ART. IV.-SYDNEY SMITH.

A Memoir of the Rev. Sydney Smith, by his Daughter, LADY HOLLAND; with a Selection from his Letters. Edited by MRS. AUSTIN. New-York: Harper & Brothers. 2 vols. 1855.

No recent book has attracted a larger share of public attention than has Lady Holland's memoir of her father. Tried by a general standard, it has proved a most acceptable and welcome contribution to our current literature. The critics have enjoyed a revel over its brilliant pages; and the fine talkers, who minister to the intellect of dinner tables, and cheer the closing hours of the day by racy speech and flowing humour, have exulted as if a new possession had been added to their stores of wealth. Within the last six months Sydney Smith has, probably, been named more frequently than he was during any twenty years of his life. What an instance, this, of the power of literature! What a significance does it give to pen and press! A few sheets of paper, growing into a volume beneath the gentle hand of woman; a widow's love collecting worthy materials, and a daughter's affection arranging and combining them into order and beauty; then the mechanical service of types, and Sydney Smith is an inmate of thousands of homes, living his life over again; talking in the same gushing and exhaustless strain of thought and humour; writing, reviewing, reforming, and preaching; a struggling man, a brave man, a hearty man; a kind, generous, philanthropic man, whose moral qualities honoured a genius that rendered most valuable and praiseworthy services to the truth, wisdom, and heroism of the age. The new Sydney Smith, we incline to believe, is better than the old; or, to speak more exactly, he has a better position before the world. It is the same man the distinct, unmistakable Sydney Smith-the broad-chested, round-built Englishman, with just enough of French blood to quicken his nerves without any injury to his substantial muscles. Here he is, with all his instant-telling, sharp-pointed faculties; with all his learning in ready obedience; with clear, vigorous, accurate language for the despatch of ideas as fast as a teeming brain could originate them: here he is, the full-freighted man, with more diversity of intellect, and more adaptedness to this many-sided world than any one of his day; here he is, busy at all imaginable things, from inventing horse-scratchers to the manufacture of a grotesque wardrobe for rheumatism, from training stupid servants to the management of official revenues, from a tender oversight of the

sick of his parish to the most formidable sort of surgery on some cancerous affection of the body politic. Here he is-curate, joker, satirist, Utilitarian, Whig, Canon of St. Paul's-with all his versatile endowments, each as fresh, as spirited, as demonstrative, as if the great soul had to diffuse itself into its action alone.

Apart from its subject, every book has a "natural history" peculiar to itself; and, if followed out in its details, it would deeply enlist attention and sympathy. No book ever reaches its precise mark; none ever accomplishes just the object, in just the manner, and under just the circumstances, that an author expected. It always, in some particulars, disappoints calculations. The state of the public mind, the accidental prominence of certain topics, the abeyance of ancient prejudices, the caprices of popular passions, the whims of the newspaper press, and a thousand other contingences, may essentially modify its influence. No doubt, if the secret anticipations of writers themselves could be known, the reading world would often be amazed at the difference between their thoughts and hopes before and after the appearance of their works.

The present memoir suggests and illustrates these sentiments. It has, probably, done as much for the permanent reputation of Sydney Smith as Sydney Smith himself did for it; and, moreover, it has made him favourably known to thousands, who otherwise would never have associated his name with anything great and good. The world derived its impressions of the man either from the report of his famous criticisms in the Edinburgh Review, or from his brilliant conversations. Although he was most cordially and honourably appreciated by the leaders of fashion and the oracles of taste, yet, during his lifetime, his talents were more a matter of notoriety than of desirable reputation. Outside of his own circle he was feared rather than loved; and what Sydney Smith could do, by means of his trenchant pen, always took precedence in men's thoughts of what Sydney Smith was. But these volumes have created new sympathies with him. Aristocratic families, lords and ladies, can give a man of talent and sprightliness no small share of distinction in English society; and luxurious dinners, at which refinement and elegance crown the board, and every one, by the terms of common politeness, is under obligations to be pleased, may easily afford a passport to a certain sort of intellectual position. But all the Holland houses of England could not confer such lustre on the name of Sydney Smith as these volumes. We have in them the real, genuine, earnest man-the domestic heart, the sacrificing life, the broad and massive foundations, on which influence and fame can only be built.

The present memoir gives us a distinct, palpable idea of the man; unfolds his life in all its struggles and achievements; presents its varied and striking aspects; enters minutely into his characteristics of mind and manner; and leaves us, at the close of the book, with a complete realization of what Sydney Smith was at the fire-side, on the farm, among his parishioners, in London, or wherever else inclination or duty took him. Sydney himself is the central figure in every scene. Whether the hour is serious or comical; whether he is dining with lords and ladies, or preaching to "West-Endians;" whether tugging through the mud of Yorkshire, or walking in the magnificent saloons that welcomed him as their favourite guest; whether practising "Bunch," "Annie Kay," or "Jack Robinson," or driving thunderbolts at gigantic abuses, Sydney Smith is up in full proportions before you. The image of the man is soon caught, and never afterward have you to correct it. Now and then it has a passing shadow; now and then, a little brighter hue; but it keeps its form and lineaments most distinctly in your eye. The man's uniformity was remarkable; and the memoir is remarkable in its portraiture. Once possessed of the key-note of his character, you are thenceforth exempt from any liability to surprise. The strange combinations of his acute intellect; its marvellous waywardness, that seems to be as much reduced to rule as if it were a logical power; its unannounced descent on some luckless archbishop; its facile swiftness in probing a pompous speculation; all these will come upon you unawares, and delight you by the endless recurrence of novelty. But the man himself never moves an inch from the position where nature has put him; and throughout the memoir, Sydney Smith means exactly the same measure of intelligence, wit, and heartiness.

