the virtues of the optimist and the reformer. An ardent devotee of human happiness, he did not destroy life to improve it; nor did he ever cease to oppose evils in the way of its prosperity. While he appears taking his ease in that great inn, the world, enjoying himself and communicating pleasure to others, he is quarrelling with all sorts of injustice in high places; contending for the peasant and the labourer; advocating the rights of accused criminals, with a word for poor chimney-sweeps; reading lessons to squires, parliament men and bishops; battling for religious and political freedom. He fought a long fight with dullness, pedantry, prejudice, private and political interest, and came off conqueror. His honest laugh rang through the whole field. An instinctive genius, the inspiration of common sense, was his weapon. He had an advantage of position too in favour of his wit and his reforms in fighting under the protection and in defence of the established Church; for the best reformer is not all reformer. He must have some point of support, or how can he wage war with success? Where can he deposit the fruits of victory? There are noisy reformers who cut themselves loose from all positive institutions, and, like the poets' "cats in air-pumps," attempt subsistence in a vacuum. Sydney Smith was not one of these empty whims.

The most genial and conciliatory, he was the most independent of men. His independence was, with his other virtues, of a practical character; alike above obsequiousness, indolence and churlishness. He had a just knowledge of the respect due his faculties and attainments, of his claims upon the society to which he belonged, his party and his church. On proper occasions he asserted them in a manly way; when they were not acknowledged he bore the loss philosophically, and even sported with his misfortunes. There was no misanthropy in his disposition.

In the art of getting on in the world, he was certainly not indifferent to the main chance, while his life affords an illustration of the benevolence of men of moderate means. During a considerable part of his career in narrow circumstances, and compelled to

economy, whether selling his wife's jewels, preaching at chapels, lecturing, reviewing, eking out a curate's humbleness by drafts on humour and imagination, he is constantly doing liberal acts; a man of charity and beneficence; bestowing free-will offerings from a life of self-denial and honourable industry; contributions which a generous nature extorted from a stock almost too small for home necessities.

Independence of opinion and of fortune he valued most highly, and pursued steadily and successfully, the one for the other, the inferior for the superior. In the wisdom of Burns the poet's manly Epistle, he "assiduously waited" upon Fortune and gathered wealth

"Not for to hide it in a hedge,

Nor for a train attendant,
But for the glorious privilege
Of being independent."

He had the courage in a luxurious, artificial society, where weak men are crushed by conventionalisms, of appearing what he was and spending no more than he could afford. An instance of his business punctilio in pecuniary obligations occurs in one of his letters to his early friend Mr. Beach. The latter had a small sum of money left in his hands on settlement with his son's tutor. Mr. Beach credits the account with five per cent. interest. Sydney insists positively that it must be but four, and will be under no obligation for any more.

His personal independence was shown in many instances during the period of his alliance with a political party out of office; an association unfriendly to his clerical advancement. In a less public light it was exhibited in the manly freedom of his intercourse with his friends. His wit spared none of their absurdities. His letters, frequently models of courtesy and compliment, are always frank and truthful.

This resolute self-possession, though based on brave, natural

Fourth English edition of the Memoirs, i. 109.

qualities, and developed with freedom, was also an affair of conviction and the will. Bashfulness is one of the last qualities which would be assigned to Sydney Smith, but we read that he was shy even in his early manhood. His acuteness of mind, however, soon corrected the evil. He first discovered, he says, "that all mankind were not solely employed in observing him, as all young people think, and that shamming was of no use, the world being very clear-sighted, and soon estimating a man at his just value. This cured me, and I determined to be natural, and let the world find me out."*

