the writer glories in the fact that the Government of India is beginning to harry the missionaries.—

"The Board of Control (all Atheists, and disciples of Voltaire, of course) are so entirely of our way of thinking, that the most peremptory orders have been issued to send all the missionaries home upon the slightest appearance of disturbance. Those who have sons and brothers in India may now sleep in peace. Upon the transmission of this order, Mr. Styles is said to have destroyed himself with a kime."

The same vigorous dislike to the Evangelical way of religion animates the article on Hannah More; and here again the criticized writer gave the critic just the handle which he required.

"We observe that Mrs. More, in one part of her work, falls into the common error about dress. She first blames ladies for exposing their persons in the present style of dress, and then says, if they knew their own interest—if they were aware how much more alluring they were to men when their charms are less displayed, they would make the desired alteration from motives merely selfish.

"'Oh! if women in general knew what was their real interest, if they could guess with what a charm even the appearance of modesty invests its possessor, they would dress decorously from mere self-love, if not from principle. The designing would assume modesty as an artifice; the coquette would adopt it as an allurement; the pure as her appropriate attraction; and the voluptuous as the most infallible art of seduction.'

"If there is any truth in this passage, nudity becomes a virtue; and no decent woman, for the future, can be seen in garments."

That is aptly said; but it is a relief to turn from Sydney Smith the Philistine—the bigoted and rather brutal opponent of enthusiastic religion, to Sydney Smith the Philanthropist—the passionate advocate of humanitarian reform born at least fifty years before his time. Excellent illustrations of this aspect of his character are to be found in "Mad Quakers," with its study of the improved methods of treating lunacy; "Chimney-Sweepers," "Game-Laws," "Spring-Guns," "Prisons," and "Counsel for Prisoners." Each of these essays shows a deliriously warm sympathy with the sufferings of the downtrodden and the friendless; and a curiously intimate knowledge of matters which lie quite outside the scope of a clergyman's ordinary duties. As an appreciation of character, friendly but not servile, nothing can be better than his paper on Sir James Mackintosh,[136] with the illustration from Curran, and the noble image (which the writer himself admired) of the man-of-war. Writing to Sir James's son, Sydney Smith says:—

"Curran, the Master of the Rolls, said to Mr. Grattan, 'You would be the greatest man of your age, Grattan, if you would buy a few yards of red tape, and tie up your bills and papers.' This was the fault or the misfortune of your excellent father; he never knew the use of red tape, and was utterly unfit for the common business of life. That a guinea represented a quantity of shillings, and that it would barter for a quantity of cloth, he was well aware; but the accurate number of the baser coin, or the just measurement of the manufactured article, to which he was entitled for his gold, he could never learn, and it was impossible to teach him. Hence his life was often an example of the ancient and melancholy struggle of genius with the difficulties of existence.

* * * * *

"A high merit in Sir James Mackintosh was his real and unaffected philanthropy. He did not make the improvement of the great mass of mankind an engine of popularity, and a stepping-stone to power, but he had a genuine love of human happiness. Whatever might assuage the angry passions, and arrange the conflicting interests of nations; whatever could promote peace, increase knowledge, extend commerce, diminish crime, and encourage industry; whatever could exalt human character, and could enlarge human understanding, struck at once at the heart of your father, and roused all his faculties. I have seen him in a moment when this spirit came upon him—like a great ship of war—cut his cable, and spread his enormous canvass, and launch into a wide sea of reasoning eloquence."

For pure fun, one could not quote a better sample than the review of Waterton's[137] Travels in South America.—

"Snakes are certainly an annoyance; but the snake, though high-spirited, is not quarrelsome; he considers his fangs to be given for defence, and not for annoyance, and never inflicts a wound but to defend existence. If you tread upon him, he puts you to death for your clumsiness, merely because he does not understand what your clumsiness means; and certainly a snake, who feels fourteen or fifteen stone stamping upon his tail, has little time for reflection, and may be allowed to be poisonous and peevish. American tigers generally run away—from which several respectable gentlemen in Parliament inferred, in the American war, that American soldiers would run away also!

"The description of the birds is very animated and interesting; but how far does the gentle reader imagine the Campanero may be heard, whose size is that of a jay? Perhaps 300 yards. Poor innocent, ignorant reader! unconscious of what Nature has done in the forests of Cayenne, and measuring the force of tropical intonation by the sounds of a Scotch duck! The Campanero may be heard three miles!—this single little bird being more powerful than the belfry of a cathedral, ringing for a new dean—just appointed on account of shabby politics, small understanding, and good family!... It is impossible to contradict a gentleman who has been in the forests of Cayenne; but we are determined, as soon as a Campanero is brought to England, to make him toll in a public place, and have the distance measured.