Nothing could be further from the romantic than Sydney Smith's life. It had none of those, startling incidents and exciting events that strike the imagination, and that so frequently disguise the real interests of human existence beneath an artificial drapery; and yet, his career appeals to the imagination, and awakens feelings above the common level of experience. His boyhood opens at Woodford, in Essex, England; and your first glance at his home touches a cord of merriment. The father, Mr. Robert Smith, is odd enough for the frontispiece of a comic almanac; and he holds fast to his oddities with such delightful pertinacity, that you suspect him of enjoying them much more than did his family. By way of contrast, he dresses in professional drab, and surmounts his head with a hat that isolates this Mr. Smith from all other Smiths in the land of the living. What was left of his inventive genius after its efforts on

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dress, seems to have been expended on architecture, considered as a wasteful art; for we are informed that, in this particular, he was successful in "buying, altering, spoiling, and then selling, about nineteen different places in England." House-building and housechanging being costly whims, Mr. Smith lost a small fortune in their gratification. Despite of these crotchets, he must have been a sensible man in some things, as he married a noble girl, Miss Olier, daughter of M. Olier, a French emigrant from Languedoc. The few glimpses that we have of the Woodford household, as it was three quarters of a century since, show the stalwart man in his Quaker dress, and beside him a fair and beautiful woman, whose bright face lit up the walls, and kept sunshine always in the dwelling. The graces of womanhood, that are lovelier than form or feature, were preserved in their freshness; and the home never wanted charm of mind and manner so long as she lived. Around this eccentric Englishman and his interesting French wife-the vivacity and sweetness of the one, framed in the grotesque carving of the other's temperament and habits-are four boys and a girl, who evince decided symptoms of strong, sturdy, brilliant character. The father called the four sons an intolerable and overbearing set of boys;" but the mother read prophecies in them that one day were to be fulfilled. She toiled with them as well as for them; striving sincerely and faithfully to infuse a salutary, moral sentiment into their hearts. Her letters to them at school must have been unusually attractive; for we are told that their school-fellows would gather around them when they had a letter from their mother, and beg to have it read aloud. The best traits of the Huguenot mother descended to Sydney: and our only regret is, that more of her character and history is not recorded. The few hints are sufficient, however, to indicate that she was a charming person; and, amid the dim outlining of her intellectual and moral qualities, her social gentleness and domestic sweetness, it is more than a pastime of fancy to follow the career of her distinguished son, and attribute this virtue, or that brave endeavour to befriend oppressed innocence, to the impress which she stamped upon him. All through his life, we think that we can trace her presence. His regard for women was one of his strongest characteristics; and, delighting in their society, he yielded the richest treasures of his mind to them. Never was he more himself than when he had them as a group of listeners; and if ever his rapid play of cross-lights was carried on more dazzlingly than usual, and his wit was more winning and sportive, it was when some of his favourites among the sex ministered a pleasant provocation to his

clastic spirit. One of the earliest and foremost champions of female education, he contributed greatly to form a liberal and noble public sentiment on this subject; and still faithful to the stirrings of his Huguenot blood, he touched the hidden nerves of England's heart by Peter Plymley's Letters. Thus, at intervals, the noble mother reappears in the noble son, and thus the childhood, which she lived long enough-happily for the world-to train and bless, bore her simplicity and beauty onward, through manhood and age, to the grave.

Sydney was sent to Winchester College, where he distinguished himself for Latin verses, and gained a captainship. Thence he was removed to New College, Oxford, of which he became a fellow. His industry, scholarship, and popularity were, at this early age, sufficient to attract attention. Economical and prudent in whatever related to his own expenses, he was generous and kind to others, stinting himself to save means for their assistance, On leaving Oxford, he was inclined to study law; but he was overruled by his father, and consigned to the Church. It was a business arrangement, a movement for professional position. There is nothing to indicate that he was conscious of any particular call to preach the Gospel, or that Providence prompted his step in this direction; but it is not for us to pronounce a judgment. All that we dare speak of is what appears on the surface: and beneath that surface the Holy Spirit may have wrought its work. The footsteps of charity must tread lightly on ground sacred to God.

The scenes of his clerical life open in the midst of Salisbury Plain. There is a religious poem in the words-Salisbury Plain; and there rise before us at the instant, beckoned from the past, the saintly images of one who made Barley Wood a shrine for pious pilgrims; and of another--the trusting, loving, heavenwardlooking "Shepherd "who saw the darkest cloud lie serenely in the hollow of the same firmament, that had the day before irradiated its snow-like mass, and found a benediction ever present in the thoughts of reconciliation and peace, that Christianity had written on every object around him. But to Sydney Smith it was simple Salisbury Plain. It was a dreary place, forlorn enough to try the stout heart of the hero; for the inventory, all told, consisted of a village, most humble in pretension-people, who had inherited poverty, and preserved their inheritance far better than is common among heirsand potatoes, denied the luxury of catchup. Imagine the curate in this new world; and surely it is no fanciful chain of circumstances, that binds the experience of the half-starved Winchester boy to the experience of the "Pauper Pastor" of Salisbury Plain. Fortunately