or the lawn of the prelate. A long and hopeless career in your profession-prebendaries, deans, bishops, made over your head; reverend renegades advanced to the highest dignities of the Church, for helping to rivet the chains of Catholic and Protestant Dissenters; and no more chance of a Whig Administration than of a thaw in Zembla. These were the penalties exacted for liberality at that period; and not only was there no pay, but there were many stripes." But, contrary to all his vaticinations, the thaw in Zembla occurred. "In 1806, those political changes took place which so unexpectedly, and for so short a period, brought the Whigs into power. Through the influence of Lord Holland, the living of Foston-le-Clay, in Yorkshire, was bestowed on him by the Chancellor, Lord Erskine. This living being a permanent provision, not only increased his income, but "gave him the first feeling of independence and security he had enjoyed after a life of anxiety and uncertainty." Through the indulgence of the Archbishop of York, he was permitted, as there was no house on his living, to continue his residence in town, on condition of his appointing an efficient curate; until the Residence Bill of Mr. Percival, in 1808, compelled him to resign or build. In his case, this requisition operated hardly. The living consisted of three hundred acres of glebe-land of the stiffest clay, in a remote village of Yorkshire, where there had not been a resident clergyman for a hundred and fifty years, owing to the wretched state of the hovel, which had once been a parsonage-house-a pitiful reward for the signal services he had rendered to his political friends-to any ordinary man, a gift so impoverishing, that, if acceptance had not been voluntary, a suit for damages might have been sustained againt the donor. His common-sense and tact in temporal affairs were extraordinary. He had the knack of extracting comfort from a condition in which most persons would starve. When he went to his parish, he at once summoned "the clerk, the most important man in the village-a man who had numbered eighty years, looking with his long gray hair, his thread-bare coat, deep wrinkles, stooping gait, and crutch-stick, more ancient than the parsonage-house. He looked at Mr. Smith for some time, from under his gray, shaggy eyebrows, and held a long conversation with him, in which the old clerk showed that age had not quenched the natural shrewdness of the Yorkshireman. At last, after a pause, he said, striking his crutch-stick on the ground: Muster Smith, it often stroikes my mind, that people as comes frae London is such fools. But you,' he said, (giving him a nudge with his crutch-stick,) 'I see you are no fool."" With that practical knowledge and management which commended him to the discerning clerk, Mr. Smith commenced the parsonage-house; and, after encountering difficulties and disappointments against which nothing but actual experience conquered, (and that not always,) he completed the building, though not without encumbering himself with a debt which it required time and all his economy to liquidate. He says: "I landed my family in my new house nine months after laying the first stone; and performed my promise to the letter to the Archbishop, by issuing forth at midnight with a lantern, to meet the last load, with the cook and the cat, which had stuck in the mud, and fairly established them before twelve o'clock at night in the new parsonage-house-a feat, taking ignorance, inexperience, and poverty into consideration, requiring no small degree of energy. It made me a very poor man for several years, but I never repented it. I turned schoolmaster, to educate my sons, as I could not afford to send them to school. Mrs. Sidney turned schoolmistress, to educate my girls, as I could not afford a governess. I turned farmer, as I could not let my land." "I had little furniture, so I bought a cart-load of deals, took a carpenter, (who came to me for parish relief, called Jack Robinson,) with a face like a full moon, into my service, established him in my barn, and said, 'Jack, furnish my house.' You see the result." No one can fail to admire the commendable thrift with which he arranged and conducted his household affairs, and the cheerfulness with which he accommodated himself to his restricted circumstances, "impressing his own spirit into the common-place events of life." Here his literary and political friends were always most hospitably entertained; for, though there was no attempt to ape the style of many of his visitors, his skill as a caterer always insured to his guests a comfortable board, whilst his extraordinary conversational powers seasoned every thing of which they partook. His habits as a student are thus described by his daughter: "He spent much time in reading compositions; his activity was unceasing; I hardly remember seeing him unoccupied, but when engaged in conversation. He never considered his education as finished; he had always some object in hand to investigate. He read with great rapidity. I think it was said of Johnson, 'Look at Johnson, tearing the bowels out of his book.' It might be said of my father, he is running off with their contents; for he galloped through their pages so rapidly, that we often laughed at him when he shut up a thick quarto as his morning's work, and said, he meant he had looked at it, not read it. 