"The Toucan has an enormous bill, makes a noise like a puppy dog, and lays his eggs in hollow trees. How astonishing are the freaks and fancies of nature! To what purpose, we say, is a bird placed in the woods of Cayenne with a bill a yard long, making a noise like a puppy dog, and laying eggs in hollow trees? The Toucans, to be sure, might retort, to what purpose were gentlemen in Bond Street created? To what purpose were certain foolish prating Members of Parliament created?—pestering the House of Commons with their ignorance and folly, and impeding the business of the country? There is no end of such questions. So we will not enter into the metaphysics of the Toucan.

"The Sloth, in its wild state, spends its life in trees, and never leaves them but from force or accident. The eagle to the sky, the mole to the ground, the sloth to the tree; but what is most extraordinary, he lives not upon the branches, but under them. He moves suspended, rests suspended, sleeps suspended, and passes his life in suspense—like a young clergyman distantly related to a bishop.

* * * * *

"Just before his third journey, Mr. Waterton takes leave of Sir Joseph Banks,[138] and speaks of him with affectionate regret. 'I saw' (says Mr. W.) 'with sorrow, that death was going to rob us of him. We talked of stuffing quadrupeds; I agreed that the lips and nose ought to be cut off, and stuffed with wax.' This is the way great naturalists take an eternal farewell of each other!

* * * * *

"Insects are the curse of tropical climates. The bete rouge lays the foundation of a tremendous ulcer. In a moment you are covered with ticks. Chigoes bury themselves in your flesh, and hatch a large colony of young chigoes in a few hours. They will not live together, but every chigoe sets up a separate ulcer, and has his own private portion of pus. Flies get entry into your mouth, into your eyes, into your nose; you eat flies, drink flies, and breathe flies. Lizards, cockroaches, and snakes, got into the bed; ants eat up the books; scorpions sting you on the foot. Every thing bites, stings, or bruises; every second of your existence you are wounded by some piece of animal life that nobody has over seen before, except Swammerdam and Meriam. An insect with eleven legs is swimming in your teacup, a nondescript with nine wings is struggling in the small beer, or a caterpillar with several dozen eyes in his belly is hastening over the bread and butter! All nature is alive, and seems to be gathering all her entomological hosts to eat you up, as you are standing, out of your coat, waistcoat, and breeches. Such are the tropics. All this reconciles us to our dews, fogs, vapours, and drizzle—to our apothecaries rushing about with gargles and tinctures—to our old, British, constitutional coughs, sore throats, and swelled faces."

Space should be found, in even the shortest book on Sydney Smith, for two passages in which, perhaps more effectively than anywhere else, he clinched an argument with a masterpiece of fun. The first is the warning to the United States against the love of military glory. The second is the wonderful concatenation of fallacies in "Noodle's Oration."[139] Both these pieces will he found in Appendix B.

In 1840 he wrote to a friend:—

"I printed my reviews to show, if I could, that I had not passed my life merely in making jokes; but that I had made use of what little powers of pleasantry I might be endowed with, to discountenance bad, and to encourage liberal and wise principles."

The natural and becoming indolence of age was now beginning to show itself in Sydney Smith. He had worked harder than most men in his day, and now he wisely cultivated ease. In his comfortable house in Green Street, he received his friends with what he himself so excellently called "that honest joy which warms more than dinner or wine"; but he went less than of old into general society. Least of all was he inclined to that most melancholy of all exertions which consists in rushing about to entertainments which do not amuse. In 1840 he wrote, in answering an invitation to the Opera:—

"Thy servant is threescore-and-ten years old; can he hear the sound of singing men and singing women? A Canon at the Opera! Where have you lived? In what habitations of the heathen? I thank you, shuddering."

Although the Canon would not go to the Opera, his general faculty of enjoyment was unimpaired, and, as always, he loved a gibe at the clergy. On the 30th of November 1841, Samuel Wilberforce wrote to a friend about George Augustus Selwyn,[140] Missionary Bishop of New Zealand:—

"Selwyn is just setting out. Sydney Smith says it will make quite a revolution in the dinners of New Zealand. Tete d'Eveque will be the most recherche dish, and the servant will add, 'And there is cold clergyman on the side-table.'"

But this is Sydney's own version of the joke:—

"The advice I sent to the Bishop of New Zealand, when he had to receive the cannibal chiefs there, was to say to them, 'I deeply regret, sirs, to have nothing on my own table suited to your tastes, but you will find plenty of cold curate and roasted clergyman on the sideboard'; and if, in spite of this prudent provision, his visitors should end their repast by eating him likewise, why, I could only add, 'I sincerely hoped he would disagree with them.'"

In spite of increasing years and decreasing health—"I have," he said, "seven distinct diseases, but am otherwise pretty well"—the indefatigable pamphleteer had not yet done with controversy. In 1842 he published three Letters on the Mismanagement of Railways,[141] and in 1843 two on a tendency displayed by the "drab-coloured men of Pennsylvania" to repudiate the interest on their State's bonds. On the 18th of December 1843 he wrote:—

"My bomb has fallen very successfully in America, and the list of killed and wounded is extensive. I have several quires of paper sent me every day, calling me monster, thief, atheist, deist, etc."

"I receive presents of cheese and apples from Americans who are advocates for paying debts, and very abusive letters in print and in manuscript from those who are not."

