to restricted in these respects than in America. Addressing Lady Holland in 1811 in a note, in a reply to an invitation to dinner, his witticism seems bold as addressed to a lady; satirical personally, considering the antecedents of his honourable hostess : "How very odd, dear Lady Holland, to ask me to dine with you on Sunday, the 9th, when I am coming to stay with you from the 5th to the 12th! It is like giving a gentleman an assignation for Wednesday, when you are going to marry him on the preceding Sunday-an attempt to combine the stimulus of gallantry with the security of connubial relations. I do not propose to be guilty of the slightest infidelity to you while I am at Holland House, except you dine in town; and then it will not be infidelity, but spirited recrimination. Ever the sincere and affectionate friend of Lady Holland." These, however, if pressed as defects, would be but slight blemishes in a lifetime passed in kindliness,* charity, truthfulness and honour. If his wit or humour occasionally appear in excess in his memoirs, it is to be remembered how largely these relaxations of his life have been chronicled, and that all the while he was pursuing a serious, noble, useful career. The jests of Sydney Smith should be passed to his credit, as supererogatory gifts to the world, contributed after he had performed the usual duties of a valuable man. Men of worth and integrity are always to be honoured, but how little would we give for the table-talk of most of them, in comparison with that of this ingenious social benefactor. Sydney Smith was not, indeed, a profound spiritualist; he was *There is a rare instance of forbearance for a wit, which comes to light in one of Sydney Smith's letters to Lady Holland, in 1839: "I have written against -one of the cleverest pamphlets I ever read, which I think would Cover- and him with ridicule. At least it made me laugh very much in reading it; and there I stood, with the printer's devil, and the real devil close to me; and then I said, 'After all, this is very funny, and very well written, but it will give great pain to people who have been very kind and good to me through life; and what can I do to show my sense of that kindness, if it is not by flinging this pamphlet into the fire? So I flung it in, and My sense of ill-usage remaius, of course, the same." there was an end not a great philosopher; there have been deeper thinkers, more earnest divines. He was a dogmatist from his impulses and position in society. Fortunately his nature was broad and liberal, and his lot was cast among whigs and reformers. He was for expediency; but his expediency implied courage for the right and true. It was not vulgar temporizing, but an enlarged conformity to the well-being of society. It is for few to round the outer circle, broken as it is, of human excellence. Sydney Smith, like most of the best of men, was but a parcel man. But how complete within his limits, how perfect in his segment! He took a healthy view of life, as it must practically come home to the greater part of the world; saw its necessities, and complied with its duties, while he embroidered this plainness with his delightful humours. Such men should be cultivated at the present day from their rarity, for modern levelling is not favourable to their growth. They enlarge the freedom of life, add to its faculties as well as its enjoyments, clear the intellectual and warm the moral atmosphere. Characters there are enough, excrescences on society, oddities, in the sense of perversions of human nature, anomalous churls, crude, hard-hearted and repulsive; but there are few such illustrations of the kindly powers of life as this brave humourist-the man of generous humour and humours. PASSAGES FROM THE EDINBURGH REVIEW. DR. PARR'S SPITAL SERMON.* WHOEVER has had the good fortune to see Dr. Parr's wig, must have observed, that while it trespasses a little on the orthodox magnitude of perukes in the anterior parts, it scorns even Episcopal limits behind, and swells out into boundless convexity of frizz, the uɛya Oavua of barbers, and the terror of the literary world. After the manner of his wig, the doctor has constructed his sermon, giving us a discourse of no common length, and subjoining an immeasurable mass of notes, which appear to concern every learned man, and almost every unlearned man since the beginning of the world.† The style is such as to give a general impression of heaviness to the whole sermon. The Doctor is never simple and natural for a single instant. Everything smells of the rhetorician. He never appears to forget himself, or to be hurried by his subject into obvious language. Every expression seems to be the result of artifice and intention; and as to the worthy dedicatees, the LordMayor and Aldermen, unless the sermon be done into English by a person of honour, they may, perhaps, be flattered by the Doctor's politeness, but they can never be much edified by his meaning. * Ed. Rev., Oct., 1802. Spital Sermon, preached at Christ Church upon Easter-Tuesday, April 15, 1800. To which are added, Notes by Samuel Parr, LL.D. In the edition of Parr's Works, the sermon occupies fifty pages of pica text; the notes fill two hundred and twelve in brevier. |