66 at Holland House or at Rogers's, that he mankind as if they were mere machines; talked his best; but, unlike most wits, he the feelings or affections never enter into owed none of his excitement to wine. their calculations. If everything is to be Wine generally depressed his spirits, as it sacrificed to utility, why do you bury your did Byron's; and when he had drank noth-grandmother at all? why don't you cut her ing but a glass of barley water, he was in into small pieces at once, and make potable his highest spirits. These were his hap- soup of her ? " piest hours of inspiration; and the slightest Yet, Sydney Smith's wit, after all, was hint set him off striking out analogies, but the flavour of his mind. Of course, playing with them in his imagination, and people who knew nothing of him but as a adorning them with the flowers of his fancy. diner-out of the first water, and took their And you could generally trace his wit, as it estimate of his character from the witty were, in the process of manufacture. That nonsense they heard him pouring forth was one of the charms of his conversation. when talking, over a glass of wine, à tort His intellect was like an electric coil; you et à travers, quoting the anathema of the touched it, and it flashed out in sparkling Clerk of the General Assembly upon the coruscations at the touch. The conversa- Solemn League and Covenant for spoiling tion at one of Rogers's breakfasts turns the longs and shorts in Scotland, and upon American birds. 'My dear Rogers," relating how at College he had broken a says Smith, "if we were both in America, chess-board over the head of the Archwe should be tarred and feathered; and, bishop of Canterbury, suggesting that a lovely as we are by nature, I should be an Tory Dean ought to be preached to death ostrich and you an emu." Sir Charles by wild curates, praying that Spring Rice Lyell's book is brought on the carpet, and would go into holy orders, talking of the people wonder what sort of a spectacle our secret wish of his heart to roast a Quaker, era will present to the Sir Charles Lyell of arguing that the Jews should be kept for the next geological epoch. "Yes, imagine the private tyranny and intolerance of the an excavation on the site of St Paul's; bishops Thirty thousand Jews, it is fancy a lecture, by the Owen of some future but a small matter! do not be too hard age, on the thigh-bone of a Minor Canon, upon the Church; "recommending the Bishor the tooth of a Dean the form, quali-op of New Zealand to serve up roast misties, the knowledge, tastes, propensitities, sionary, with cold curate on the sideboard, he would discover from them." It was in for the entertainment of the Maori chiefs, this spirit that, picturing the embarrass- rallying the bishops for living vindictively, ments of the London University, he drew and evincing their aversion to a Whig his sketch of the bailiffs seizing on the Ministry by improved health, hoaxing innoair-pump, the exhausted receiver, and gal- cent dowagers by telling them that a cherub vanic batteries, and chasing the Professor had been caught in the Blue Mountains, of Modern History round the quadrangle. or that his dog was in the habit of eating a His list of tortures dooming Mrs. Mar- parish boy every morning for breakfast, cet, for example, to listen for a thousand and recommending them, when the theryears to conversations between Caroline mometer was in the nineties, to take off and Emily, where Caroline should always their skin and sit in their bones, as he did; give wrong explanations in chemistry, and throwing out wild conjectures upon the Emily, in the end, be unable to distinguish possibility of the existence of a world where an acid from an alkali; and Macaulay to men and women are all made of stone, or have false dates and facts of the reign of perhaps of Parian marble, and shouting out Queen Anne for ever shouted in his ears, to Sir Roderick Murchison to ask how he all liberal and honest opinions ridiculed in would like to pass eternity with a grey his presence, and not able to say a single wacke woman; talking about confounding word in their defence, was thrown off in a the number of the Muses with the Thirtyconversation at Romilly's on the tortures nine Articles when he took an extra glass that Dante bad invented. And so, too, of wine, and setting himself right by rewas his description of the Utilitarians. peating the lines, and finding “ Descend ye "That man is so hard," says Smith, criti-Thirty-nine" two feet too long-thought cising a quotation from Mr. James Mill, or him a very clever and witty man, but, perone of the Westminster Reviewers, "that haps, a joker of jokes, and nothing more. you might drive a broad-wheeled waggon over him, and it would produce no impression; if you were to bore holes in him with a gimlet, I am convinced sawdust would come out of him. He and his school treat 66 These people knew nothing of