to marry at Cheam a Miss Pybus, daughter of a deceased banker. The bride's brother, one of Pitt's Lords of the Admiralty, was highly incensed at the marriage of his sister with a decided Whig without fortune, and the prospects of the young pair were far from brilliant. But the wife had a small fortune of her own, and she realised £500 by the sale of a necklace her mother had given her. The Wiltshire squire added £750 for Sydney's care of his son, and thus the sordid ills of poverty were averted. Literature also furnished an additional resource. The Edinburgh Review was started in 1802, and it was Sydney Smith who was the original projector. 'The principles of the French Revolution,' he says, 'were then fully afloat, and it is impossible to conceive a more violent and agitated state of society. Among the first persons with whom I became acquainted were Lord Jeffrey, Lord Murray-late Lord Advocate for Scotland-and Lord Brougham; all of them maintaining opinions upon political subjects a little too liberal for the dynasty of Dundas, then exercising supreme power over the northern division of the island. One day we happened to meet in the eighth or ninth story or flat in Buccleuch Place, the elevated residence of the then Mr Jeffrey. I proposed that we should set up a Review; this was acceded to with acclamation. I was appointed editor, and remained long enough in Edinburgh to edit the first number of the Edinburgh Review. The motto I proposed for the Review was, Tenui musam meditamur avena-"We cultivate literature upon a little oatmeal." But this was too near the truth to be admitted, and so we took our present grave motto from Publius Syrus, of whom none of us had, I am sure, ever read a single line; and so began what has since turned out to be a very important and able journal. When I left Edinburgh it fell into the stronger hands of Lord Jeffrey and Lord Brougham, and reached the highest point of popularity and success.' A not unimportant feature in the scheme was that the writers were to receive for their contributions ten guineas a sheet of sixteen printed pages. In 1804 Sydney Smith went to London, officiated for some time as preacher of the Foundling Hospital at £50 per annum, and obtained another preachership in Berkeley Square. His sermons were eminently popular; and a course of lectures on Moral Philosophy, delivered in 1804, 1805, and 1806 at the Royal Institution, and published after his death, raised his reputation. In Holland House and other select circles his extraordinary conversational powers had already made him famous; and his contributions to the Edinburgh Review brought him much éclat, though their liberal tone and spirit rendered him obnoxious to the party in power. During the short Whig administration in 1806-7, he obtained the living of Foston-le-Clay in Yorkshire, and here he wrote his most amusing and powerful Letters on the Subject of the Catholics, to my Brother Abraham, who lives in the Country, by Peter Plymley (1807). The success of the Letters was immense-they ran through twentyone editions. Since the days of Swift, no such irresistible argument had been indited in such masterly political irony. The Yorkshire clergyman, not content with his clerical work and his literary undertakings, became a farmer next. And having in his youth made some studies in medicine, he occasionally doctored his poorer parishioners. It was his aim to make the most of his situation in life, and no man with a tithe of his talents was ever a more contented practical philosopher. Patronage came slowly. About 1825 the Duke of Devonshire presented him with the living of Londesborough, to hold till the duke's nephew came of age; and in 1828 Lord Lyndhurst, disregarding party considerations, gave him a prebend at Bristol. 'Moralists tell you,' he said, 'of the evils of wealth and station, and the happiness of poverty. 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.' Lord Lyndhurst conferred another favour: he enabled him in 1829 to exchange Foston for Combe Florey, near Taunton, and the rector and his family removed from Yorkshire to Somerset. In 1831 the advent of the Whigs to power procured for him a prebendal stall at St Paul's. The political agitation about the Reform Bill drew from his vigorous pen some letters intended for circulation amongst the poor, and several short but pronouncedly liberal speeches, in one of which, delivered at Taunton in 1831, the famous Mrs Partington was introduced. Like Swift, Sydney Smith seems almost never to have taken up his pen from the mere love of composition, but to enforce practical views and opinions on which he felt strongly. Though he was a professed joker and convivial wit—'a dinerout of the first lustre,' as he himself described Canning-there is not one of his humorous or witty sallies that does not come in as naturally as if it had been struck out or remembered at the moment it was used. In his latter years Sydney Smith waged war with the Ecclesiastical Commissioners in a series of Letters addressed to Archdeacon Singleton. He thought the Commission had been invested with too much power, and