bursts into tears when reproached for some imputed political backsliding, exclaiming, that it was all very well for his noble friends, with their tens, twenties, or fifty thousands a year, to taunt a man whose whole life had been one of struggle and embarrassment? We have heard Sydney Smith revert to this incident, and avow his cordial concurrence in the axiom of a fellow-passenger in a stage-coach,-"Poverty, sir, is no disgrace to a man, but it's confoundedly inconvenient." In his letters he fairly owns that every guinea he was enabled to add to his growing fortune was a gratification to him.

His preaching had been much admired, both at Edinburgh and London; and one of his projects, about 1805, for gaining money, was to take the lease of a chapel then occupied by a set of Dissenters called the New Jerusalem, and run the chance of increasing his pew-rents by his popularity. Four years before, he had unfolded his views of what pulpit oratory was, and what it might become without losing any of its indispensable solemnity. "The English, generally remarkable for doing very good things in a very bad manner, seem to have reserved the maturity and plenitude of their awkwardness for the pulpit. Is it wonder, then, that every semi-delirious sectary who pours forth his animated nonsense with the genuine look and voice of passion, should gesticulate away the congregation of the most profound and learned divine. of the Established Church, and in two Sundays preach him bare to the very sexton? Why this holoplexia on sacred occasions alone? Why call in the aid of paralysis to piety? Is it a rule of oratory to balance the style against the subject, and to handle the most sublime truths in the dullest language and the driest manner? Is sin to be taken from men as Eve was from Adam, by casting them into a deep slumber?"

It was his wish to enter the field against the semidelirious sectary; but for this purpose he required a license from the rector of the parish in which the chapel lay, and this was politely but peremptorily declined. Sydney was much annoyed; his family shared his indignation, and his affectionate biographer implies that he was cruelly wronged. "I appeal to you again," he wrote, addressing the rector, whose name is suppressed, "whether anything can be so enormous and unjust as that that privilege should be denied to the ministers of the Church of England, which every man who has folly and presumption enough to differ from it can immediately enjoy." He who is his own advocate has a fool for a client, is a sound though homely adage. Its literal application to Sydney Smith, in his most incautious moments, would be preposterous; but it is instructive to mark how a man of his intellectual culture could be blinded

by eagerness in the pursuit of a favourite object to the palpable unsoundness of his argument. The essential end and object of a church establishment are to prevent this very description of competition which he claims as the inalienable privilege of its ministers. "With what sincerity, or with what dignity," asks Paley, " can a preacher dispense truths of Christianity, whose thoughts are perpetually solicited to the reflection how he may increase his subscription? His eloquence, if he possess any, resembles rather the exhibition of a player who is computing the profits of his theatre." *

"The drama's laws the drama's patrons give,

And those who live to please, must please to live."

The late lamented Charles Buller, improving on a

* "Wagner. I have often heard say, a player might instruct a priest. "Faust. Yes, when the priest is a player, as may likely enough come to pass occasionally."- Goethe's Faust.

suggestion of Swift's, proposed to organise a body of dignitaries and ministers of the Church of England, to be called "The Church Moveable," or "The Clergy Unattached;" so that whenever the sectaries were gaining ground in any given district, a bishop's or a dean's party might be sent down to encounter them, as we despatch a captain's or subaltern's party to prevent a political outbreak. But he did not propose to increase their pay in proportion to the number of Dissenters they led captive. On what ground did Sydney Smith himself propose to settle a State provision on the Roman Catholic clergy of Ireland? Was it not in the hope of rendering them independent of their flocks, and of taking away the pecuniary temptation to turbulence?

In 1804, 1805, and 1806 were delivered at the Royal Institution the Lectures first printed for private circulation by Mrs. Sydney Smith in 1849, and subsequently published under the title of "Elementary Sketches of Moral Philosophy." They were eminently and deservedly popular. "His success," wrote Horner during their delivery, "has been beyond all possible conjecture; from six to eight hundred hearers; not a seat to be procured, even if you go there an hour before the time. Nobody else, to be sure, could have executed such an undertaking with the least chance of success. For who else could make such a mixture of odd paradox, quaint fun, manly sense, liberal opinions, and striking language?" The portions of the series which attracted most attention were the two lectures on "Wit and Humour," in which he broached the startling doctrines that "the feeling of wit is occasioned by those relations of ideas which excite surprise, and surprise alone," and that wit might be acquired by study, like mathematics:

"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."

Why absurd, if the object were really attainable by study, and the man had no better or more urgent employment or pursuit ?

The peroration of the second of these two lectures is very striking :

"There is an association in men's minds between dulness and wisdom, amusement and folly, which has a very powerful influence in decision upon character, and is not overcome without considerable difficulty. The reason is, that the outward signs of a dull man and a wise man are the same, and so are the outward signs of a frivolous man and a witty man; and we are not to expect that the majority will be disposed to look to much more than the outward sign. I believe the fact to be, that wit is very seldom the only eminent quality which resides in the mind of any man; it is commonly accompanied by many other talents of every description, and ought to be considered as a strong evidence of a fertile and superior understanding. Almost all the great poets, orators, and statesmen of all times, have been witty. Cæsar, Alexander, Aristotle, Descartes, and Lord Bacon, were witty men; so were Cicero, Shakspeare, Demosthenes, Boileau,

Pope, Dryden, Fontenelle, Jonson, Waller, Cowley, Solon, Socrates, Dr. Johnson, and almost every man who has made a distinguished figure in the House of Commons. The meaning of an extraordinary man is, that he is eight men, not one man; that he has as much wit as if he had no sense, and as much sense as if he had no wit; that his conduct is as judicious as if he were the dullest of human beings, and his imagination as brilliant as if he were irretrievably ruined. But when wit is combined with sense and information; when it is softened by benevolence, and restrained by strong principle; when it is in the hands of a man who can use it and despise it, who can be witty, and something much better than witty, who loves honour, justice, decency, good-nature, morality, and religion, ten thousand times better than wit ;wit is then a beautiful and delightful part of our nature. There is no more interesting spectacle than to see the effects of wit upon the different characters of men; than to observe it expanding caution, relaxing dignity, unfreezing coldness, -teaching age, and care, and pain, to smile,—extorting reluctant gleams of pleasure from melancholy, and charming even the pangs of grief. It is pleasant to observe how it penetrates through the coldness and awkwardness of society, gradually bringing men nearer together, and, like the combined force of wine and oil, giving every man a glad heart and a shining countenance. Genuine and innocent wit like this, is surely the flavour of the mind! Man could direct his ways by plain reason, and support his life by tasteless food; but God has given us wit, and flavour, and laughter, and perfumes, to enliven the days of man's pilgrimage, and to 'charm his pained steps over the burning marle.””

There cannot be a more striking proof of the slenderness of the provision made for the reward or encouragement of intellectual eminence in this country, than the fact that Sydney Smith, with this fulness of reputation, and with his political friends in power, felt compelled to accept the small living of Foston-le-Clay in Yorkshire, which was with some difficulty obtained, through the exertions of Lord and Lady Holland, from the Whig Chancellor, Lord Erskine. Again, however, we maintain, that his