the depth and richness of his mind. The flash and sparkle of his thought were so dazzling that none but those who knew him well-knew him, that is, in his quiet and soberer moods-gave him credit for the power of thought, the sense, and prudence that formed the fibre of his intellect. Yet few men possessed higher powers of thought, of eloquence, of earnestness, of courage, than Sydney Smith. Possessing as much wit as a man without a grain of his sense, he had as much sense as a man without a spark of his wit. But he had one fault. He did not understand the art of cant; he never thought of his cloth. His serious conversation with two or three friends on the lawn at Coombe Florey was like the serious conversation of Charles Lamb, superior to that of his lighter and gayer hours. But, like Macaulay's flashes of silence, these lapses of Sydney Smith into the proprieties of conversation, into thought and philosophy, and iced common sense, were reserved for his own fireside, and for the friends of his fireside. Take up his sermons, or run your eye through the reflections and precepts which he notes in his diary, and you see at once what a vein of deep religious thought ran through his nature, what pure and noble conceptions he formed of life, and of his own work as a Christian minister; but even here you may trace the hand of the wit in his criticism upon the false sentiments of religion and philosophy. He ranked a comfortable house as a source of happiness next to health and a pure conscience. "To be unhappy is the luxury of a false religion." "No reflecting man can ever wish to adulterate manly piety (the parent of all that is good in the world) with mummery and pa-inburgh Review, and to scribble witty nonrade. But we are strange, very strange creatures, and it is better, perhaps, not to place too much confidence in our reason alone. If anything, there is, perhaps, too little pomp and ceremony in our worship, instead of too much. We quarrelled with the Roman Catholic Church in a great hurry and a great passion, and furious with spleen; clothed ourselves with sackcloth because she was habited in brocade; rushing, like children, from one extreme to another, and blind to all medium between complication and barrenness, formality and neglect." Moralists tell you of the evils of wealth and station, and the happiness of poverty. I have been very poor the greatest part of my life, and have borne it as well I believe as most people; but I can safely say that I have been happier every guinea I have gained." "How exquisitely absurd to tell girls that beauty is of no value, dress of no use! Beauty is of value; her whole prospects and happiness in life may often depend upon a new gown or a becoming bonnet, and if she has five grains of common sense she will find this out. The great thing is to teach her their just value, and that there must be something better under the bonnet than a pretty face for real happiness. But never sacrifice truth." Upon matters of business, too, upon anything affecting the administration of his parish, or his duties as a Canon of Bristol or St. Paul's, or as a country gentleman and a magistrate, Sydney Smith was as prompt, as energetic, and as business-like as a man who never made a joke in his life. Looking upon the country as a kind of healthy grave, believing that most of the happiness of life was to be found in association with the bad weather, coal fires, and good society of a crowded city, and that the main use of the country was to give one a keener relish for London life, Sydney Smith settled down upon a Yorkshire Vicarage in the spirit of a man who had talked of turnips and dogs, and drank ale with his grooms all his life, and in a couple of years this "powerful son of Heaven," this prince of dinner-table wits, the rival of Talleyrand, of Canning, and of Frere, was the life and soul of a village, where, as he said, people only dined out once in seven years, and where, except then, nothing was visible but crows. He built his own house without the assistance of an architect, farmed his own glebe with the aid of a speaking trumpet and a telescope in the style of an Illinois squatter, bred horses like the rest of his parishioners, and sat down at his desk at the close of his day's work to throw off articles for the Ed 66 sense for Lady Holland and Lady Grey on the books and politics and scandal of the hour, without ever uttering a syllable of peevish complaint about being thrown away, being desolate, or such like trash. At Bristol and at St. Paul's Sydney Smith distinguished himself as the most business-like man in the Chapter; and in dealing with practical questions in the Edinburgh Review, with questions like those of Church Government, Penal Settlements, Prison Discipline, and the Game Laws, he dealt with them in the keen hard-headed style of a model Chairman of Quarter Sessions. His papers on Botany Bay and the Game Laws, and his