that the interests of the inferior clergy had not been sufficiently regarded; he took up the defence of the rights of Dean and Chapter with warmth and spirit, and his tone was at times none too friendly to his old Whig associates. The Letters contain some admirable portrait-painting, bordering on caricature, and a characteristic variety of rich illustration. In 1839 the death of his youngest brother, Courtenay, in India, put him in possession of £50,000: 'in my grand climacteric, I became unexpectedly a rich man.' This wealth enabled him to invest money in Pennsylvanian bonds; and when Pennsylvania and other states sought to repudiate the debt due to England, the witty canon of St Paul's took the field, and by a petition and a series of letters roused all Europe against the repudiating states. His last work was a short treatise on the use of the Ballot at elections. A representative Englishman, manly, fearless, independent, practical, he strove in season and out of season to correct what he deemed abuses, to enforce religious toleration, to expose cant and hypocrisy, and to inculcate timely reformation. No politician was ever more disinterested or effective. He had some of the wit of Swift without his coarseness or cynicism; and if inferior to Swift in the high attribute of original inventive genius, he had a peculiar and inimitable breadth of humour and drollery of illustration that served as potent auxiliaries to his clear and logical argument. Shortly after his death was published A Fragment on the Irish Roman Catholic Church. Smith discharged with diligence his public and clerical duties, and was much annoyed when persons of a devouter temper assumed that he was indifferent to the creed he professed or was a scoffer at religion. Certainly his jests were hardly consistent with a reverent temper; his intimate friends were neither religious nor orthodox; and he himself was frankly and outspokenly hostile to mysticism and fanaticism, to evangelicalism and Methodism (he said Methodists and evangelicals were 'numerous and nasty vermin'), to Puseyism and transcendentalism. Mrs Partington. I do not mean to be disrespectful, but the attempt of the Lords to stop the progress of reform reminds me very forcibly of the great storm of Sidmouth, and of the conduct of the excellent Mrs Partington on that occasion. In the winter of 1824 there set in a great flood upon that town-the tide rose to an incredible height-the waves rushed in upon the houses-and everything was threatened with destruction. In the midst of this sublime storm, Dame Partington, who lived upon the beach, was seen at the door of her house with mop and pattens, trundling her mop, and squeezing out the sea-water, and vigorously pushing away the Atlantic Ocean. The Atlantic was roused; Mrs Partington's spirit was up; but I need not tell you that the contest was unequal. The Atlantic Ocean beat Mrs Partington. She was excellent at a slop or a puddle, but she should not have meddled with a tempest. (From a Speech at Taunton in 1831.) If From Peter Plymley's Letters. The pope has not landed-nor are there any curates sent out after him-nor has he been hid at St Albans by the Dowager Lady Spencer-nor dined privately at Holland House-nor been seen near Dropmore. these fears exist-which I do not believe-they exist only in the mind of the Chancellor of the Exchequer [Spencer Perceval]; they emanate from his zeal for the Protestant interest; and though they reflect the highest honour upon the delicate irritability of his faith, must certainly be considered as more ambiguous proofs of the sanity and vigour of his understanding. By this time, however, the best-informed clergy in the neigh bourhood of the metropolis are convinced that the rumour is without foundation; and though the pope is probably hovering about our coast in a fishing-smack, it is most likely he will fall a prey to the vigilance of the cruisers; and it is certain he has not yet polluted the Protestantism of our soil. Exactly in the same manner the story of the wooden gods seized at Charing Cross, by an order from the Foreign Office, turns out to be without the shadow of a foundation: instead of the angels and archangels mentioned by the informer, nothing was discovered but a wooden image of Lord Mulgrave going down to Chatham as a head-piece for the Spanker gun-vessel; it was an exact resemblance of his lordship in his military uniform, and therefore as little like a god as can well be imagined. From Wit and Humour.' Surprise is so essential an ingredient of wit, that no wit will bear repetition ;-at least the original electrical feeling produced by any piece of wit can never be renewed. There is a sober sort of approbation succeeds at hearing it the second time, which is as different from its original rapid, pungent volatility as a bottle of champagne that has been opened three days is from one that has at that very instant emerged from the darkness of the cellar. To hear that the top of Mont Blanc is like an umbrella, though the relation be new to me, is not sufficient to excite surprise: the idea is so very obvious, it