All this time, in spite of continual discomfort from gout and asthma, he kept up his merry interest in his friends' concerns, his enjoyment of good company, and his kindness to young people. Here is a charming letter, written in September 1843 to his special favourite, Miss Georgiana Harcourt,[142] daughter of the Archbishop of York:—

"I suppose you will soon be at Bishopthorpe, surrounded by the Sons of the Prophets. What a charming existence, to live in the midst of holy people; to know that nothing profane can approach you; to be certain that a Dissenter can no more be found in the Palace than a snake in Ireland, or ripe fruit in Scotland; to have your society strong, and undiluted by the laity; to bid adieu to human learning, to feast on the Canons, and revel in the XXXIX. Articles. Happy Georgiana!"

At the beginning of 1844 he wrote, "I am tolerably well, but intolerably old." He complained of "nothing but weakness, and loss of nervous energy." "I look as strong as a cart-horse, but cannot get round the garden without resting once or twice," Soon he was back again at St. Paul's, preaching a sermon on Peace, and rebuking the "excessive proneness to War." "I shall try the same subject again—a subject utterly untouched by the clergy."[143] The summer passed in its usual occupations, and on the 28th of July he preached for the last time in the pulpit of the Cathedral. His subject was the right use of Sunday; and the sermon was a strong protest against the increasing secularization of the holy day. The best ways of employing Sunday, he said, were Worship, Self-Examination, and Preparation for Death. The sermon ended with some words which indicate the sense of impending change:—

"I never take leave of any one, for any length of time, without a deep impression upon my mind of the uncertainty of human life, and the probability that we may meet no more in this world."[144]

He now left London for Combe Florey. "I dine with the rich in London, and physic the poor in the country; passing from the sauces of Dives to the sores of Lazarus." His bodily discomforts increased, but his love of fun never diminished. He wrote as merrily as ever to Miss Harcourt:—

"Neither of us, dear Georgiana, would consent to survive the ruin of the Church. You would plunge a poisoned pin into your heart, and I should swallow the leaf of a sermon dipped in hydro-cyanic acid."

In October, after an alarming attack of breathlessness and giddiness, he returned to London. In Green Street he was happy in the proximity and skill of his son-in-law, Dr. Holland, and "a suite of rooms perfectly fitted up for illness and death." This phrase occurs in the last of his published letters, dated the 7th of November 1844. It was now pronounced that his disease was water on the chest, caused by an unsuspected affection of the heart. He was entirely confined to his bed, perfectly aware of his condition, and keenly grateful for the kindness and sympathy of friends. His daughter writes:—

"My father died at peace with himself and with all the world; anxious, to the last, to promote the comfort and happiness of others. He sent messages of kindness and forgiveness to the few he thought had injured him. Almost his last act was, bestowing a small living of L120 per annum on a poor, worthy, and friendless clergyman, who had lived a long life of struggle with poverty on L40 per annum. Full of happiness and gratitude, the clergyman entreated he might be allowed to see my father; but the latter so dreaded any agitation that he most unwillingly consented, saying, 'Then he must not thank me; I am too weak to bear it.' He entered,—my father gave him a few words of advice,—the clergyman silently pressed his hand, and blessed his death-bed. Surely such blessings are not given in vain!"

Sydney Smith died on the 22nd of February 1845, and was buried by the side of his son Douglas in the Cemetery at Kensal Green.

[107] R.A. Kinglake, quoted by Mr. Stuart Reid.

[108] The Beer-house Act, 1830, allowed any one to retail beer, on merely taking out an excise-licence.

[109] Frances Talbot, wife of John, 1st Earl of Morley.

[110] As a matter of fact he lived at 33 Charles Street, and subsequently at 56 Green Street.

[111] This intention gave rise to the "Oxford Movement." Keble thought that the time had come when "scoundrels must be called scoundrels." His Sermon on "National Apostasy" was preached on the 14th of July 1833.

[112] Henry Hart Milman (1791-1868).

[113] Born Sarah Taylor (1793-1867).

[114] At that period there were no sermons under the Dome

[115] In 1825, after a visit to Lord Essex at Cassiobury, he noted with disapproval—"No hot luncheons."

[116] (1798-1869), created Lord Taunton in 1859.

[117] This is interesting as being, so far as I know, Sydney Smith's only reference to Lord Beaconsfield.

[118] Gladstone's Gleanings, vol. vii. p. 220.

[119] Thomas Singleton (1783-1842), Canon of Worcester and Archdeacon of Northumberland.

[120] It is sometimes forgotten that a Prebend is a thing; a Prebendary a person.

[121] Compare his letter to Lady Holland, May 14, 1835;—"Liberals of the eleventh hour abound! and there are some of the first hour, of whose work in the toil and heat of the day I have no recollection!"

[122] John Wilson Croker (1780-1857), M.P. and Tory pamphleteer.

[123] Samuel Lee (1783-1852).

[124] Charles Richard Sumner (1790-1874).

