must admit the possibility of a scruple, | on February 22nd, 1845, in the seventythough he may not share it, about the effect fourth year of his age. of seeing either the "Tale of a Tub" or "Peter Plymley's Letters," with "the Right Reverend the Lord Bishop of on the title-page. The people who would have been shocked might in each case have been fools; there is nothing that I at least can see in either book inconsistent with sound religion and churchmanship. But they would have been honest fools, and of such a prime minister has to take heed. So Amen Corner, or rather, for he did not live there, certain streets near Grosvenor Square in London, and Combe Florey in the country were Sydney Smith's abodes till his death. In the former he gave his breakfasts and dinners in the season, being further enabled to do so by his share (some thirty thousand pounds) of his brother Courtenay's Indian fortune. The latter, after rebuilding it, for he had either a fate or a passion for bricks and mortar, he made on a small scale one of the most beautiful and hospitable houses in the west of England. The memorials and evidences of his peculiar if not unique genius consist of "three different kinds : reported or remem bered conversations and jokes, letters, and formal literary work. He was once most famous as a talker; but conversation is necessarily the most perishable of all things, and its recorded fragments bear keeping less than any other relics. Some of the verbal jests assigned to him (notably the famous one about the tortoise, which, after being long known by the initiated not to be his, has of late been formally claimed by its rightful owner) are certainly or probably borrowed or falsely attributed, as rich conversationalists always borrow or receive. And always the things have something of the mangled air which sayings detached from their context can hardly escape. It is otherwise with the letters. The best letters are always most like the actual conversation of their writers, and probably no one ever wrote more as he talked than Sydney Smith: the specially literary qualities of his writing for print are here too in great measure; and on the whole, though of course the importance of subject is nearly always less, and the interest of sustained work is wholly absent, nowhere can the whole Sydney be better seen. Of the three satirists of modern times with whom he may not unfairly claim to rank Pascal, Swift, and Voltaire - he is most like Voltaire in his faculty of presenting a good thing with a preface which does not in the least prepare you for it, and then leaving it without the slightest attempt to go back on it, and elaborate it, and make sure that his hearer has duly appreciated it and laughed at it. And of the two, though the palm of concentration must be given to Voltaire, the palm of absolute simplicity must be given to Sydney. Hardly any of his letters are without these unforced flashes of wit, from almost his first epistle to Jeffrey (where, after rallying that great little man on being the "only male despondent he has met," he added the postscript," I beg to except the Tuxford waiter, who desponds exactly as you do ") to his very last to Miss Harcourt, in which he mildly dismisses one of his brethren as "anything but a polished corner of the Temple.' There is the "usual establishment for an eldest landed baby;" the proposition advanced in the grave and chaste manner that "the information of very plain women is so inconsiderable that I agree with you in setting no store by it; "the plaintive To Combe Florey, as to Foston, a sheaf of fantastic legends attaches itself; indeed as Lady Holland was not very fond of dates (a fault no doubt to be rebuked with the greatest indignation and sorrow) it is sometimes not clear to which of the two residences some of them apply. At both Sydney had a huge storeroom, or rather grocer's and chemist's shop, from which he supplied the wants not merely of his household but of half the neighborhood. It appears to have been at Combe Florey (for though no longer poor he still had a frugal mind) that he hit upon the device of "putting the cheapest soaps in the dearest papers," confident of the result upon the female mind. It was certainly there that he fitted up two favorite donkeys with a kind of holiday dress of antlers, to meet the objection of one of his lady visitors that he had no deer; and converted certain large bay-trees in boxes into the semblance of an orangery, by fastening some dozens of fine fruit to the branches. I like to think of the mixed astonishment and disgust of a great Russian and a not very small Frenchman, both lately deceased, M. Tourguenieff and M. Paul de Saint-Victor, if they had heard of these pleasing tomfooleries. But tomfoolery, though, when properly and not inordinately indulged, one of the best things in life, must, like the other good things of life, come to an end. After an illness of some months Sydney Smith died at his house in Green Street, of heart disease, expostulation with Lady Holland (who had LIVING AGE. | Of course, however, no rational man will contend that in estimating Sydney Smith's place in the general memory, his deliberate literary work, or at least that portion of it which he chose to present on reflection, acknowledged and endorsed, can be overlooked. His life contains (what is infinitely desirable in all such lives and by no means always or often furnished) a complete list of his contribu tions to the Edinburgh Review, and his works contain most of them. To these have to be added the pamphlets, of which the chief and incomparably the best are, at intervals of thirty years, "Peter Plymley" and the "Letters to Archdeacon Singleton," together with sermons, speeches, and