is so much within the reach of the most ordinary understandings, that I can derive no sort of pleasure from the comparison. The relation discovered must be something remote from all the common tracks and sheep-walks made in the mind; it must not be a comparison of colour with colour, and figure with figure, or any comparison which, though individually new, is specifically stale, and to which the mind has been in the habit of making many similar; but it must be something removed from common apprehension, distant from the ordinary haunts of thought-things which are never brought together in the common events of life, and in which the mind has discovered relations by its own subtlety and quickness. It is imagined that wit is a sort of inexplicable visitation, that it comes and goes with the rapidity of lightning, and that it is quite as unattainable as beauty or just proportion. I am so much of a contrary way of thinking, that I am convinced a man might sit down as systematically, and as successfully, to the study of wit as he might to the study of mathematics; and I would answer for it that, by giving up only six hours a day to being witty, he should come on prodigiously before midsummer, so that his friends should hardly know him again. For what is there to hinder the mind from gradually acquiring a habit of attending to the lighter relations of ideas in which wit consists? Punning grows upon everybody, and punning is the wit of words. I do not mean to say that it is so easy to acquire a habit of discovering new relations in ideas as in words, but the difficulty is not so much greater as to render it insuperable to habit. One man is unquestionably much better calculated for it by nature than another; but association, which gradually makes a bad speaker a good one, might give a man wit who had it not, if any man chose to be so absurd as to sit down to acquire it. I have mentioned puns. They are, I believe, what I have denominated them-the wit of words. They are exactly the same to words which wit is to ideas, and consist in the sudden discovery of relations in language. A pun, to be perfect in its kind, should contain two distinct meanings; the one common and obvious, the other more remote; and in the notice which the mind takes of the relation between these two sets of words, and in the surprise which that relation excites, the pleasure of a pun consists. Miss Hamilton, in her book on Education, mentions the instance of a boy so very neglectful that he could never be brought to read the word patriarchs; but whenever he met with it he always pronounced it partridges. A friend of the writer observed to her that it could hardly be considered as a mere piece of negligence, for it appeared to him that the boy, in calling them partridges, was making game of the patriarchs. Now here are two distinct meanings contained in the same phrase: for to make game of the patriarchs is to laugh at them; or to make game of them is by a very extravagant and laughable sort of ignorance of words, to rank them among pheasants, partridges, and other such delicacies, which the law takes under its protection and calls game: and the whole pleasure derived from this pun consists in the sudden discovery that two such different meanings are referable to one form of expression. I have very little to say about puns; they are in very bad repute, and so they ought to be. The wit of language is so miserably inferior to the wit of ideas that it is very deservedly driven out of good company. Sometimes, indeed, a pun makes its appearance which seems for a moment to redeem its species; but we must not be deceived by them it is a radically bad race of wit. By unremitting persecution, it has been at last got under, and driven into cloisters from whence it must never again be suffered to emerge into the light of the world. One invaluable blessing produced by the banishment of punning is an immediate reduction of the number of wits. It is a wit of so low an order, and in which some sort of progress is so easily made, that the number of those endowed with the gift of wit would be nearly equal to those endowed with the gift of speech. The condition of putting together ideas in order to be witty operates much in the same salutary manner as the condition of finding rhymes in poetry;-it reduces the number of performers to those who have vigour enough to overcome incipient difficulties, and make a sort of provision that that which need not be done at all should be done well whenever it is done. Mrs Trimmer. This is a book written by a lady who has gained considerable reputation at the corner of St Paul's Churchyard; who flames in the van of Mr Newberry's shop; and is, upon the whole, dearer to mothers and aunts than any other author who pours the milk of science into the mouths of babes and sucklings. Tired at last of scribbling for children, and getting ripe in ambition, she has now written a book for grown-up people, and selected for her antagonist as stiff a controversialist as the whole field of dispute could well have supplied. Her opponent is Mr Lancaster, a Quaker, who has lately