speeches on Catholic Emancipation and Parliamentary Reform might all have been addressed to crowded benches in the House of Commons at two o'clock in the morning. They glitter with wit, like almost everything that he wrote; but their wit is, after all, but the foil of his arguments, and his arguments are those of a statesman, arguments that even the Tory squires would turn over in their minds as they lit their cigars to walk home. Contrast any of these articles of Syd tions to the Edinburgh Review to chance and Jeffrey. Take up any of these articles and you have Sydney Smith before you at once, and generally in his best form, in all his brilliance, benevolence, and flashing decision; and by the light of Lady Holland's hints as to her father's habits of work, one can, by a very slight effort of imagination, picture him at his fireside galloping through the pages of a thick quarto in the course of ney Smith with the speeches of Sheridan, and | point of view. And his style is in its way you see at once what a mass of tough argu- perfect. It is the exact mirror of his ment and of hard thought underlies Sydney thought. He wrote as he talked, wrote, Smith's wit when he thought it necessary to that is, with the dash of a man of keen wit be anything more than witty. Sheridan, in and of high intelligence, rarely revised his comparison, is mere tinsel. Possessing manuscript, and left most of his contribupowers of raillery equal, at least, to those of Sheridan, Sydney Smith, nevertheless, unlike Sheridan, never thought of depending on these alone in discussing a question of politics or social morality. His forte was logic, and he marshalled his arguments with the tact of a Parliamentary general. He puts his own arguments in the terse and decisive form of the most accomplished master of fence, and he scalps the fallacies of an opponent in the neat and off-hand a morning, or sitting down at his desk in style of that Red Indian of Parliamentary debate, Mr. Lowe. You see at a glance that he is full of his subject, master of all its arguments, and knows all the points of his opponent. He never haggles over a weak argument. He goes to the heart of the question at once, seizes all its strongest points, and works these up in their most powerful and vivid forms. There is an air of touch and go in his style; he deals with everything with an apparently light hand; but analyze his views and his arguments, and in nine cases out of ten you find them characterized by the keen intelligence, good sense, and breadth of a man of the world looking at the matter in the dry light of a political epicurean. And yet, with all this, Sydney Smith always contrives to close his discussion of a serious question in the tone of a man quite in earnest in the tone of a man, that is, whose convictions are thoroughly ingrained — of a man who, if called upon, can express those convictions with a strength of language corresponding with their depth and intensity in his own mind; but who, relying at present upon their own inherent plausibility, tempers his expressions by the rules of chivalry and good breeding. the evening looking through his papers and his bills with the plodding industry of an attorney's clerk, and then, by way of variation in his employment, taking up his pen to throw off a few pages of trifling nonsense" for Jeffrey. He wrote with great rapidity. "No hesitation, no erasures, no stopping to consider and round his periods, no writing for effect, but a pouring out of the fulness of his mind and feelings, for he was heart and soul whatever he undertook. He hardly ever altered or corrected; 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 as soon as finished, and say, starting up and addressing his wife, 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 his manuscript needed this revision; for, with the exception of Jeffrey's, it was probably the worst that Constable's printers had to puzzle out for the Edinburgh Review. He compared it himself to the hieroglyphics of a swarm of ants escaping from an ink bottle and walking over a sheet of paper without wiping their legs; and when his wife enclosed him an illegible passage from Of art and polish, as art and polish were one of his letters from London, containing understood by Macaulay, you find no traces directions about the management of his in Sydney Smith. His daughter calls him farm, and asked for an interpretation, he a sort of rough rider of subjects; and the simply returned it with the explanation that phrase is an apt one. He never troubled he must decline ever reading his own himself with the metaphysics of a question; handwriting four-and-twenty hours after he he never troubled himself with its triviali- had written it." Yet writing, as he genties. Taking up only those topics of talk erally did, upon the impulse of the moment, that were of the directest personal in- no man ever wrote more consistently, more terest, those