other miscellaneous matter. The whole, except the things which he did not himself care to reprint, can be obtained now in one volume; but the print is not to be recommended to aged or weakly sight. Sydney Smith had no false modesty, and in not a few letters to Jeffrey he speaks of his own contributions to the Edinburgh with the greatest freedom, combating and quite refusing to accept his editor's sug. gestion as to their flippancy and fantasticality, professing with much frankness that this is the way he can write and no other, and more than once telling Jeffrey that whatever they may think in solemn Scotland, his, Sydney's, articles are a great deal more read in England and elsewhere than any others. Although there are maxims to the contrary effect, the judg ment of a clever man, not very young and tolerably familiar with the world, on his own work, is very seldom far wrong. I should say myself that, putting aside the historic estimate, Sydney Smith's articles are by far the most interesting nowadays of those contributed by any one before the days of Macaulay, who began just as Sydney left off; he ceased to write anony mously in 1827, on his Bristol appointment. They are also by far the most distinct and original. Jeffrey, Brougham, and the rest wrote for the most part very much after the fashion of the ancients; if a very few changes were made for date, passages of Jeffrey's criticism might almost be passages of Dryden's, certainly passages of the better critics of the eighteenth century, as far as manner goes. There is nobody at all like Sydney Smith before him in England, for Swift's style is wholly different. To begin with, Sydney had a strong prejudice in favor of writing very short articles and a horror of reading long ones - the latter being perhaps less laughing, and among them I should suppose must be the somebody or other, whose name we too have forgotten, who is said to have imagined that he had more than parried Sydney's unforgiven jest about the joke and the surgical operation by retorting, "Yes! an English joke." I have always wept to think that Sydney did not live to hear this retort. The classical places for this kind of summary work are the article just named on Ceylon, and that on Waterton. But the most inimitable single example, if it is not too shocking to this very proper age, is the argument of Mat Lewis's tragedy: "Ottilia becomes quite furious from the conviction that Cæsario has been sleeping with a second lady called Estella; whereas he has really been sleeping with a third lady called Amelrosa." peculiar to himself than the former. Then he never made the slightest pretence at systematic or dogmatic criticism of anything whatever. In literature proper he seems indeed to have had no particular principles, and I cannot say that he had very good taste. He commits the almost unpardonable sin of not merely blaspheming Madame de Sévigné, but preferring to her that second-rate leader-writer in petticoats, Madame de Staël. On the other hand, if he had no literary principles he had (except in rare cases where politics came in, and not often then) few literary prejudices, and his happily incorrigible good sense and good humor were proof against the frequent bias of his associates. Though he could not have been very sensible, from what he himself says, of their highest qualities, he championed Scott's novels incessantly against the Among the most important of these esWhigs and prigs of Holland House. He says are the two famous ones on Methogives a most well timed warning to Jeffrey dism and on Indian missions, which gave that the constant running down of Words- far more offence to the religious public of worth had very much the look of persecu- Evangelical persuasion than all Sydney's tion, though with his usual frankness he jokes on bishops, or his arguments for avows that he has not read the particular Catholic emancipation, and which (owing article in question because the subject is to the strong influence which then, as now, "quite uninteresting to him." I think he Nonconformity possessed in the counsels would, if driven hard, have admitted with of the Liberal party) probably had as much equal frankness that poetry merely as to do as anything else with the reluctance poetry was uninteresting. Still he had of the Whig leaders when they came into so many interests of various kinds that power to give their friend high ecclesiasfew books failed to appeal to one or the tical preferment. These subjects are other, and he, in his turn, has seldom rather difficult to treat in a general literary failed to give a lively if not a very exact essay, and it may perhaps be admitted or critical account of his subject. But it that here, as in dealing with poetry and is in his way of giving this account that other subjects of the more transcendental the peculiarity, glanced at above as mak- kind, Sydney showed a touch of Philistining a parallel between him and Voltaire, ism and a distinct inability to comprehend appears. It is, I have said, almost orig- exaltation of sentiment and thought. But inal, and what is more, endless as has the general sense is admirably sound and been the periodical writing of the last perfectly orthodox; and the way in which eighty years and sedulously as later writ so apparently light and careless a writer ers have imitated earlier, I do not know has laboriously supported every one of his that it has ever been successfully copied. charges and almost every one of his flings It consists in giving rapid and apparently with chapter and verse from the writings business-like summaries, packed, with ap- of the incriminated societies, is very reparent negligence and real art, full of the markable. Nor can it, I think, be