Born, at Woodford, Essex, 3 June 1771. At school at Southampton, 1777–82. At Winchester School, July 1782 to 1789. Matric., New Coll., Oxford, 7 Feb. 1789; Fellow, 1790–1800; B.A., 1792; M.A., 1796. Ordained, 1794. Curate of Nether-Avon, Wilts., 1794–97. To Edinburgh, as private tutor to Michael Beach, 1798. Married Catherine Amelia Pybus, 2 July 1800. Founder of “Edinburgh Review,” 1803; contributor till March 1827. Removed to London, 1803. Lectured at Royal Institution, 1804, 1805, 1806. Preacher at Foundling Hospital, March 1805 to Oct. 1808. Rector of Foston-le-Clay, Yorkshire, 1806–29. Rector of Londesborough, 1825–32. Visit to Paris, 1826. Canon of Bristol, 1828. Rector of Combe-Florey, Somersetshire, 1829–31. Canon Residentiary of St. Paul’s Cathedral, 1831. Visit to Paris, 1835. Died, in London, 22 Feb. 1845. Buried at Kensal Green. Works: (exclusive of separate sermons); “Six Sermons,” 1800; “Sermons” (2 vols.), 1801 (2nd edn., same year); “Letters on the Subject of the Catholics” (under pseud.: “Peter Plymley”), 1807–08; “Sermons” (2 vols.), 1809; “The Judge that smites contrary to the Law” (priv. ptd.), 1824; “Catholic Claims,” 1825; “Letters to the Electors on the Catholic Question,” 1826 (2nd edn. same year); “Mr. Dyson’s Speech to the Freeholders on Reform,” 1831; “Three Letters to Archdeacon Singleton,” 1837, 1838, 1839; “Letter to Lord John Russell,” 1838; “Ballot,” 1839 (3rd edn. same year); “Works” (4 vols.), 1839–40; “Letters on American Debts,” 1844 (2nd edn. same year). Posthumous: “A Fragment on the Irish Roman Catholic Church,” 1845 (7th edn. same year); “Sermons preached at St. Paul’s Cathedral,” 1846; “Elementary Sketches of Moral Philosophy,” ed. by Lord Jeffrey, 1850 (2nd edn. same year; priv. ptd., 1849); “Essays” (from “Edinburgh Rev.”) [1874]. Collected Works: in 3 vols., 1854. Life: “Life and Letters” by Lady Holland, 1855; “Life,” by S. J. Reid, 1884.

Personal

  I never saw a man so formed to float down the stream of conversation, and, without seeming to have any direct influence upon it, to give it his own hue and charm. He is about fifty, corpulent, but not gross, with a great fund of good nature, and would be thought by a person who saw him only once, and transiently, merely a gay, easy gentleman, careless of everything but the pleasure of conversation and society. This would be a great injustice to him, and one that offends him, I am told; for, notwithstanding the easy grace and light playfulness of his wit, which comes forth with unexhausted and inexhaustible facility, and reminded me continually of the phosphoric brilliancy of the ocean, which sparkles more brightly in proportion as the force opposed to it is greater, yet he is a man of much culture, with plain good-sense, a sound, discreet judgment, and remarkably just and accurate habits of reasoning, and values himself upon these, as well as on his admirable humor. This is an union of opposite qualities, such as nature usually delights to hold asunder, and such as makes him, whether in company or alone, an irresistibly amusing companion; for, while his humor gives such grace to his argument that it comes with the charm of wit, and his wit is so appropriate that its sallies are often logic in masquerade, his good-sense and good-nature are so prevalent that he never, or rarely, offends against the proprieties of life or society, and never says anything that he or anybody else need to regret afterwards.

  Dined at Rogers’s. A distinguished party…. Smith particularly amusing. Have rather held out against him hitherto; but this day he conquered me; and I now am his victim, in the laughing way, for life. His imagination of a duel between two doctors, with oil of croton on the tips of their fingers, trying to touch each other’s lips highly ludicrous. What Rogers says of Smith, very true, that whenever the conversation is getting dull, he throws in some touch which makes it rebound, and rise again as light as ever. Ward’s artificial efforts, which to me are always painful, made still more so by their contrast to Smith’s natural and overflowing exuberance. Luttrel too, considerably extinguished to-day; but there is this difference between Luttrel and Smith—that after the former, you remember what good things he said, and after the latter, you merely remember how much you laughed.

