natural and necessary introduction to the remarks which we propose to make upon them.

He was born at Woodford, Essex, in 1771, the second of four brothers. So long as mankind shall continue to attach importance to ancestral distinctions, it will be an idle affectation to depreciate them; and many enlightened men, famous for their superiority to popular weaknesses and vulgar errors, have endeavoured to defend the pride of birth on philosophical grounds. A lively desire of knowing and recording our ancestors,' says Gibbon, so generally prevails, that it must depend on some common principle in the minds of men.' In the same spirit of candour, Bishop Watson has observed Without entering into a disquisition concerning the rise of this general prejudice, I freely own that I am a slave to it myself.' Sydney Smith had none of it. He once laughingly declared, in reference to the somewhat laboured attempt of the author of 'Waverley' to establish a pedigree, when Lady Lansdowne asked me about my grandfather, I told her he disappeared about the time of the Assizes, and we asked no questions.'

This, we need hardly say, was a jocular fabrication; for his descent was respectable on the side of each parent, and Lady Holland, unappalled by Sir David Brewster's authority, still retains hopes of being able to claim Sir Isaac Newton for an ancestor. Her account of her paternal grandfather, Mr. Robert Smith, is that 'he was very clever, odd by nature, but still more odd by design; and that (having first married a beautiful girl, from whom he parted at the church door) he spent

all the early part of his life partly in wandering over the world for many years, and partly in diminishing his fortune, by buying, altering, spoiling, and then selling about nineteen different places in England.' The beautiful girl was Miss Ollier, or D'Olier, the youngest daughter of a Languedoc emigrant for conscience' sake. She was the mother of the four Smiths, Robert (Bobus), Cecil, Courtenay, and Sydney, and we are requested to believe that all the finest qualities of their minds were derived from her.

The talents of the Smiths for controversy must have been singularly precocious, for the tradition goes that, before they were old enough for school, they might be seen neglecting games, and often lying on the floor, stretched over their books, and discussing with loud voice and vehement gesticulation, every point that arose.' Robert and Cecil were sent to Eton, Courtenay and Sydney to Winchester, where Sydney rose in due time to be captain of the school. Such were his own and his brother's proficiency that their schoolfellows signed a round-robin refusing to compete for the college prizes, if the Smiths, who always gained them, were allowed to enter the lists.

One incident of his schooldays is commemorated in the first Letter to Archdeacon Singleton: 'I was at school and college with the Archbishop of Canterbury (Howley); fifty-three years ago he knocked me down with the chessboard for checkmating him, and now he is attempting to take away my patronage. I believe these are the only two acts of violence he ever committed in his life.'

He used to say, 'I believe whilst a boy at school, I made above ten thousand Latin verses, and no man in his senses would dream in after-life of ever making another. So much for life and time wasted.' There is another current remark attributed to him,—that a false quantity at the commencement of the career of a young man intended for public life was rarely got over; and when a lady asked him what a false quantity was, he explained it to be in a man the same as a faux pas

in a woman.

On leaving Winchester, he was placed for six months at Mont Villiers, in Normandy, to learn French, and he then went to New College, Oxford, where nothing remarkable is recorded of him, except that he obtained, by virtue of his Winchester honours, first a scholarship, and then a fellowship yielding about 100l. a year. No sooner was this limited provision secured, than his father abandoned him to his own resources, which were insufficient, he thought, to justify him in studying for the profession of his choice-the Bar. So, after being within an ace of going out as supercargo to China, he reluctantly made up his mind to enter the Church.

This determination is doubtless to be regretted for his own sake. Besides possessing the talents which are commonly deemed sufficient to insure forensic success, such as acuteness, readiness, boldness, an intuitive knowledge of the springs of action, dialectic skill, and command of language, he was preeminently endowed with the no less indispensable requisites of patience and perHe would have bided his time. He would neither have been disheartened by neglect, nor have

severance.

sunk under the sickness of hope deferred, nor have been turned aside by political, social, or literary aspirations, nor have dropped out of the race because he was disgusted with the jockeyship, or annoyed by the heat, dust, and clamour of the course. He might have turned out a Scarlett at Nisi Prius, and an Ellenborough on the Bench. He would also have been spared the sarcasms, galling though ill-founded, so repeatedly levelled at him for trifling with his sacred vocation. But if he had devoted all his energies to the Law-proverbially a jealous mistress-he must have given up to a profession what was meant for mankind, and the world would have lost incalculably by the change.

When it is asked why he did not do what would be done by most aspiring young men similarly situated in our day, why he did not trust to his pen for supplying the required funds in aid of the income from his fellowship, the obvious answer is, that sixty years since, reviews and magazines stood on a widely different footing. Their rate of pay to contributors was scanty in the extreme. They were mostly got up for the booksellers by the regular denizens of Grub Street, and a Fellow of New College could hardly have been accused of undue fastidiousness, if he had dismissed at once, assuming it to have occurred to him, the notion of being enrolled in such a troop. Amongst other good effects universally admitted to have resulted from the establishment of this Journal, must be ranked the triumphant vindication of the dignity of our craft. So signal has been our success in this respect, that people find it difficult to imagine a period when it was a moot point in the

minor morals, whether a gentleman could receive pecuniary remuneration for an article. Swift quarrelled with Harley for offering to pay him in hard cash for his literary aid in the Examiner.' Lord Jeffrey was visited with misgivings which were not overcome without a struggle. In May, 1803, he writes:- The terms are, as Mr. L. says, without precedent; but the success of the work is not less so. All the men here will guineas, I find, and, under the sanction of that example, I think I may take my Editor's salary also without being supposed to have suffered any degradation.'

take their

We learn from the same high authority, Lord Cockburn's Life of Jeffrey,' that, after three numbers of the Review had been published on the voluntary principle, it was Sydney Smith himself who suggested that no permanent reliance could be placed in amateurs; a sagacious hint, which the late Professor Wilson condensed into his well-known maxim, that an unpaid contributor is ex vi termini an ass.' But we are anticipating, and we have not yet brought Mr. Smith to the scene of his earliest labours in the grand cause of civil and religious liberty. We must first accompany him to his curacy in Salisbury Plain, where he underwent the most imminent risk of starvation, mental and bodily.

His parish was Netherhaven, near Amesbury, a village consisting of a few scattered farms and cottages: once a week a butcher's cart came over from Salisbury; it was then only he could obtain any meat, and he often dined, he said, on a mess of potatoes