doubted flashes of wit so often noticed and to be that the publication in so widely read a noticed. Such are, in the article on "The periodical of the nauseous follies of Island of Ceylon," the honey bird," into speech in which well-meaning persons inwhose body the soul of a common informer dulged, had something to do with the seems to have migrated," and "the chap- gradual disuse of a style than which nothlain of the garrison, all in black, the Rev. ing could be more prejudicial to religion, Mr. Somebody or other whose name we for the simple reason that nothing else have forgotten," the discovery of whose could make religion ridiculous. The medbody in a serpent his ruthless clerical icine did not of course operate at once, brother pronounces to be "the best his- and silly people still write silly things. tory of the kind he remembers." Very But I hardly think that the Wesleyan likely there may be people who can read body or the Church Missionary Society this, even the "all in black," without would now officially publish such stuff as the passage about Brother Carey, who, while in the actual paroxysm of sea-sickness, was "wonderfully comforted by the contemplation of the goodness of God," or that about Brother Ward "in design clasping to his bosom" the magnanimous Captain Wickes, who subsequently "seemed very low," when a French privateer was in sight. Jeffrey was, it seems, a little afraid of these well-deserved exposures, which, from the necessity of abundant quotations, are an exception to the general shortness of Sydney's articles. Sydney's interest in certain subjects led him constantly to take up fresh books on them; and thus a series of series might be made out of his papers, with some advantage to the reader perhaps, if a new edition of his works were undertaken. The chief of such subjects is America, in dealing with which he pleased the Americans by descanting on their gradual emancipation from English prejudices and abuses, but infuriated them by constant denunciations of slavery and by laughing at their lack of literature and cultivation. With India he also dealt often, his brothers' connection with it giving him an interest therein. Prisons were another favorite subject, though in his zeal for making them uncomfortable he committed himself to one really atrocious suggestion that of dark cells for long periods of time. It is odd that the same person should make such a truly diabolical proposal, and yet be in a perpetual state of humanitarian rage about man-traps and spring-guns, which were certainly milder engines of torture. It is odd, too, that Sydney, who was never tired of arguing that prisons ought to be made uncomfortable, because nobody need go there unless he chose, should have been furiously wroth with poor Mr. Justice Best for suggesting much the same thing of spring guns. The greatest political triumph of his manner is to be found no doubt in the article "Bentham on Fallacies," in which the unreadable diatribes of the apostle of utilitarianism are somehow spirited and crisped up into a series of brilliant arguments, and the whole is crowned by the famous "Noodle's Oration," the Summary and storehouse of all that ever has been or can be said on the Liberal-side in the lighter manner. It has not lost its point even from the fact that Noodle has now for a long time been for the most part on the other side, and has elaborated for himself after his manner a similar stock of platitudes and absurdities in favor of the very things for which Sydney was fighting. The qualities of these articles appear equally in the miscellaneous essays, in the speeches, and even in the sermons, though Sydney Smith, unlike Sterne, never conde scended to buffoonery or theatrical tricks in the pulpit. In "Peter Plymley's Letters" they appear concentrated and acidulated; in the "Letters to Archdeacon Singleton," in the "Repudiation Letters,” and the "Letters on Railways " which date from his very last days, concentrated and mellowed. More than one good judge has been of the opinion that Sydney's powers increased to the very end of his life, and it is not surprising that this should have been the case. Although he did plenty of work in his time, the literary part of it was never of an exhausting nature. Though one of the most original of commentators he was a commentator pure and simple, and found, but did not supply, his matter. Thus there was no danger of running dry, and as his happiest style was not indignation but good-natured raillery, his increas ing prosperity, not chequered till quite the close of his life by any serious bodily ailment, put him more and more in the right atmosphere and temper for showing his faculty. "Plymley," though very amusing, and except in the Canning matter above referred to not glaringly unfair for a polit ical lampoon, is distinctly acrimonious, and almost (as "almost " as Sydney could be) ill-tempered. It is possible to read between the lines that the writer is furious at his party being out of office, and is much more angry with Mr. Perceval for having the ear of the country than for being a respectable nonentity. The main argument moreover is bad in itself and was refuted by facts. Sydney pretends to be, as his friend Jeffrey really was, in mortal terror lest the French should invade England, and, joined by rebellious Irishmen and wrathful Catholics generally, produce an English revolution. The Tories replied, "We will take good care that the French shall not land and that Irishmen shall not rise,” and they did take the said good care, and they beat the Frenchmen through and through while Sydney and his friends were pointing their epigrams. Therefore, though much of the contention is unanswerable enough, the thing is