[125] On the 13th of January 1838, he wrote to the Bishop of London—"I think the best reason for destroying the Cathedrals is the abominable trash and nonsense they have all published since the beginning of this dispute."

[126] Lord John Russell.

[127] Thomas Noon Talfourd (1795-1854), Judge and Dramatist.

[128] James Henry Monk (1784-1856).

[129] William FitzHardinge Berkeley (1786-1857) was created Lord Segrave of Berkeley Castle in 1831, and Earl FitzHardinge in 1841.

[130] "You see my younger brother, Courtenay, is turned out of office in India, for refusing the surety of the East India Company! Truly the Smiths are a stiff-necked generation, and yet they have all got rich but I. Courtenay, they say, has L150,000, and he keeps only a cat! In the last letter I had from him, which was in 1802, he confessed that his money was gathering very fast." (S.S. 1827).

[131] (1794-1871), Banker, Historian, and Politician.

[132] William, Viscount Melbourne (1779-1848).

[133] "Have you read Sydney Smith's Life? There is a strange mixture in his character of earnest common-sense and fun. On the whole, I think he will be thought more highly of in consequence of the publication of the Life, though it may be doubted whether his religion was not injured by his strong sense of the ludicrous. I cannot forgive him for his anti-missionary articles in the Edinburgh Review."—Life of Archbishop Tait, vol. I. chapter xiii.

What seems to be his later and juster judgment on missionary work is given, without date, by Lady Holland. "Some one, speaking of Missions, ridiculed them as inefficient. He dissented, saying, that though all was not done that was projected, or even boasted of, yet that much good resulted; and that wherever Christianity was taught, it brought with it the additional good of civilization in its train, and men became better carpenters, better cultivators, better everything."

[134] "It is immaterial whether Mr. Shufflebottom preaches at Bungay, and Mr. Ringletub at Ipswich; or whether an artful vicissitude is adopted, and the order of insane predication reversed."

[135] William Carey (1761-1834), Shoemaker, Orientalist, and Missionary.

[136] (1765-1832), Historian and Philosopher.

[137] Charles Waterton (1782-1865), Naturalist.

[138] (1748-1820.)

[139] It is possible that the argument about the Wisdom of our Ancestors in "Noodle's Oration" may have been suggested by the following extract from the Parliamentary Debates for May 26, 1797. On Mr. Grey's Motion for a Reform of Parliament, Sir Gregory Page-Turner, M.P., spoke as follows—"He craved the indulgence of the House for a few observations which he had to make. When he got up in the morning and when he lay down at night, he always felt for the Constitution. On this question he had never had but one opinion. When he came first into Parliament, he remembered that the Chancellor of the Exchequer proposed a Reform, but he saw it was wrong, and he opposed it. Would it not be madness to change what had been handed, sound and entire, down from the days of their fathers?"

[140] (1809-1878.)

[141] In these a special appeal is made to "our youthful Gladstone," then recently appointed Vice-President of the Board of Trade.

[142] Afterwards Mrs. Malcolm: died in 1886.

[143] He said afterwards that this Sermon on Peace was really Channing's.

[144] Compare his letter on parting from his friends at Edinburgh, quoted by Lady Holland:—"All adieus are melancholy; and principally, I believe, because they put us in mind of the last of all adieus, when the apothecary, and the heir-apparent, and the nurse who weeps for pay, surround the bed; when the curate, engaged to dine three miles off, mumbles hasty prayers; when the dim eye closes for ever in the midst of empty pillboxes, gallipots, phials, and jugs of barley-water."



CHAPTER VII

CHARACTERISTICS—HUMOUR—POLITICS—CULTURE—THEORIES OF LIFE—RELIGION

What Sydney Smith was to the outward eye we know from an admirable portrait by Eddis[145] belonging to his grand-daughter, Miss Caroline Holland. He had a long and slightly aquiline nose, of the type which gives a peculiar trenchancy to the countenance; a strongly developed chin, thick white hair,[146] and black eyebrows. His complexion was fresh, inclining to be florid. In figure he was, to use his own phrase, "of the family of Falstaff." Ticknor described him as "corpulent but not gross." Macaulay spoke of his "rector-like amplitude and rubicundity." He was of middle height, rather above it than below, and sturdily built. He used to quote a saying from one of his contemporaries at Oxford—"Sydney, your sense, wit, and clumsiness, always give me the idea of an Athenian carter." Except on ceremonious occasions, he was careless about his dress. His daughter says:—"His neckcloth always looked like a pudding tied round his throat, and the arrangement of his garments seemed more the result of accident than design."

His manner in society was cordial, unrestrained, and even boisterous. "I live," he said in an admirable figure, "with open doors and windows." His poor parishioners regarded him with "a curious mixture of reverence and grin."[147] His daughter says that, "on entering the pulpit, the calm dignity of his eye, mien, and voice, made one feel that he was indeed, and felt himself to be, 'the pastor standing between our God and His people,' to teach His laws, to declare His judgments, and proclaim His mercies."