given to the world new and striking lights upon the subject of Education, and come forward to the notice of his country by spreading order, knowledge, and innocence among the lowest of mankind. (From Article in the Edinburgh, 1806.) Botany Bay. And This land of convicts and kangaroos is beginning to rise into a very fine and flourishing settlement. great indeed must be the natural resources and splendid the endowments of that land that has been able to survive the system of neglect and oppression experienced from the mother-country, and the series of ignorant and absurd governors that have been selected for the administration of its affairs. But mankind live and flourish not only in spite of storms and tempests, but (which could not have been anticipated previous to experience) in spite of colonial secretaries expressly paid to watch over their interests. The supineness and profligacy of public officers cannot always overcome the amazing energy with which human beings pursue their happiness, nor the sagacity with which they determine on the means by which that end is to be promoted. Be it our care, however, to record, for the future inhabitants of Australasia, the political sufferings of their larcenous forefathers; and let them appreciate, as they ought, that energy which founded a mighty empire in spite of the afflicting blunders and marvellous cacœconomy of their government. Such is the climate of Botany Bay; and, in this remote part of the earth, Nature (having made horses, oxen, ducks, geese, oaks, elms, and all regular and useful productions for the rest of the world), seems determined to have a bit of play, and to amuse herself as she pleases Accordingly, she makes cherries with the stone on the outside; and a monstrous animal, as tall as a grenadier, with the head of a rabbit, a tail as big as a bed-post, hopping along at the rate of five hops to a mile, with three or four young kangaroos looking out of its false uterus, to see what is passing. Then comes a quadruped as big as a large cat, with the eyes, colour, and skin of a mole, and the bill and web-feet of a duck-puzzling Dr Shaw, and rendering the latter half of his life miserable, from his utter inability to determine whether it was a bird or a beast. Add to this a parrot with the legs of a sea-gull, a skate with the head of a shark, and a bird of such monstrous dimensions that a side-bone of it will dine three real carnivorous Englishmen-together with many other productions that agitate Sir Joseph [Banks], and fill him with mingled emotions of distress and delight. (From Article in the Edinburgh, 1819) His Life, with a selection from his Letters, was published in 1855 by his daughter Saba (1802-66), who in 1834 married Dr (Sir) Henry Holland. See also Hayward's Essays (1858), Stuart J. Reid's Life and Times of Sydney Smith (1884; new ed. 1896), Professor Saintsbury's Essays in English Literature (1890), Selections from Sydney Smith by Ernest Rhys (1894), and a French study by Chevrillon (1894); also an interview with him by Miss Martineau (see below). Thomas Henry Lister (1800-42), well born, and educated at Westminster and Trinity College, Cambridge, wrote half-a-dozen novels, of which the best known are Granby (1826), Herbert Lacy (1828), and Arlington (1832) —–—– largely interesting pictures of aristocratic life set in a strain of graceful reflection after the style of the essays in the Mirror and Lounger. Lister produced also a tragedy and a Life of the Earl of Clarendon, and at the time of his death was Registrar-General for England and Wales the first to hold the post, established only in 1836. James and Horace Smith, extraordinarily clever, lively, and amusing authors in both prose and verse, were sons of an eminent legal prac JAMES SMITH. From an Engraving after the Portrait by Lonsdale. titioner in London, solicitor to the Board of Ordnance, and noted for his accomplishments. Both James (1775-1839) and Horatio (usually Horace ; 1779-1849) were educated at Chigwell in Essex, and for this retired 'school-boy spot' James ever retained a strong affection. After school-days James Smith was articled to his father, was taken into partnership in due time, and in 1812 succeeded to the business, as well as to the post of solicitor to the Ordnance. With a quick sense of the ridiculous, a strong passion for the stage and the drama, and a love of London society and manners, Smith became a town wit and humourist -delighting in parodies, dramatic dialogues, and current criticism. His first pieces appear to have been contributed to The Pic-nic newspaper, afterwards merged in The Cabinet. He wrote for the London Review, a short-lived journal established by Cumberland the dramatist, on the principle that every writer's name must be appended to his critique; and next became a constant writer in The Monthly Mirror, where there appeared a series of parodies and poetical imitations, Horace in London, the joint work of the brothers. Some of the pieces are sprightly and humorous, many only trifling and tedious. To London he was as strongly attached as Dr Johnson himself. 