doubtfully successful as as a whole. In the "Letters to Archdeacon Singleton " the tone is almost uniformly good-humored, and the argument, whether quite consistent or not in the particular speaker's mouth, is absolutely sound, and has been practically admitted since by almost all the best friends of the Church. Here occurs that inimitable passage before referred to: I met the other day, in an old Dutch chronicle, with a passage so apposite to this subject, that, though it is somewhat too light for the occasion, I cannot abstain from quoting it. There was a great meeting of all the clergy at Dordrecht, and the chronicler thus describes it, which I give in the language of the translation: "And there was great store of Bishops in the town, in their robes goodly to behold, and all the great men of the State were there, and folks poured in in boats on the Meuse, the Merse, the Rhine, and the Linge, coming from the Isle of Beverlandt and Isselmond, and from all quarters in the Bailiwick of Dort; Arminians and Gomarists, with the friends of John Barneveldt and of Hugh Grote. And before my Lords the Bishops, Simon of Gloucester, who was a Bishop in those parts, disputed with Vorstius and Leoline the Monk, and many texts of Scripture were bandied to and fro; and when this was done, and many propositions made, and it waxed towards twelve of the clock, my Lords the Bishops prepared to set them down to a fair repast, in which was great store of good things- - and among the rest a roasted peacock, having in lieu of a tail the arms and banners of the Archbishop, which was a goodly sight to all who favored the Church-and then the Archbishop would say a grace, as was seemly to do, he being a very holy man; but ere he had finished, a great mob of townspeople and folks from the country, who were gathered under the windows, cried out Bread! bread! for there was a great famine, and wheat had risen to three times the ordinary price of the sleich; and when they had done crying Bread! bread! they called out No Bishops! and began to cast up stones at the windows. Whereat my Lords the Bishops were in a great fright, and cast their dinner out of the window to appease the mob, and so the men of that town were well pleased, and did devour the meats with a great appetite; and then you might have seen my Lords standing with empty plates, and looking wistfully at each other, till Simon of Gloucester, he who disputed with Leoline the Monk, stood up a nong them and said, Good my Lords, is it your pleasure to stand here fasting, and that those who count lower in the Church than you do should feast and fluster? Let us order to us the dinner of the Deans and Canons, which is making ready for them in the chamber below. And this speech of Simon of Gloucester pleased the Bishops much; and so they sent for the host, one William of Ypres, and told him it was for the public good, and he, much fearing the Bishops, brought them the dinner of the Deans and Canons; and so the Deans and Canons went away without dinner. and were pelted by the men of the town, because they had not put any meat out of the windows like the Bishops; and when the Count came to hear of it, he said it was a pleasant conceit, and that the Bishops were right cunning men, and had ding'd the Canons well. Even in the Singleton letters, however there are some little lapses of the same kind (worse, indeed, because these letters were signed) as the attack on Canning in the Plymley letters. Sydney Smith exclaiming against "derision and persiflage, the great principle by which the world is now governed," is again edifying. But in truth Sydney never had the weakness (for I have known it called a weakness) of looking too carefully to see what the enemy's advocate is going to say. Take even the famous, the immortal apologue of Mrs. Partington. It covered, we are usually told, the Upper House with ridicule, and did as much as anything else to carry the Reform Bill. And yet, though it is a watery apologue, it will not hold water for a moment. The implied conclusion is, that the Atlantic beat Mrs. Partington. Did it? It made no doubt a great mess in her house, it put her to flight, it put her to shame. But when I was last at Sidmouth the line of highwater mark was, I believe, much what it was before the great storm of 1824, and though the particular Mrs. Partington had Mrs. Partington of the day was, equally no doubt been gathered to her fathers the without doubt, living very comfortably in the house which the Atlantic had threatened to swallow up. It was, however, perhaps part of Sydney's strength that he never cared to consider too curiously, or on too many sides. Besides his inimitable felicity of expres sion (the Singleton letters are simply crammed with epigram) he had the sturdiest possible common sense and the liveliest possible humor. I have known his claim to the title of "humorist " called in question by precisians; nobody could deny him the title of good-humorist. Except that the sentimental side of Toryism would never have appealed to him, it was chiefly an accident of time that he was a polemical Liberal. He would always and naturally have been on the side opposite to that on which most of the fools were. When he came into the world, as the straitest Tory will admit, there were in that world a great many abuses as they are called, that is to say, a great many things which, once useful and excellent, had either decayed into positive nuisances, or dried up into neutral aud harmless but obstructive rubbish. There were also many silly and some mischievous people. as well as some wise and useful ones, who defended the abuses. Sydney Smith was in his way. He was not extraordinarily an ideal soldier of reform for his time, and |