Enough has been quoted from his writings to give the reader a clear notion of his style. In early life it was not scrupulously correct,[148] and to the end it was marked here and there by an archaism such as "I have strove," and "they are rode over." It was singularly uninvolved and uncomplicated, and was animated, natural, and vigorous in the highest degree. As years went on, it gained both in ease and in accuracy, but never lost either its force or its resonance. It ran up and down the whole gamut of the English tongue, from sesquipedalian classicisms (which he generally used to heighten a comic effect) to one-syllabled words of the homeliest Anglo-Saxon. His punctuation was careless, and the impression produced by his written composition is that of a man who wrote exactly as he spoke, without pause, premeditation, or amendment; who was possessed by the subject on which he was writing, and never laid down the pen till that subject lived and breathed in the written page.[149] Here and there, indeed, it is easy to note an unusual care and elaboration in the structure of the sentences and the cadence of the sound, and then the style rises to a very high level of rhetorical dignity.

Enough too has been quoted, both from his writings and from his conversation, to illustrate the quality and quantity of his humour. It bubbled up in him by a spontaneous process, and flowed over into whatever he wrote or said. Macaulay described his "rapid, loud, laughing utterance," and adds—"Sydney talks from the impulse of the moment, and his fun is quite inexhaustible." He was, I think, the greatest humourist whose jokes have come down to us in an authentic and unmutilated form. Almost alone among professional jokers, he made his merriment—rich, natural, fantastic, unbridled as it was—subserve the serious purposes of his life and writing. Each joke was a link in an argument; each sarcasm was a moral lesson. Peter Plymley, and the Letters to Archdeacon Singleton, the essays on America and on Persecuting Bishops, will probably be read as long as the Tale of a Tub or Macaulay's review of "Satan" Montgomery; while of detached and isolated jokes—pure freaks of fun clad in literary garb—an incredible number, current in daily converse, deduce their birth from this incomparable clergyman.[150] "In ability," wrote Macaulay in 1850, "I should say that Jeffrey was higher, but Sydney rarer. I would rather have been Jeffrey; but there will be several Jeffreys before there is a Sydney."

It would of course be absurd to pretend that all his jokes were of an equally high order. In his essays and public letters he is always and supremely good; in his private letters and traditional table-talk he descends to the level of his correspondent or his company. Thus, in spite of his own protests against playing on words, he found his clerk "a man of great amen-ity of disposition." He complimented his friends Mrs. Tighe and Mrs. Cuffe as "the cuff that every one would wear, the tie that no one would loose." His fondness for Lord Grey's family led him to call himself "Grey-men-ivorous." When the Hollands were staying with him, "his house was as full of hollands as a gin-shop." He nicknamed Sir George Philips's home near Manchester Philippi. He ascribed his brother's ugly mansion at Cheam to "Chemosh, the abomination of Moab." In 1831 he wrote to his friend Mrs. Meynell that "the French Government was far from stable—like Meynell's[151] horses at the end of a long day's chase." When a lady asked him for an epitaph on her pet dog Spot, he proposed "Out, damned Spot!" but, "strange to say, she did not think it sentimental enough." When William Cavendish,[152] who had been Second Wrangler, married Lady Blanche Howard, Sydney wrote—"Euclid leads Blanche to the altar—a strange choice for him, as she has not an angle about her." It was with reference to this kind of pleasantry that he said:—

"A joke goes a great way in the country. I have known one last pretty well for seven years. I remember making a joke after a meeting of the clergy, in Yorkshire, where there was a Rev. Mr. Buckle, who never spoke when I gave his health. I said that he was a buckle without a tongue. Most persons within hearing laughed, but my next neighbour sat unmoved and sunk in thought. At last, a quarter of an hour after we had all done, he suddenly nudged me, exclaiming, 'I see now what you meant, Mr. Smith; you meant a joke.' 'Yes,' I said, 'sir; I believe I did.' Upon which he began laughing so heartily, that I thought he would choke, and was obliged to pat him on the back."

A graver fault than this boyish love of punning is the undeniable vein of coarseness which here and there disfigures Sydney Smith's controversial method. In 1810 he wrote, very characteristically, about his friend Lord Grey—"His deficiency is a want of executive coarseness." This is a fault with which he could never have charged himself. His own "executive coarseness" is referable in part to the social standard of the day, when ladies as refined as the Miss Berrys "d——d" the too-hot tea-kettle, and Canning referred to a political opponent as "the revered and ruptured Member." In a similar vein Sydney jokes incessantly about skin-disease in Scotland; writes of a neighbour whose manners he disliked that "she was as cold as if she were in the last stage of blue cholera"; and, after his farmers had been dining with him, says that "they were just as tipsy as farmers ought to be when dining with the parson."