  Tickler. “Yes—Sydney Smith has a rare genius for the grotesque. He is, with his quibs and cranks, a formidable enemy to pomposity and pretension. No man can wear a big wig comfortably in his presence; the absurdity of such enormous frizzle is felt; and the dignitary would fain exchange all that horsehair for a few scattered locks of another animal.”

  I have really taken a great liking to him. He is full of wit, humor, and shrewdness. He is not one of those show-talkers who reserve all their good things for special occasions. It seems to be his greatest luxury to keep his wife and daughters laughing for two or three hours every day. His notions of law, government, and trade are surprisingly clear and just. His misfortune is to have chosen a profession at once above him and below him. Zeal would have made him a prodigy; formality and bigotry would have made him a bishop; but he could neither rise to the duties of his order, nor stoop to its degradations.

  Sydney Smith preached a most beautiful, eloquent sermon this morning to a crowded, alas! dining-room. I like him better so than when in society. He is, as Mr. Sneyd says, something between Cato and Punch. You must allow that this describes his physique admirably.

  I do not know any man whom I should wish more to make my friend: super eminent talents and an excellent heart, which in my opinion almost always go together.

  Went to St. Paul’s yesterday evening, to hear Sydney Smith preach. He is very good; manner impressive, voice sonorous and agreeable, rather familiar, but not offensively so, language simple and unadorned, sermon clever and illustrative.

  His great delight was to produce a succession of ludicrous images: these followed each other with a rapidity that scarcely left time to laugh; he himself laughing louder and with more enjoyment than any one. This electric contact of mirth came and went with the occasion; it cannot be repeated or reproduced. Any thing would give occasion to it. For instance, having seen in the newspapers that Sir Æneas Mackintosh was come to town, he drew such a ludicrous caricature of Sir Æneas and Lady Dido, for the amusement of their namesake, that Sir James Mackintosh rolled on the floor in fits of laughter, and Sydney Smith, striding across him, exclaimed “Ruat Justitia!”

  He had no philosophic turn, little poetic fancy, and scarce any eloquence, but a prodigious fund of innate sagacity, vast powers of humorous illustration, and a clear perception of the practical bearing of every question…. In society he was very much sought after, from the fame of his convivial talents and the real force of his colloquial expressions; but there was a constant straining after effect, and too little interchange of thought to raise his discourse to a very high charm.

  It signified not what the materials were: I never remember a dull dinner in his company. He extracted amusement from every subject, however hopeless. He descended, and adapted himself to the meanest capacity, without seeming to do so; he led without seeking to lead; he never sought to shine—the light appeared because he could not help it. Nobody felt excluded. He had the happy art of always saying the best thing in the best manner to the right person at the right moment; it was a touch-and-go impossible to describe, guided by such tact and attention to the feelings of others, that those he most attacked seemed most to enjoy the attack; never in the same mood for two minutes together, and each mood seemed to be more agreeable than the last.

  He was a giant when roused, and the goad which roused him was Injustice. He was clear from envy, hatred, and all uncharitableness, and incapable of any littleness. He was ever ready to defend the weak. He showed as much zeal in saving a poor village boy, as in aiding a Minister of State. His hatred of every form of cant and affectation was only equalled by his prompt and unerring detection of it…. There never was a man in whom they were calculated to excite more disgust than the brave, frank, and high-spirited gentleman whose letters are before us. For in him a passion for truth was enlightened by the utmost perspicacity of mind, and the most acute sense of the ludicrous and unseemly.

  He came, and sat down, broad and comfortable, in the middle of my sofa, with his hands on his stick, as if to support himself in a vast development of voice; and then he began, like the great bell of St. Paul’s, making me start at the first stroke. He looked with shy dislike at my trumpet, for which there was truly no occasion. I was more likely to fly to the furthest corner of the room. It was always his boast that I did not want my trumpet when he talked with me.

  He seems to have been a thoroughly good husband, good father, good master—loving and beloved—caring for the convenience, the feelings, of all round him—free from parsimony, equally free from prodigality—free from the vulgarity which is ashamed of poverty, and the vulgarity which pretends to despise wealth.