topics that were under dis- honestly, or more courageously. "Catch cussion in the House of Commons, in me, if you can," he said, with a touch of Cathedral Chapters, and at every dinner pride, when collecting his contributions to table, Sydney Smith selected their most the Edinburgh Review for republication, telling points, and then sat down to work in any one illiberal sentiment, or in any these up with his own vigorous understand- opinion which I have need to recant; and ing, from what I may call the common sense that after twenty years' scribbling upon all subjects." And Sydney Smith had rea- | justice and common 'sense, they combine, son to think and speak with pride of his in a rare degree, in their style, English writings from this point of view, for, ani- sense and French wit, and form, with the mated as they are by high purpose, and writings of Jeffrey and Macaulay, the most illustrating as they do, in the most vivid characteristic of the contributions to the and brilliant form, his passionate love of Edinburgh Review. NATURE gives a detailed description of an atmospheric telegraph invented by Signor Guattari, which professes to effect by means of compressed air all that is performed by an electric battery. By an ingenious system of tubes and stopcocks the inventor creates currents, or pulsations of air, which set in motion a lever connected with the writing apparatus. Any number of conducting tubes may be employed, and the machinery is so simple that it cannot get out of order. Of course it has an advantage over the electric system in being wholly unaffected by atmospheric influences, and in the requisite medium being always at hand. The Royal Scientific Institute of Naples has awarded to Signor Guattari a gold medal, in recognition of what they consider an important invention, adding a graceful tribute on its presentation to the effect that it was the only gold medal which the institute had ever awarded. As experiments with the machine were successfully conducted only a few weeks ago, the system cannot be pronounced chimerical; and we hope the attention of our Post Office authorities will be directed to it. a prince [the term may include a president] sends forces into a nation where the people are poor and ignorant, he may lawfully put the half of them to death and make slaves of the rest [putting them all to death is simpler and saves trouble] in order to civilize and seduce them from their barbarous way of living. It is a very kingly, honourable, and frequent practice when one prince desires the assistance of another to secure him against an invasion, that the assistant, when he has driven out the looks better to annex part of them], and kill, iminvader, should seize on the dominions himself [it prison, or banish the prince he came to relieve. Only in modern times princes are not killed, but provided with a comfortable retiring pension. With the exceptions we have noticed, there is still some sense in these pithy remarks. A few words should have been added on the duty of neutrals. The great principle is to stand still so long as you are not hurt yourself, see your neighbours swallowed up without disturbing the process by useless complaints, and make the best market you can from the wants of the belligerents. A few corollaries may perhaps be added when the present war has added a little to our experience. Pall Mall Gazette. Sometimes (says the great traveller, Captain Gulliver) the quarrel between two princes is to decide which of them shall dispossess a third of his dominions, where neither of them pretends to any right On the same principle occasionally, to do them justice, they try to make treaties instead of quarrelling. Sometimes (he proceeds) one prince quarrels with another for fear the other should quarrel with him. Sometimes a war is entered upon because the enemy is too strong, and sometimes because he is too weak. Sometimes our neighbours want the things which we have, or have the things which we want; and we both fight till they take ours or give us theirs. It is a very justifiable cause of war to invade a country after the people have been wasted by famine, destroyed by pestilence, or embroiled by factions among themselves (and still more, we will venture to add, if they are in danger of becoming too closely united]. It is justifiable to enter into a war against our nearest ally when one of his towns lies convenient for us or a territory of land that would render our dominions round and compact [a rude and old-fashioned expression for the more graceful term of a rectification of the frontiers]. If "OHE! LAMBERT!"