When he came to dealing publicly with a political opponent, he seems to have thought that, the coarser were his illustrations, the more domestic and personal his allusions, the better for the cause which he served. The Letters of Peter Plymley abound in medical and obstetrical imagery. The effect of the Orders in Council on the health of Europe supplies endless jokes. Peter roars with laughter at the thought of his sister-in-law, Mrs. Abraham Plymley, "led away captive by an amorous Gaul." Nothing can be nastier (or more apt) than his comparison between the use of humour in controversy and that of the small-tooth comb in domestic life; nothing less delicate than the imaginary "Suckling Act" in which he burlesques Lord Shaftesbury's Ten Hours Bill. He barbs his attacks on an oppressive Government by jokes about the ugliness of Perceval's face and the poverty of Canning's relations—the pensions conferred on "Sophia" and "Caroline," their "national veal" and "public tea"; and the "clouds of cousins arriving by the waggon." When a bishop has insulted him, he replies with an insinuation that the bishop obtained his preferment by fraud and misrepresentation,[153] and jeers at him for having begun life as a nobleman's Private Tutor, called by the "endearing but unmajestic name of Dick." It is only fair to say that these aberrations from good taste and good feeling became less and less frequent as years went on. That they ever were permitted to deform the splendid advocacy of great causes is due to the fact that, when Sydney Smith began to write, the influence of Smollett and his imitators was still powerful. Burke's obscene diatribes against the French Revolution were still quoted and admired. Nobody had yet made any emphatic protest against the beastliness of Swift or the brutalities of Junius.[154]

When these necessary deductions have been made, we can return to the most admiring eulogy. In 1835 Sydney wrote:—

"Catch me, if you can, in any one illiberal sentiment, or in any opinion which I have need to recant; and that, after twenty years' scribbling upon all subjects."

It was no mean boast, and it was absolutely justified by the record. From first to last he was the convinced, eager, and devoted friend of Freedom, and that without distinction of place or race or colour. He would make no terms with a man who temporized about the Slave-Trade.—

"No man should ever hold parley with it, but speak of it with abhorrence, as the greatest of all human abominations."

The toleration of Slavery was the one and grave exception to his unstinted admiration of the United States, which afforded, in his opinion, "the most magnificent picture of human happiness" which the world had ever seen. And this because in America, more than in any other country, each citizen was free to live his own life, manage his own affairs, and work out his own destiny, under the protection of just and equal laws. As regards political institutions in England, he seems to have been converted rather gradually to the belief that Reform was necessary. In 1819 he wrote to his friend Jeffrey:—

"The case that the people have is too strong to be resisted; an answer may be made to it, which will satisfy enlightened people perhaps, but none that the mass will be satisfied with. I am doubtful whether it is not your duty and my duty to become moderate Reformers, to keep off worse."

In 1820 he wrote:—"I think all wise men should begin to turn their faces Reform-wards." In 1821 he writes about the state of parties in the House of Commons:—

"Of all ingenious instruments of despotism, I most commend a popular assembly where the majority are paid and hired, and a few bold and able men, by their brave speeches, make the people believe they are free."

And then again, with regard to religious liberty, what can be finer than his protest against the spirit of persecution?—

"I admit there is a vast luxury in selecting a particular set of Christians and in worrying them as a boy worries a puppy dog; it is an amusement in which all the young English are brought up from their earliest days. I like the idea of saying to men who use a different hassock from me, that till they change their hassock, they shall never be Colonels, Aldermen, or Parliament-men. While I am gratifying my personal insolence respecting religious forms, I fondle myself into an idea that I am religious, and that I am doing my duty in the most exemplary (as I certainly am in the most easy) way."

It may perhaps be dangerous to persecute the Roman Catholics of Ireland. They are many, they are spirited—they may turn round and hurt us. It might be wiser to try our hands on some small body like the Evangelicals of Clapham or the followers of William Wilberforce (at whom in passing he aims a Shandeau sneer).—

"We will gratify the love of insolence and power; we will enjoy the old orthodox sport of witnessing the impotent anger of men compelled to submit to civil degradation, or to sacrifice their notions of truth to ours. And all this we may do without the slightest risk, because their numbers are (as yet) not very considerable. Cruelty and injustice must, of course, exist: but why connect them with danger? Why torture a bull-dog, when you can get a frog or a rabbit? I am sure my proposal will meet with the most universal approbation. Do not be apprehensive of any opposition from Ministers. If it is a case of hatred, we are sure that one man[155] will defend it by the Gospel: if it abridges human freedom, we know that another[156] will find precedents for it in the Revolution."

As years went on, he was sometimes displeased by the doings of his Liberal friends, but he was never "stricken by the palsy of candour"; he never forsook the good cause for which he had fought so steadily, never made terms with political deserters. After the Conservative triumph of 1841 he wrote:—"The country is in a state of political transition, and the shabby are preparing their consciences and opinions for a tack."

But, though he was so keen and so consistent a champion of civil and religious freedom, he was a sworn foe to anarchy and licence. Like most people who had seen the later stages of the French Revolution, he had a holy horror of mob-law and mob-justice. "If I am to be a slave," he said, "I would rather be the slave of a king than of a rabble"; but he vehemently objected to being the slave of either. He likened Democracy and Despotism to the "two tubes of a double-barrelled pistol," which menaced the life of the State. "The democrats are as much to be kept at bay with the left hand as the Tories are with the right." "A thousand years," he wrote in 1838, "have scarce sufficed to make our blessed England what it is: an hour may lay it in the dust."