Subsidiary to this personal courage was his hopeful way of looking at the world. He was always practising and inculcating the disposition. "Some very excellent people," he said, "tell you they dare not hope. To me it seems much more impious to dare to despair." He had an excellent rule for the happiness and wisdom of life as to the future, not to look too far into it for inevitable though probably distant disaster. "Take short views, hope for the best, and trust in God." Inclined by temperament to anticipate coming evils-for our wit, spite of his many jests, was a serious man-he resisted the atrabilious tendency, and avoided drawing drafts on the misery of futurity. "Never," he said, "give way to melancholy; nothing encroaches more: I fight against it vigorously. One great remedy is, to take short views of life. Are you happy now? Are you likely to remain so till this evening? or next week? or next month? or next year? Then why destroy present happiness by a distant misery, which may never come at all, or you may never live to see it? for every substantial grief has twenty shadows, and most of them shadows of your own making." It was said of the happy nature of Oliver Goldsmith that he had a knack at hoping: with Sydney Smith it was a principle. Cheerfulness he made an art. He liked household illuminations of a good English coal fire, "the living thing," he said, "in a dead room," abundance of lights, flowers on his *Mem. i. 77, 324. † Ib. i. 167, 117.

table, prints and pictures on his walls. He was no connoisseur in the latter, and if he had been, could not have afforded the gratification of the taste, but he made poor and cheap pictures do the work of good ones by filling up the gap between with his sport and imagination.

There is a highly characteristic anecdote of the man, illustrating his habitual regard to human happiness, and his frequent solicitude for the natural welfare of children. The story is thus told by his daughter, Lady Holland: "One of his little children, then in delicate health, had for some time been in the habit of waking suddenly every evening; sobbing, anticipating the death of parents, and all the sorrows of life, almost before life had begun. He could not bear this unnatural union of childhood and sorrow, and for a long period, I have heard my mother say, each evening found him, at the waking of his child, with a toy, a picture-book, a bunch of grapes, or a joyous tale, mixed with a little strengthening advice and the tenderest caresses, till the habit was broken, and the child woke to joy and not to sorrow."

The intellectual habits of Sydney Smith were those of a quick, keen, sensitive nature, prompt to receive impressions, apt to decide upon them, cautious of its convictions, never driven at random. Impatient of restraint, ardent and vivacious, he was remarkable for his self-knowledge, and the discriminating use of his powers. He did not over-estimate them or under-estimate them; he knew precisely what he could do; the weight of the projectile, the momentum, the effect.

His habits of reading were somewhat peculiar. He read many books, and was content, on principle, to secure the best use of his faculties, to remain ignorant of many others. He was constantly looking into his stock of knowledge and strengthening his defences on the weak points. In this way he laid up a large store of practical, working information. His directness and vivacity of mind led him at once to the essential points of a subject. He plucked out the heart of a series of volumes, in a morning. The happy

result may be seen in his reviews, in the Edinburgh, of books of travels-his favourite reading.

He wrote rapidly, making few corrections, a proof of his exact discipline of mind, for his writings have that conciseness which may be supposed to have required frequent revision. His handwriting, a sign of his impatience, was villainously bad. He described it, in a letter to a gentleman who wished to borrow one of his sermons: "I would send it to you with pleasure, but my writing is as if a swarm of ants, escaping from an ink-bottle, had walked over a sheet of paper without wiping their legs." It is amusing to notice his lectures to Jeffrey, on his cacography, which may be attributed to a similar restlessness of mind.

The clearness and purity of his style are noticeable. It is direct, forcible, manly English; brief without obscurity; rich without any extravagance of ornament; the unaffected language of a gentleman and a scholar. It has a constant tendency to the aphorism—the ripe fruit hanging on the tree of knowledge-noticeable in the writings of the higher order of men of genius; the great dramatists, the poets generally, Bacon, Burke, Franklin, Landor, and indeed most of the classic authors who pass current in the world in quotation. Wit, indeed, of all the faculties, is the most rapid and powerful condenser; it puts volumes into apophthegms; has a patent for proverbs; contracts an essay to an aphorism; bottles an argument in a jest.

Unless where peculiar Latinized expressions or technical terms are intentionally introduced for their witty effect, Smith's language is of the purest Saxon. His method is very direct. His meaning reaches us pure of all superfluities and pruned of all tediousness. It is a style, too, which is essentially his own, a reflex of his keen, impulsive, straight-forward character. In his first published sermons he has been charged with imitating the efforts of Jeremy Taylor and others of the old divines; but this transfusion, which appears very slightly, is rather a beauty. When he advanced into *Memoirs, i. 174.