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High though his titles, proud his name,
Boundless his wealth as wish can claim :
Despite those titles, power, and pelf,
The wretch, concentered all in self,
Living, shall forfeit fair renown,

And doubly dying, shall go down
To the vile dust, from whence he sprung,
Unwept, unhonored, and unsung.

A SERENADE

АH! County Guy, the hour is nigh,
The sun has left the lea,

The orange-flower perfumes the bower,
The breeze is on the sea.

The lark, his lay who trilled all day,
Sits hushed his partner nigh;

Breeze, bird, and flower confess the hour, -
But where is County Guy?

The village maid steals through the shade

Her shepherd's suit to hear;

To Beauty shy, by lattice high,
Sings high-born Cavalier.
The star of love, all stars above,

Now reigns o'er earth and sky,

And high and low the influence know, -
But where is County Guy?

SYDNEY SMITH

1771-1845

SYDNEY SMITH's name is a synonym of wit; but he has left behind him evidences of far higher powers than those which are called into exercise in the effort to amuse. He was born at Woodford, Essex, England, in 1771, and died in 1845. He was educated at Oxford, took holy orders, and held a

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Sydney South

curacy in Wiltshire; in 1796 he removed to Edinburgh, where, in conjunction with Brougham and other distinguished men, he founded the Edinburgh Review. Removing to London in 1804, he continued to write for the Review, and speedily won a brilliant reputation as a critic. Ecclesiastical preferment came often to him, and at the time of his death he was Canon Residentiary of St. Paul's Cathedral. His writings were mainly in the form

of sermons; but he wrote many notable letters on political and religious questions which go far toward justifying Everett's opinion that if Smith "had not been known as the wittiest man of his day, he would have been accounted one of the wisest." It is believed that his Letters on Catholic Emancipation were largely instrumental in pushing that measure to success. Macaulay said of him: "He is universally admitted to have been a great reasoner, and the greatest master of ridicule that has appeared among us since Swift."

The distinguished critic, George Saintsbury, makes in a recent article the following estimate of Sydney Smith's work: "The memorials and evidences of his peculiar, if not unique, genius consist of three different kinds: reported or remembered conversations, letters, and formal literary work. He was once most famous as a talker; but conversation is necessarily the most perishable of all things, and its recorded fragments bear keeping less than any other relics. . . . The best letters are always most like the actual conversation of their writers, and probably no one ever wrote more as he talked than Sydney Smith. The specially literary qualities of his writing for print are here too in great measure, and on the whole, nowhere can the entire Sydney be better seen. Of the three satirists of modern times with whom he may not unfairly claim to rank - Pascal, Swift, and Voltaire - he is most like Voltaire in his faculty of presenting a good thing with a preface which does not in the least prepare you for it, and then leaving it without the slightest attempt to go back on it, and elaborate it, and make sure that his hearer has duly appreciated it and laughed at it. And of the two, though the palm of concentration must be given to Voltaire, the palm of absolute simplicity must be given to Sydney Smith. Hardly any of his letters are without these unforced flashes of wit. . . .

“Sydney Smith had no false modesty, and in not a few letters to Jeffrey he speaks of his own contributions to the Edinburgh Review with the greatest freedom, combating and quite refusing to accept his editor's suggestion as to their flippancy and fantasticality, professing with much frankness that this is the way he can write and no other, and more than once telling Jeffrey that whatever they may think in solemn Scotland, his, Sydney's, articles are a great deal more read in England and elsewhere than any others. Although there are maxims to the contrary effect, the judgment of a clever man, not very young, and tolerably familiar with the world, on his own work, is very seldom far wrong. Sydney Smith's articles are by far the most interesting of those contributed to the Review by any one before the days of Macaulay. They are also by far the most distinct and original. . . . Here was a man who, for goodness as well as for cleverness, for sound practical wisdom as well as for fantastic verbal wit, has had hardly a superior and very few equals."

THE PLEASURES OF KNOWLEDGE

It is noble to seek truth, and it is beautiful to find it. It is the ancient feeling of the human heart, that knowledge is better than riches; and it is deeply and sacredly true. To mark the course of human passions as they have flowed on in the ages that are past; to see why nations have risen, and why they have fallen; to speak of heat, and light, and the winds; to know what man has discovered in the heavens above and in the earth beneath; to hear the chemist unfold the marvelous properties that the Creator has locked up in a speck of earth; to be told that there are worlds so distant from our own that the quickness of light, traveling from the world's creation, has never yet reached us; to wander in the creations of poetry, and grow warm again with that eloquence which swayed the democracies of the old world;1 to go up with great reasoners to the First Cause of all, and to perceive, in the midst of all this dissolution and decay and cruel separation, that there is one thing unchangeable, indestructible, and everlasting; it is worth while in the days of our youth to strive hard for this great discipline; to pass sleepless nights for it; to give up for it laborious days; to spurn for it present pleasures;2 to endure for it afflicting poverty; to wade for it through darkness, and sorrow, and contempt, as the great spirits of the world have done in all ages and all times.

I appeal to the experience of any man who is in the habit of exercising his mind vigorously and well, whether there is not a satisfaction in it which tells him he has been acting up to one of the great objects of his existence? The end of nature has been answered; his faculties have done that which they were created to do,- not languidly occupied upon trifles, not enervated by sensual gratification, but exercised in that toil which is so congenial to their nature, and so worthy of their strength.

1 i. e. the ancient world

2 Compare Milton, p. 68 "To scorn delights, and live laborious days."

A life of knowledge is not often a life of injury and crime. Whom does such a man oppress? with whose happiness does he interfere? whom does his ambition destroy? and whom does his fraud deceive? In the pursuit of science he injures no man, and in the acquisition he does good to all. A man who dedicates his life to knowledge, becomes habituated to pleasure which carries with it no reproach; and there is one security that he will never love that pleasure which is paid for by anguish of heart, his pleasures are all cheap, all dignified, and all innocent; and, as far as any human being can expect permanence in this changing scene, he has secured a happiness which no malignity of fortune can ever take away, but which must cleave to him while he lives, ameliorating every good, and diminishing every evil of his existence.

I solemnly declare, that, but for the love of knowledge, I should consider the life of the meanest hedger and ditcher preferable to that of the greatest and richest man in existence; for the fire of our minds is like the fire which the Persians burn on the mountains, it flames night and day, and is immortal, and not to be quenched! Upon something it must act and feed, upon the pure spirit of knowledge, or upon the foul dregs of polluting passions.

Therefore, when I say, in conducting your understanding, love knowledge with a great love, with a vehement love, with a love coeval with1 life, what do I say but love innocence; love virtue; love purity of conduct; love that which, if you are rich and great, will sanctify the providence which has made you so, and make men call it justice; love that which, if you are poor, will render your poverty respectable, and make the proudest feel it unjust to laugh at the meanness of your fortunes; love that which will comfort you, adorn you, and never quit you, which will open to you the kingdom of thought, and all the boundless regions of conception, as an asylum against the cruelty, the injustice, and the pain that may be your lot in the outer world, — that which

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1 coeval with, “of the same age as ;” ¿. e. as long as

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