After the riots at Bristol in 1831, consequent on the rejection of the Reform Bill, he strenuously demanded stern punishment for the rioters. He wrote to the Prime Minister:—

"Pray do not be good-natured about Bristol. I must have ten people hanged, and twenty transported, and thirty imprisoned; it is absolutely necessary to give the multitude a severe blow, for their conduct at Bristol has been most atrocious. You will save lives by it in the end. There is no plea of want, as there was in the agricultural riots."

You will save lives by it in the end. There spoke the truly humanitarian spirit which does not shrink from drawing the sword at the bidding of real necessity, but asks itself once and again whether any proposed effusion of blood is really demanded by the exigencies of the moral law.

On questions of peace and war, Sydney Smith was always on the right side.[157] He saw as clearly as the most clamorous patriot that England was morally bound to defend her existence and her freedom. He exhorted her to rally all her forces and strive with agonies and energies against the anti-human ambition of Napoleon. And, when once the great deliverance was achieved, he turned again to the enjoyment and the glorification of Peace.—

"Let fools praise conquerors, and say the great Napoleon pulled down this kingdom and destroyed that army: we will thank God for a King[158] who has derived his quiet glory from the peace of his realm."

"The atrocities, and horrors, and disgusts of war have never been half enough insisted upon by the teachers of the people; but the worst of evils and the greatest of follies have been varnished over with specious names, and the gigantic robbers and murderers of the world have been holden up for imitation to the weak eyes of youth."

No wars, except the very few which we really required for national self-defence, could attract his sympathy. Wars of intervention in the affairs of other nations, even when undertaken for excellent objects, he regarded with profound mistrust.

When in 1823, the nascent liberties of Spain were threatened, he wrote:—

"I am afraid we shall go to war; I am sorry for it. I see every day in the world a thousand acts of oppression which I should like to resent, but I cannot afford to play the Quixote. Why are the English to be the sole vindicators of the human race?"

And again:—

"For God's sake, do not drag me into another war! I am worn down, and worn out, with crusading and defending Europe, and protecting mankind; I must think a little of myself. I am sorry for the Spaniards—I am sorry for the Greeks—I deplore the fate of the Jews; the people of the Sandwich Islands are groaning under the most detestable tyranny; Bagdad is oppressed—I do not like the present state of the Delta—Thibet is not comfortable. Am I to fight for all these people? The world is bursting with sin and sorrow. Am I to be champion of the Decalogue, and to be eternally raising fleets and armies to make all men good and happy? We have just done saving Europe, and I am afraid the consequence will be, that we shall cut each other's throats."

In 1830 he wrote to his friend Lady Holland about her son,[159] afterwards General Fox:—

"I am very glad to see Charles in the Guards. He will now remain at home; for I trust that there will be no more embarkation of the Guards while I live, and that a captain of the Guards will be as ignorant of the colour of blood as the rector of a parish. We have had important events enough within the last twenty years. May all remaining events be culinary, amorous, literary, or any thing but political!"

And so again, according to Lord Houghton, he said in later life:—

"I have spent enough and fought enough for other nations. I must think a little of myself. I want to sit under my own bramble and sloe-tree with my own great-coat and umbrella."

This is no fatty degeneration of the chivalrous spirit. It is merely the old doctrine of Non-intervention speaking in a lighter tone.

An account of a man's personal characteristics must contain some estimate of his aesthetic sense. This was not very strongly developed in Sydney Smith. He admired the beauties of a smiling landscape, such as he saw in the Vale of Taunton, and hated grimness and barrenness such as he remembered at Harrogate. "I thought it the most heaven-forgotten country under the sun when I saw it; there were only nine mangy fir-trees there, and even they all leaned away from it." He enjoyed bright colours and sweet scents, and had a passion for light. His views of Art were primitive. We have seen that he preferred gas to Correggio. He admired West,[160] and did not admire Haydon.[161] He bought pictures for the better decoration of his drawing-room, and, when they did not please him, had them altered to suit his taste,—

"Look at that sea-piece, now; what would you desire more? It is true, the moon in the corner was rather dingy when I first bought it; so I had a new moon put in for half-a-crown, and now I consider it perfect."

This perhaps may be regarded as burlesque, and so may his sympathetic remark to the gushing connoisseur—

"I got into dreadful disgrace with him once, when, standing before a picture at Bowood, he exclaimed, turning to me, 'Immense breadth of light and shade!' I innocently said, 'Yes;—about an inch and a half.' He gave me a look that ought to have killed me."

But his gratitude to his young friend Lady Mary Bennet, who covered the walls of his Rectory with the sweet products of her pencil, is only too palpably sincere. It may perhaps be imputed to him for aesthetic virtue that he considered the national monuments in St. Paul's, with the sole exception of Dr. Johnson's, "a disgusting heap of trash." It is less satisfactory that he found the Prince Regent's "suite of golden rooms" at Carlton House "extremely magnificent."