-Many versions have been published of the origin of this saying in France. The following may be relied upon as the correct one. I was an eye-witness of the circumstance: "In 1848, after the declaration of the Republic in France, it became the fashion for the National Guards of the larger towns to invite detachments of those of Paris to visit and fraternize' with them, for the purpose of fellowship and union against the common enemies, the socialists and the reactionary parties (Imperialist and Royal). The National Guards of Paris were thus invited by those of Havre. At the close of the fete a train awaited the Parisians at the Havre station, wherein most were seated, the departure being delayed to fill the carriages. Just at this period a Parisian National Guard, who had been separated from his friend, ran along the carriages shouting into each as he passed it-Ohe! Lambert! Es-tu-la?' The persistence of his endeavours raised a general laugh, and for some time the cry became popular in the streets, and then 'died out,' to be revived a year or two ago after being forgotten for many years." Notes and Queries. From The Pall Mall Gazette. had been unjustly attacked by the Emperor and the Pope, and that he had asked for the King's protection for himself and the Count Mirandola. In consequence whereof the King had received tidings of the desire of so many great princes and estates of the Holy Empire for a Christian understanding with them towards the saving of German liberty. The Emperor, and his brother, the Roman King, had, instead of augmenting the Empire, diminished it, inasmuch as they had swallowed wholesale (ganz und gar gefressen) great foundations, principal THE proclamation to the German nation which the Emperor issued before he left for the war, and wherein he promised to save it as he had saved France, and to bring it liberty from its oppressors generally and chiefly from the rapacious Prussian King, is not without its curious pendant. It was in 1552 that that most Christian French King, Henry II., issued a very similar document to the German nation by way of introduction to the robbery of the three episcopates of Metz, Toul, and Verdun.ities, cities, and communes. Why does the His peacefulness, he says, had been inter- Emperor prohibit the Germans to serve preted by his enemies as fear. Meanwhile, anybody but him, or to take into council, many heavy complaints by a number of against their ancient freedom, any other electors, princes, and other excellent people potentate? How many honest, sincere, of the German nation had come before him, and brave men had the Emperor miserably of their being oppressed by the Emperor betrayed through his bloodhounds, specially with unbearable tyranny and servitude, so trained for that purpose, and had brought much so that nothing more certain could them to disgraceful death with horrible torfollow therefrom than that, with everlasting tures? From these motives the King had loss of the national freedom of Germany not been able to refuse his aid to the Gerand the perishing of many people, a mon-man Princes and estates, but had, after archy would be built up unto the Emperor divine impulse and inspiration, created with and the House of Austria. To hear this them an alliance. And because for such had been very grievous to the King, not merely because he was of the same origin as the Germans, inasmuch as his own ancestors had also been Germans, but also on account of the treaties and ancient friendship which through similarity of customs had always been held steadily between the two nations before those present evil practices of the Emperor, and this had served for the common weal as well as for the real safety of the crown of France. A change from German liberty to everlasting servitude, and the consequent misery of the German nation and the Holy Empire, could not, therefore, come to pass without injuring France, since the German nation was a strong citadel not only for all France but all Christendom. The King had for this reason always hoped that those two strongest nations of Christendom would some day combine their arms, so that they should have absolutely nothing more to fear from the unbelievers (Turks) or any other enemy. Since, however, hitherto no such unanimity of princes had existed from which a union of the German nation could have been hoped for, and now one, now the other had asked for his assistance, the King had not known how to tender his hand to the thus disunited empire. Now the almighty, everlasting God, however, who alone was a just master, had thus ordained it, that the Duke Octavio of Parma and Piacenza LIVING AGE. VOL. XVIII. 834 great benefit he hoped to obtain everlasting Several German princes allowed themselves to be deluded by this proclamation, and the consequence was the loss of those portions of German territory which the King of France had long coveted. Whatever may have been the intent of Napoleon's recent declaration, there are very significant signs visible already that Germany has an eye upon some of those German provinces which have at different periods been annnexed to France, but which still retain their genuine German 'mundart," together with their homely old manners and customs. 66 |