'Cross-examine me, then,' said he; and we generally found he knew all that was worth knowing in it; though I do not think he had a very retentive memory. The same peculiarity characterized his compositions; when he had any subject in hand, he was indefatigable in reading, searching, inquiring, seeking every source of information, and discussing it with any man of sense or cultivation who crossed his path. But, having once mastered it, he would sit down, and you might see him committing his ideas to paper with the same rapidity that they flowed out in his conversation—no hesitation, no erasions, no stopping to consider and round his periods, no writing for effect, but a pouring-out of the fullness of his mind and feelings, for he was heart and soul in whatever he undertook. One could see by his countenance how much he was interested and amused as fresh images came clustering round his pen; he hardly ever altered or corrected what he had written; indeed, he was so impatient of this, that he could hardly bear the trouble of even looking over what he had written, but would, not unfrequently, throw the manuscript down on the table, and say: 'There, it is done; now, Kate, do look it over, and put in dots to the i's, and strokes to the t's,' and he would sally forth to his morning's walk." He studied by system. his common-place book. Some of his plans are sketched in “Translate every day ten lines of the 'De Officiis,' and re-translate into Latin. Two chapters of the Greek Testament, Theological Studies, Plato's Apology for Socrates; Horace's Episodes, Epistles, Satires and Ars Poetica." At this period of his life, Mr. Smith was inclined to "embonpoint," and, as he said, "to avoid sudden death," he accustomed himself to dig vigorously an hour or two each day in his garden. His remarks on the subject of health deserve the consideration of students: "Happiness is most impossible without health, but it is of very difficult attainment. I do not mean by health merely an absence of dangerous complaints, but that the body should be in perfect tune-full of vigor and alacrity." "The longer I live, the more I am convinced that the Apothecary is of more importance than Seneca, and that half the unhappiness in the world proceeds from little stoppages, from a duct choked up, from food pressing in the wrong place, from a vext duodenum or an agitated pylorus." "Johnson says, 'Every man is a rascal when he is sick;' meaning, I suppose, that he has no benevolent dispositions towards his fellow-creatures, but that his notions assume a character of greater affinity to his bodily feelings, and that feeling pain, he becomes malevolent; and if this be true of great diseases, it is true in a less degree of the smaller ailments of the body." Mr. Smith evidently sympathized as deeply with his parishioners in their bodily, as in their spiritual diseases. At least we read as much in the Memoir, of his physicking them, as of his dividing to them their portion of the Gospel. To calligraphy, Mr. Smith had not the slightest pretension. He and his friend Jeffrey, were both sad delinquents in this beautiful accomplishment. In a letter to Mr. Travers, who wished to see one of his sermons, he says: "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." On receiving a letter from Jeffrey, he replied: "We are much obliged by your letter, but should be still more so were it legible. I have tried to read it from left to right, and Mrs. Sidney from right to left, and we neither of us can decipher a single word of it." "In 1827 the Junction Ministry was formed, which combined a portion of the Whigs with the remains of Mr. Canning's party," and Mr. Smith encouraged himself with the hope of preferment. He had contented himself as a "grub," but not without a reasonable expectation of becoming, in due time, an "aurelia." The season for the inception of the change, he supposed, had arrived, and he felt it due to himself and his family to avail himself of the juncture. "He accordingly wrote to one or two who were in the ministry, and to his friend Lord Brougham, expressing his hopes and wishes, and requesting his influence with those in power." From him he received a kind reply-but no preferment came. In the following year, however, Lord Lyndhurst, though differing from him in politics, had the magnanimity to disregard the opposition of his own party, and bestow upon Mr. Smith a stall which was then vacant at Bristol. From this time he ceased to be a contributor to the Review, simply because he regarded it as proper that a dignitary of the Church should always annex his name to his publications. His promotion to the prebendary stall at Bristol, entitled him to one of their livings, Foston, in Somersetshire, which, through the kindness of Lord Lyndhurst, he was enabled to exchange for Combe Fleury, near Taunton, a smaller but much more beautifully situated living. His daughter describes it as "a lovely spot where nature and art combined to realize the Happy Valley." At Bristol, Mr. Smith officiated with increasing popularity. His celebrated sermon on toleration, preached before the mayor and corporation, produced "a prodigious sensation. And the cathedral, from that period, (whenever he preached,) was crowded to suffocation." In 1831, the Whigs were again in power, with Lord Grey as their leader. One of his first sayings, on entering Downing street, was, "Now I shall be able to do something for Sidney Smith." He soon received the appointment to a prebendal stall at St. Paul's, London, in exchange for the one of inferior value at Bristol. This he held to the day of his death. Why did not Mr. Smith receive further preferment? His personal and political friends, with whom, for fifty years, he had nobly fought, side by side, in their adversity, now had the reins of government and its patronage in their hands; but whilst others, whose claims on their consideration were not comparable to his, were elevated, he was overlooked. It was not that he did not desire advancement. He says, indeed, after expressing his feelings on this subject, "But, thank God, I never acted from the hope of preferment, but from the love of justice and truth which was bursting within me." This we believe; and he affirms the truth when he adds: "When I began to express my opinions on church politics, what hope could any but a madman have of gaining preferment by such a line of conduct?" Sidney Smith was not the man to part with his principles to purchase preferment. Yet if he persuaded himself that the mitre had no attractions for him, the reader of the Memoir and Letters can not but conclude differently. From these it is manifest, that as the gift of friends, and in acknowledgment of his valuable services, he would have been much gratified by the elevation. That the offer was not made to him caused him evident and great mortification. Those friends, when they had the power, thought of it;—when it was no longer possible, expressed regret that it had not been done. The fact is, they had gone as far as they deemed safe and proper. They might introduce him to a prebendary stall, but when an Episcopal |