  In default of an episcopal palace, Sydney Smith removed, in 1828, to Combe Florey, near Taunton, which he soon converted into one of the most comfortable and delightful of parsonages…. On one occasion, when some London visitors were expected, he called in art to aid nature, and caused oranges to be tied to the shrubs in the drive and garden. The stratagem succeeded admirably, and great was his exultation when an unlucky urchin from the village was detected in the act of sucking one through a quill…. Another time, on a lady’s happening to hint that the pretty paddock would be improved by deer, he fitted his two donkeys with antlers, and placed them with this extraordinary head-gear on a rising ground immediately in front of the windows. The effect, enhanced by the puzzled looks of the animals, was ludicrous in the extreme.

  Like pious and brave old Herbert, he found a kingdom in his mind which he knew how to rule and to enjoy; and this priceless boon was his triumph and comfort in the lowliest struggles and in the highest prosperity. It irradiated the damp walls of his first parsonage with the glow of wit; nerved his heart, as a poor vicar, to plead the cause of reform against the banded conservatives of a realm; hinted a thousand expedients to beguile isolation and indigence of their gloom; invested his presence and speech with self-possession and authority in the peasant’s hut and at the bishop’s table; made him an architect, a physician, a judge, a schoolmaster, a critic, a reformer, the choicest man of society, the most efficient of domestic economists, the best of correspondents, the most practical of political writers, the most impressive of preachers, the most genial of companions; a good farmer, a patient nurse, and an admirable husband, father, and friend. The integrity, good sense, and moral energy, which gave birth to this versatile exercise of his faculties, constitute the broad and solid foundation of Sydney Smith’s character; they were the essential traits of the man, the base to that noble column of which wit formed the capital and wisdom the shaft. In the temple of humanity what support it yielded during his life, and how well-proportioned and complete it now stands to the eye of memory, an unbroken and sky-pointing cenotaph on his honored grave!

  I at this time [1832] became acquainted with Sydney Smith, through my friend Newton. His wit and humour were always unpremeditated, and seemed not so much the result of efforts to amuse, as the overflowing of a mind full of imagery, instantly ready to combine with whatever passed in conversation. His very exaggerations took away the sting of his most personal witticisms, and I suppose no man was ever so amusing with so little offence; for those who were the subjects of his jokes were often the most ready to relate them.

  Such eyes, so noble a brow, with its brown hair thinly scattered; so symmetrical a profile, so expressive a mouth, so fine and glowing a complexion; such a combination of manly dignity and beauty,—were never before seen, nor since, as were combined in the face of that short, slight, active youth, Sydney Smith.

  While his main delight was in intellectual intercourse, and, during his more active life, in intellectual exertion, he could hardly be called a student of literature. He thought it no more necessary for a man to remember the different books that had made him wise than the different dinners that had made him healthy: he looked for the result of good feeding in a powerful body, and that of good reading in a full strong mind. Thus his pleasure in the acquaintance of authors was rather in the men and women themselves than in the merit of this or that production.

  The only wit, perhaps, on record, whom brilliant social success had done nothing to spoil or harden; a man who heartened himself up to enjoy, and to make others enjoy, by the sound of his own genial laugh; whose tongue was as keen as a Damascus blade when he had to deal with bigotry, or falsehood, or affectation; but whose forbearance and gentleness to those, however obscure, whom he deemed honest, were as healing as his sarcasm could be vitriolic.

  The special and reportable sallies of Sydney Smith have been, of course, often repeated, but the fanciful fun and inexhaustible humorous drollery of his conversation among his intimates can never be adequately rendered or reproduced. He bubbled over with mirth, of which his own enjoyment formed an irresistible element, he shook, and his eyes glistened at his own ludicrous ideas, as they dawned upon his brain; and it would be impossible to convey the faintest ideas of the genial humor of his habitual talk by merely repeating separate witticisms and repartees.

  He was buried at Kensal Green Cemetery, on Friday the 28th; the funeral was strictly private, and only a few of his nearest relatives and friends were present; but in spirit at least, there was no section of the nation which was not represented by the sorrow round that grave. There is an official handbook to the vast and silent city of the dead in which he sleeps, and yet so late as the summer of 1883, the name of one of the truest benefactors of the English people who rests within its gates, was not judged of sufficient importance to be included in the pages of that manual. Those who wish to make a pilgrimage to the grave of Sydney Smith, will therefore be glad to know that they can easily find it, by following the north walk until they are opposite the entrance to the catacombs. Turning to the left at that point, they will discover in the fifth row from the walk a raised tomb of Portland stone…. With the solitary exception of a small painted window (erected through the efforts of his successor Mr. Sanford) in the church at Combe-Florey, the grave in Kensal Green is the only memorial to Sydney Smith which England has to show.