To music he was more sympathetic, but even here his sympathies had their limitations. Music in the minor key made him melancholy, and had to be discontinued when he was in residence at St. Paul's;[162] and this was not his only musical prejudice.—

"Nothing can be more disgusting than an oratorio. How absurd to see five hundred people fiddling like madmen about the Israelites in the Red Sea!"

"Yesterday I heard Rubini and Grisi, Lablache and Tamburini. The opera, by Bellini, I Puritani, was dreadfully tiresome, and unintelligible in its plan. I hope it is the last opera I shall ever go to."

"Semiramis would be to me pure misery. I love music very little. I hate acting. I have the worst opinion of Semiramis herself, and the whole thing seems to me so childish and so foolish that I cannot abide it. Moreover, it would be rather out of etiquette for a Canon of St. Paul's to go to the opera; and, where etiquette prevents me from doing things disagreeable to myself, I am a perfect martinet."

After a Musical Festival at York he writes to Lady Holland:—

"I did not go once. Music for such a length of time (unless under sentence of a jury) I will not submit to. What pleasure is there in pleasure, if quantity is not attended to, as well as quality? I know nothing more agreeable than a dinner at Holland House; but it must not begin at ten in the morning, and last till six. I should be incapable for the last four hours of laughing at Lord Holland's jokes, eating Raffaelle's cakes, or repelling Mr. Allen's[163] attack upon the Church."

Yet, in spite of these limitations, he took lessons on the piano, and often warbled in the domestic circle. In 1843 he writes—"I am learning to sing some of Moore's songs, which I think I shall do to great perfection," His daughter says, with filial piety, that, when he had once learnt a song, he sang it very correctly, and, "having a really fine voice, often encored himself." A lady who visited him at Combe Florey corroborates this account, saying that after dinner he said to his wife, "I crave for Music, Mrs. Smith. Music! Music!" and sang, "with his rich sweet voice, A Few Gay Soarings Yet." In old age he said;—

"If I were to begin life again, I would devote much time to music. All musical people seem to me happy; it is the most engrossing pursuit; almost the only innocent and unpunished passion."

When we turn from the aesthetic to the literary faculty, we find it a good deal better developed. That he was a sound scholar in the sense of being able to read the standard classics with facility and enjoyment we know from his own statements. In the early days of the Edinburgh Review he perceived and extolled the fine scholarship of Monk[164] and Blomfield[165] and Maltby.[166] The fact that Marsh[167] was a man of learning mitigated the severity of the attack on "Persecuting Bishops." His glowing tribute to the accomplishments of Sir James Mackintosh is qualified by the remark that "the Greek language has never crossed the Tweed in any great force." In brief, be understood and respected classical scholarship. He was keenly interested in English literature, and kept abreast of what was produced in France; but German he seems to have regarded as a kind of joke, and Italian he only mentions as part of a young lady's education.

In 1819 he wrote to his son at Westminster:—

"For the English poets, I will let you off at present with Milton, Dryden, Pope, and Shakespeare; and remember, always in books, keep the best company. Don't read a line of Ovid till you have mastered Virgil; nor a line of Thomson till you have exhausted Pope; nor of Massinger, till you are familiar with Shakespeare."

He thought Locke "a fine, satisfactory sort of a fellow, but very long-winded"; considered Horace Walpole's "the best wit ever published in the shape of letters"; and dismissed Madame de Sevigne as "very much over-praised." Of Montaigne he says—"He thinks aloud, that is his great merit, but does not think remarkably well. Mankind has improved in thinking and writing since that period."

It was, of course, part of his regular occupation to deal with new books in the Edinburgh; and, apart from these formal reviews, his letters are full of curious comments. In 1814 he declines to read the Edinburgh's criticism of Wordsworth, because "the subject is to me so very uninteresting." In the same year he writes:—

"I think very highly of Waverley, and was inclined to suspect, in reading it, that it was written by Miss Scott of Ancrum."

In 1818 he wrote about The Heart of Midlothian:—

"I think it excellent—quite as good as any of his novels, excepting that in which Claverhouse is introduced, and of which I forget the name.... He repeats his characters, but it seems they will bear repetition. Who can read the novel without laughing and crying twenty times?"

In 1820:—

"Have you read Ivanhoe? It is the least dull, and the most easily read through, of all Scott's novels; but there are many more powerful."

Later in the same year:—

"I have just read The Abbot; it is far above common novels, but of very inferior execution to his others, and hardly worth reading. He has exhausted the subject of Scotland, and worn out the few characters that the early periods of Scotch history could supply him with. Meg Merrilies appears afresh in every novel."

In 1821:—

"The Pirate is certainly one of the least fortunate of Sir Walter's productions. It seems now that he cannot write without Meg Merrilies and Dominie Sampson. One other such novel, and there's an end; but who can last for ever? who ever lasted so long?"