'A confirmed metropolitan in all his tastes and habits, he would often quaintly observe that London was the best place in summer, and the only place in winter; or quote Dr Johnson's dogma: "Sir, the man that is tired of London is tired of existence."' He did sometimes condescend to go as far as Yorkshire to stay with friends. But when at a country house he excused himself from joining in a stroll by asking his host to note the gouty shoe he wore, the host only said, 'You don't really mean to say that you have got the gout? I thought you had only put on that shoe to avoid being shown over the improvements.' The Rejected Addresses, 'one of the luckiest hits in literature,' appeared in 1812, having kept James and Horace busy for six weeks. The directors of Drury Lane Theatre had offered a premium for the best poetical address to be spoken at the opening of the new building; and a casual hint from the secretary of the theatre suggested to the witty brothers a series of humorous addresses, professedly composed by the principal authors of the day. The work was ready by the opening day, but, marvellous to record, it was with difficulty that a publisher could be found, although the authors asked nothing for copyright. At length John Miller, a dramatic publisher, undertook to publish and give half profits, should there be any. In an advertisement prefixed to the twenty-second edition it is put on record that Mr Murray, who had refused without even looking at the manuscript, purchased the copyright for £131 in 1819, after the book had run through sixteen editions. The success of the work was indeed almost unexampled. James's contributions were imitations of Wordsworth, Cobbett, Southey, Coleridge, and Crabbe. Horace Effusion is irresistibly ludicrous), and others. The Byronic piece was a joint work, James contributing the first stanza, the keynote, and Horace the remainder. The talent displayed was wonderfully equal; none of James's parodies are more felicitous than Horace's Scott. was The popularity of the Rejected Addresses seems to have satisfied the ambition of the elder poet; he afterwards confined himself to short anonymous pieces in The New Monthly Magazine and other periodicals, and some humorous sketches and anecdotes for Charles Mathews's theatrical entertainments, the authorship of which known only to a few. The Country Cousins, Trip to France, and Trip to America, mostly written by Smith, and brought out by Mathews at the English Opera House, not only filled the theatre and replenished the treasury, but brought the lucky writer a thousand pounds-a largess James seldom mentioned without shrugging his shoulders and ejaculating, 'A thousand pounds for nonsense! For a still slighter exertion of his muse he was even more amply rewarded; for, having met at a dinner-party Mr Strahan, the king's printer, then suffering from gout and old age, though with faculties unimpaired, James sent him next morning the following jeu d'esprit : Your lower limbs seemed far from stout The cause I presently found out The power that props the body's length, In you mounts upwards, and the strength Strahan made an immediate codicil to his will, bequeathing £3000 to the writer of the neat compliment. James made a happier, though less remunerative, epigram on Miss Edgeworth: We every-day bards may anonymous' sign- Must bring forth the name of their author to light. Horace Smith, the surviving partner of this literary duumvirate-perhaps the closest and most constant since that of Beaumont and Fletcherwas a stockbroker by profession, and realised a handsome fortune, retiring in 1820, and three years later settling at Brighton. He was one of the first imitators of Sir Walter Scott in the department of historical romance. His Brambletye House (1826), a tale of the civil wars, was received with favour, though some of its descriptions of the plague in London were copied too literally from Defoe, and there was a want of vitality and truth in the embodiment of many of the historical characters. The success of this effort inspired Horace to venture into various fields of fiction-Tor Hill; Zillah, a Tale of the Holy City; The Midsummer Medley; Walter Colyton; The Involuntary Prophet; Jane Lomax; The Moneyed Man; Adam Brown; The Merchant; and others. But none of these was destined to live. The variously gifted author was as remarkable for generosity as for wit and playful humour. Shelley said, 'Is it not odd that the only truly generous person I ever knew, who had money to be generous with, should be a stockbroker! And he writes poetry too,' continued Shelley; 'he writes poetry and pastoral dramas, and yet knows how to make money, and does make it, and is still generous.' The fastidious and ethereal poet also put in verse his regard for his facetious friend : Wit and sense, Virtue and human knowledge, all that might Apart from the parodies, James Smith did nothing so good as Horace Smith's Address to the Mummy, which is a felicitous compound of fact, humour, and sentiment, aptly, pithily, and neatly put. The Theatre. By the Rev. G. C. [Crabbe]. What various swains our motley walls contain ! |