  He was a very striking looking man, with a countenance indicating great intellectual power; a countenance, indeed, which might have been said to wear a thoughtful, if not rather a stern expression in repose—only that it never was in repose. His strength of mind, firmness of purpose, and great general ability, ought, no doubt, to have earned for him a bishopric from the Whigs, but unluckily his wit lost it him. The chiefs of his party had not courage enough (more shame to them) to place so unquenchable a live firework upon the episcopal bench, though nobody who knew him ever doubted that he would have made an excellent bishop. For he was thoroughly conscientious, knew men, and understood life in all its forms and varieties, and was rendered indulgent, both to high and low, by the softening influence of humour, as well as by the breadth and vigor of his mind. He also distinguished himself as a preacher, but that as a qualification for a bishop, whose business it is to rule, guide, and organise, seems to me to be of secondary importance.

  The manner of the preacher remains more vividly present to my mind than his words. He spoke with extreme rapidity, and had the special gift of combining extreme rapidity of utterance with very perfect clearness. His manner, I remember thinking, was unlike any that I had ever witnessed in the pulpit, and appeared to me to resemble rather that of a very earnest speaker at the hustings than the usual pulpit style. His sentences seemed to run down-hill, with continually increasing speed till they came to a full stop at the bottom. It was, I think, the only sermon I ever heard which I wished longer. He carried me with him completely, for the century was in those days, like me, young.

General

  If no publication ever came with more defective claims, in point of theological quality, than these sermons, we must employ a different language as to what they exhibit of intellectual ability and moral instruction. They display a great deal of acuteness, diversified mental activity, and independent thinking. Whatever else there is, there is no commonplace. The matter is sometimes too bad, sometimes too good, but always too shrewd, to be dull. The author is a sharp observer of mankind, and has a large portion of knowledge of the world…. The cast of his language compels an unwilling suspicion, that the purpose is not so much to enforce the subject, as to parade it; and, in doing so, to play off the greatest possible number of quaint pranks of rhetorical manœuvre. We doubt whether we ever saw, within an equal space, so many fantastic quiddities of diction, such a perverse study to twitch our strong, honest, manful, old language into uncouth postures and vain antics.

  The present publication [“A sermon preached before his Grace the Archbishop of York,”] etc., is by far the worst of all his performances, avowed or imputed. Literary merit it has none; but in arrogance, presumption, and absurdity it far outdoes all his former outdoings.

  Almost everything he has written is so characteristic, that it would be difficult to attribute it to any other man. The marked individual features, and the rare combination of powers, displayed in his works, give them a fascination unconnected with the subject of which he treats, or the general correctness of his views. He sometimes hits the mark in the white, he sometimes misses it altogether; for he by no means confines his pen to themes to which he is calculated to do justice; but whether he hits or misses, he is always sparkling and delightful…. The great peculiarity of his works, apart from the qualities of character they display, is their singular blending of the beautiful with the ludicrous; and this is the source of his refinement. He is keen and personal, almost fierce and merciless, in his attacks on public abuses; he has no check on his humor from authority or conventional forms; and yet he very rarely violates good taste. There is much good nature in him in spite of his severity. His quick perception of what is laughable modifies his sensibility to what is detestable. He cannot be grave for ten minutes, though on the gravest of subjects. His indignation and invective are almost ever followed by some jesting allusion or grotesque conceit. He draws down upon the object of his censure both scorn and laughter; and makes even abuse palatable by clothing it in phrases or images which charm by their beauty or wit.

  His sermons are replete with pure doctrine, toleration, and liberality of sentiment. The Irish Catholics ought to erect a monument to him, with his statue on the top—looking very grave, but with the hands “holding both his sides,” and the tablets at the base covered with bas-relief selected from the graphic pages of Peter Plymley. Although wit is the great predominating characteristic of the writings of Sydney Smith, the finest and most original humour is not unfrequently displayed.

