he did not propose to increase their pay in proportion to the number of Dissenters they gained over. On what ground did Sydney Smith himself propose to settle a State provision on the Roman Catholic clergy of Ireland? Was it not in the hope of rendering them independent of their flocks, and of taking away the pecuniary temptation to turbulence?

In 1804, 1805, and 1806 he delivered at the Royal Institution the Lectures first printed for private circulation by Mrs. Sydney Smith in 1849, and subsequently published under the title of Elementary Sketches of Moral Philosophy.' They were eminently and deservedly popular. His success,' wrote Horner during their delivery, has been beyond all possible conjecture; from six to eight hundred hearers; not a seat to be procured, even if you go there an hour before the time. Nobody else, to be sure, could have executed such an undertaking with the least chance of success. For who else could make such a mixture of odd paradox, quaint fun, manly sense, liberal opinions, and striking language?' The portions of the series which attracted most attention were the two lectures on Wit and Humour,' in which he broached the startling doctrines that the feeling of wit is occasioned by those relations of ideas which excite surprise, and surprise alone,' and that wit might be acquired by study like mathematics :

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It is imagined that wit is a sort of inexplicable visitation, that it comes and goes with the rapidity of lightning, and that it is quite as unattainable as beauty or just proportion. I am so much of a contrary way of thinking, that I am convinced a man might sit down as systematically, and

as successfully, to the study of wit, as he might to the study of mathematics: and I would answer for it that, by giving up only six hours a day to being witty, he should come on prodigiously before Midsummer, so that his friends should hardly know him again. For what is there to hinder the mind from gradually acquiring a habit of attending to the lighter relations of ideas in which wit consists ? Punning grows upon everybody, and punning is the wit of words. I do not mean to say that it is so easy to acquire a habit of discovering new relations in ideas as in words, but the difficulty is not so much greater as to render it insuperable to habit. One man is unquestionably much better calculated for it by nature than another; but association, which gradually makes a bad speaker a good one, might give a man wit who had it not, if any man chose to be so absurd as to sit down to acquire it.'

Why absurd, if the object were really attainable by study, and the man had no better or more urgent employment or pursuit ?

There cannot be a more striking proof of the slenderness of the provision made for the reward or encouragement of intellectual eminence in this country, than the fact that Sydney Smith, with this fulness of reputation, and with his political friends in power, felt compelled to accept the small living of Foston-le-Clay in Yorkshire, which was with some difficulty obtained, through the exertions of Lord and Lady Holland, from the Whig Chancellor, Lord Erskine. Again, however, we maintain, that his character and reputation have rather gained than suffered by what he felt as a severe infliction at the time. His second or third banishment, with its concomitants, brought out into broad relief the

finest points of his understanding and his heart. Buffon somewhere defines or describes genius as a superior aptitude to patience. May not goodness and virtue be resolved into the same element, when an uncongenial course of life is deliberately adopted, and a host of privations and (if you please, petty) miseries are knowingly encountered from a genuine and profound sense of duty? A diner-out, a wit, and a popular preacher,' to borrow his own graphic picture of his situation, "I was suddenly caught up by the Archbishop of York, and transported to my living in Yorkshire, where there had not been a resident clergyman for a hundred and fifty years. Fresh from London, not knowing a turnip from a carrot, I was compelled to farm three hundred acres, and (without capital) to build a parsonage-house.' . .

'It made me a very poor man for many years, but I never repented it. I turned schoolmaster to educate my son, as I could not afford to send him to school. Mrs. Sydney turned schoolmistress to educate my girls, as I could not afford a governess. I turned farmer, as I could not let my land. A man servant was too expensive; so I caught up a little garden-girl, made like a milestone, christened her Bunch, put a napkin in her hand, and made her my butler. The girls taught her to read, Mrs. Sydney to wait, and I undertook her morals; Bunch became the best butler in the county.

'I had little furniture, so I bought a cart-load of deals; took a carpenter (who came to me for parish relief, called Jack Robinson), with a face like a full-moon, into my service; established him in a barn, and said, "Jack, furnish my house." You see the result.

'At last it was suggested that a carriage was much

wanted in the establishment; after diligent search, I discovered in the back settlements of a York coachmaker an ancient green chariot, supposed to have been the earliest invention of the kind. I brought it home in triumph to my admiring family. Being somewhat dilapidated, the village tailor lined it, the blacksmith repaired it; nay, (but for Mrs. Sydney's earnest entreaties) we believe the village painter would have exercised his genius upon the exterior; it escaped this danger, however, and the result was wonderful. Each year added to its charms: it grew younger and younger; a new wheel, a new spring; I christened it the Immortal; it was known all over the neighbourhood; the village boys cheered it, and the village dogs barked at it: but Faber mea fortune was my motto, and we had no false shame.

Added to all these domestic cares, I was village parson, village doctor, village comforter, village magistrate, and Edinburgh Reviewer; so you see I had not much time left on my hands to regret London.

'My house was considered the ugliest in the county, but all admitted it was one of the most comfortable; and we did not die, as our friends had predicted, of the damp walls of the parsonage.'

Should any reader have felt disposed to question the advantage of having an accomplished and highminded daughter, bred up at her father's feet and imbued with his noble spirit, for the biographer of such a man, their doubts will vanish into thin air before they have half finished the seventh chapter, describing the building of the Foston Parsonage, and the arrival of the family to take possession of their new residence. Vividly as some familiar scenes in the Vicar of Wakefield' are recalled to us by the magic of association, there is no actual likeness, and there are freshness and

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novelty in every one of Lady Holland's indelible and faithfully recorded impressions and details:

'But oh, the shout of joy as we entered and took possession!-the first time in our lives that we had inhabited a house of our own. How we admired it, ugly as it was! With what pride my dear father welcomed us, and took us from room to room! Old Molly Mills, the milk woman, who had charge of the house, grinning with delight in the background. We thought it a palace; yet the drawing-room had no door, the bare plaster walls ran down with wet, the windows were like ground glass from the moisture, which had to be wiped up several times a day by the housemaid. No carpets, no chairs, nothing unpacked; rough men bringing in rougher packages at every moment. But then was the time to behold my father!-amid the confusion, he thought for everybody, cared for everybody, encouraged everybody, kept everybody in good humour. How he exerted himself! how his loud rich voice might be heard in all directions, ordering, arranging, explaining, till the household storm gradually subsided! Each half-hour improved our condition; fires blazed in every room; at last we all sat down to our tea, spread by ourselves on a huge package before the drawing-room fire, sitting on boxes round it; and retired to sleep on our beds placed on the floor;the happiest, merriest, and busiest family in Christendom.'

If Molly Mills, Annie Kay, Bunch, and Jack Robinson could be transplanted into one of Mr. Thackeray's or Mr. Dickens's monthly numbers, with appropriate parts, their names would speedily become as familiar in men's mouths as household words, whilst Bitty, the pet donkey, is a study for a Sterne. Although, as Sydney Smith admits, visions of croziers did occasionally cross