  A pen which, I think, I may venture to assert was never sullied by private passion or private interest, never degraded by an impure or unworthy motive, and, with all its unexampled powers of sarcasm, never wounding but for the public good…. He was a sort of rough-rider of a subject; sometimes originating, but more frequently taking up what others had for years been stating humbly, or timidly, or obscurely, or lengthily, or imperfectly, or dully, to the world; extracting at once its essence, unveiling the motives of his opponents, and placing his case clearly, concisely, simply, eloquently, boldly, brightly, before the public eye. Thus the subject became read, thought of, discussed, and often acted upon by thousands of persons dispersed over various parts of the world. This cannot have been without powerful influence on the opinions and conduct of society.

  Sydney Smith was an after-dinner writer: his words have a flow, a vigor, an expression, which is not given to hungry mortals; you seem to read of good wine, of good cheer, of beaming and buoyant enjoyment. There is little trace of labor in his composition: it is poured forth like an unceasing torrent, rejoicing daily to run its course. And what courage there is in it! There is as much variety of pluck in writing across a sheet as in riding across a country.

  Mrs. Austin justly remarks that the reputation of Sydney Smith has risen since his death. It has risen, and it is to rise. Every year lessens the number of those who can remember the marvellous charm of his conversation, that diaphragm-shaking, fancy-chasing, oddity-piling, incongruity-linking, hyperbole-topping, wonder-working faculty of his, which a bookful of Homeric compound adjectives would still leave undescribed. But meanwhile, the true proportions of that large intellect have been growing upon the vision of men. Blinded with tears of laughter, they could not estimate his magnitude. Hands palsied by convulsive cachinnations were too unsteady to hold the measure and fit the colossus with a judgment. Now it is better understood how all that wit was only the efflorescence of his greatness—the waving wild flowers on the surface of a pyramid. Time may take from the edifice of his fame some of its lighter decorations, obliterate quaint carvings, decapitate some grotesque and pendant gargoles, destroy some rich flamboyant word traceries; but that very spoliation will only display more completely the solid foundation, the broad harmonious plan of his life’s structure, and exhibit the fine conscientiousness with which those parts of the building most remote from the public eye were finished, even as they most seem…. The wit of Sydney Smith was always under the control of good taste and good feeling. It was never mischievous to him by any unseemliness, impertinence, or vulgarity. Throughout his writings, so remarkable for natural flow and freedom of style, so simple and so idiomatic, you search in vain for anything slipshod, for triteness or chit-chat, for a single colloquial solecism. His style, like golden haired Pyrrha, is always simplex munditiis.

  There are passages in them tinged with the wit which made him so delightful a companion out of the pulpit, but this does not in the least impair their seriousness. He seems to me, in these discourses, to be at all times equally earnest, eloquent, and sound in the view he takes of his subject, and the more I read them the more I find them to contain.

  Underneath the almost riotous exuberance of his humour, joyous to himself as to all around him, there ever lay a foundation of strong masculine sense, as well as of wholesome satire upon the foibles or wrongdoings of the world…. Swift somewhere speaks of “the Ghost of Wit delighting to walk after the death of the body.” Sydney Smith’s writings are never haunted by this spirit. His wit comes unsought for, serves its purpose, and he passes at once again into serious argument—serious, but always short and pithy in style. Those who love Dryden—and they ought to be legion—will recognise the charm, belonging to the bold and unexpected phrases of his poetry. Sydney Smith’s prose has the same charm. His phrases are never pedantic or pirated, but always fresh from the mint of his own genius. He never looked over again what he had once written, and, as I know, could hardly ever be persuaded to correct the errors of a proof-sheet. He revelled in his own manner of handling a subject, and was comparatively careless of its effect on others.

  His style has something of the reported character of his conversation; mixed up with the “infinite humour,” we have clear statement of pertinent facts and sound arguments. We are not conscious of any awkwardness of transition from the comic to the serious; he usually writes with a serious purpose—with the object of discrediting, both by reason and by ridicule, something that he disapproves of. He is often humorous, purely for the sake of the humour, but his prevailing purposes are serious. What is more, he did not, like the “Spectator,” the “Rambler,” and the “Citizen of the World,” attack ignorance, folly, bigotry, and vice with inoffensive generality, directing his ridicule against imaginary types; but he openly assailed and turned to scorn living men, and laws, parties, and institutions that were in actual existence. He was far from surveying mankind with the artistic impartiality of Goldsmith; he used his wit unmercifully on the side of a party; he was one of the most aggressive of the Edinburgh Reviewers…. Although a good-natured man, without a trace of the sourness and fierceness of Swift, and now recognised as having used his powers in the main on the side of good sense and good feeling, he was most provokingly and audaciously personal in his strictures. This point must be especially attended to in an estimate of Sydney Smith as a master of the ludicrous; the mere fact of overt personality distinguishes him from all our great humorists or satirists except Swift, and he is distinguished from Swift by his greater heartiness of nature. He is too complacent, too aboundingly self-satisfied, too buoyantly full of spirits, to hate anybody; but he burlesques them, derides them, and abuses them with the most exasperating effrontery—in a way that is great fun to the reader, but exquisite torture to the victim.

  Sydney Smith was one of the most formidable pamphleteers which this country has ever produced. With extraordinary powers of wit, sarcasm, and expression, his writings had an immense effect on the politics of his time. Born in 1771, and producing his most pungent work—“The Letters of Peter Plymley”—in 1807 and 1808, he was at the zenith of his reputation at the close of the great war. Smith’s forte lay in unsparing and occasionally indiscriminating attack. His writings were logical; but he rarely relied on his arguments alone for the success of his cause. He did not convert his readers to his own side. He overwhelmed his opponents with ridicule. The process of damning the plaintiff’s attorney has been often resorted to; but it has usually been adopted by advocates with a weak cause to rely upon. Sydney Smith thrust home his attack on the person of his adversary, when his adversary might have been beaten with more logical weapons. His exuberant wit shone forth in his most argumentative writings, and dazzled with its brilliancy those who were not convinced by his arguments.

  Sydney Smith would not appear to have encountered many of the griefs of life, and his witticisms are a constant succession of mere jeux d’esprit; they are pretty rainbow-tinted foam-bells on the waters of life. And while it is impossible not to admire their brilliancy and their point, it is only the prejudice of friendship that can draw any parallel between him and many of his contemporaries, while to a name like that of Lamb there is not the most remote approach. It is also true that Sydney Smith approached more nearly to a wit than a humorist. He attacked the world’s follies rather by satire than by banter; yet let us not be ungrateful, he lived to a purpose, and he employed his great and lively powers to advance the interests and the well-being of humanity.

  When one tries to estimate the genius of Sydney Smith, what strikes one most is his humor unaccompanied by melancholy. Most great humorists have been melancholy men, like Molière. Sydney Smith, on the other hand, was not a jester only in his books and in society. His wonderful high spirits were almost constantly with him in the home which they filled with happiness and laughter. The essence of his wit is this volatile and airy spirit, soaring without trammel high above the laboring world, and discovering, from its familiar heights, mirthful resemblances in things where other men only saw incongruities. Boldness, freedom, vivacity, these are the characteristics of his humor. He had an extraordinary audacity in venturing almost on the verge of nonsense. He was daring in humorous exaggeration. This buoyant courage and gayety of fancy sometimes give his good things the character of American humor.

  In life and in conversation, as well as more rarely in his private letters, he may sometimes have passed from comedy to farce, but he never does this in his regular literary work. There is, as a rule, no verbal horseplay, no literary practical joking allowed in these remarkable productions. Even in the most daring and the most unscrupulous of them. “Peter Plymley,” there is little of either. That quality of exact proportion and measure which Thackeray—no lenient judge in that case—rightly assigned to Swift’s humour, is in a lower degree and share equally characteristic of Sydney Smith’s wit…. Intensely amusing as it is, Sydney Smith’s pleasantry belongs on the whole to the severer styles and orders of literary architecture. It is Greek rather than Gothic, and Ionic rather than Corinthian.

  Nor had he,… either the imagination or the grasp of large issues, which makes the great satirist. He was English to the core in his overmastering instinct for the matter of fact. His best work was done in promoting definite practical ends, and his wit in its airiest gambols never escaped his control. He did not write to entertain, but because he had strong opinions. Few men of letters of his standing have had less of the foppery of the literary man.

  The great success of the review brought a reputation to the chief contributors. Smith’s articles are among the best, and are now the most readable. Many of them are mere trifles, but nearly all show his characteristic style. He deserves the credit of vigorously defending doctrines then unpopular, and now generally accepted. Smith was a thorough whig of the more enlightened variety, and his attacks upon various abuses, though not in advance of the liberalism of the day, gave him a bad name among the dispensers of patronage at the time. His honesty and manliness are indisputable.