Canon Smith

PERHAPS it will not displease the ghost of Sydney Smith— we can "count on its being affable and familiar—if we compare his reverence with a balloon. Not his corporeal self ; that would be too obvious a comparison, too vulgar a joke, but

his character. The balloon was a good solid affair, with plenty of common sense, a sturdy vitality, and a strong moral core ; but what made the balloon rise, to the comfortable height of a well-padded chair at St. Paul's, was his exhaustless capacity for humour, the compulsion he laid upon all men. however unwilling, to laugh until their sides ached. And it is his misfortune that posterity has mistaken the gas for the balloon, or at any rate remembered only the gas, and forgotten the solid structure of which it was no more than a function.

Sydney Smith remains in the popular mind as the reverend but hardly venerable jester, a kind of latter-day Yorick without the pungency, some one we would like to have always by us to appreciate our slighted sallies. Thus Calverley, bemoaning the loss of a splendid original joke, cried : " No ! mine was a joke for the ages ; Full of intricate meaning and pith ;

A feast for your scholars and sages—

How it would have rejoiced Sidney Smith ! "

and it is itself a comment that he should have misspelt the name of the man who did more than any other churchman to bring about Catholic Emancipation and the Reform Bill, and who in so doing sacrificed preferment.

He had not wanted to be a parson ; he would have pre- ferred to be a lawyer or a doctor : but the Church seemed all that offered to a man who had no more than a meagre Fellow- ship at New College to sustain him during an apprenticeship. But having chosen, he was determined to do his job well, with the humanity, the immense vitality, sanity, and courage that were always his, qualities abundantly necessary in the lost wilds of Netheravon. The inhabitants were in a wretched condition materially and educationally, so Smith set himself

to remedy these defects, and to discipline himself in an atmosphere where decay would have been so easy.

Three years of this, then Edinburgh—after a first rapturous taste of society at Bowood with the Holland House circle : Edinburgh, the Modern Athens, the brilliant centre of philo- sophic disputation and scientific curiosity, where the private tutor of the Hicks-Beach youths made his mark as a preacher, and was, perhaps, more instrumental than anybody in found- ing the Edinburgh Review, to which he contributed for years, till 1828, when he was made a Canon of Bristol, and he decided that to write for a paper—even so noble a one—was too low an activity for a dignitary of the Church (0 tempora ! 0 mores 1). But he could not be a tutor for long : it led nowhere, and he had married on nothing but this and six small silver

tea-spoons, which he threw into his wife's lap, exclaiming,

4` There Kate, you lucky girl, I give you all I have." So he adventured to London, where he preached and delivered lec- tures on moral philosophy to" crowded rooms, and, all- important, conquered the once recalcitrant Lady Holland with his irresistible laughter, and became one of the essential members of that brilliant circle of influential Whigs who were

some twenty years later to govern the country. When there he was given the living of Foston in Yorkshire, a most enjoy- able gift, until in the next year, 1808, a new Archbishop actually put into force the Clergy Residence Act, and Smith, to whom society was the breath of life, found himself once more banished to the wilds.

Well, there was nothing for it but to make the best of a bad job, and a very good best he made of it. The parsonage was a hovel, the large glebe farm utterly neglected, so Smith became an architect and built a delightful home, and made himself into a very good farmer. But there were visits from Jeffrey and Houghton, and even Macaulay : Castle Howard was not far off, and Lord Carlisle had a library. He drove about the country in a queer contraption called the Immortal," an ancient gig which grew younger every year by the replacement of its worn-out parts ; and when he inherited a pleasant £400 a year, he was able to go to Edin- burgh and London. And all the time, amid great gusts of laughter, the torrential humour which used to convulse his household for hours a day—for he did not reserve his

jesting for his guests—he worked for humanity, on a good solid humdrum basis of practical Christianity (" there is no enthusiasm in the Bible "); urging prison reform, softening, as J.P., the shocking horror of the game laws, seeing to the welfare of his parishioners, and being the local doctor aN

well as the local divine. •

He deserved the canonry at Bristol, the comfortable living in the Vale of Taunton which fell to his lot in 1829, where he again built. He aged pleasantly, making the best of both worlds, realizing the importance of good food and wine to the health of the soul. It was with food and laughter that he cured his guests of melancholy, even Henry Luttrell, who came with " a sort of apple-pudding depression as if he had been staying with a clergyman. . . . He was very agreeable, but spoke too lightly, I thought, of veal soup." It is perhaps not surprising that he was assailed by gout, the only enemy he did not wish to see at his feet.

When at last the Whigs triumphed they made him a canon of St. Paul's, though they should have made him a bishop —and admitted it. However he did not let disappointment sour him; he set to work, and his influence is to be seen in all the activities of the chapter in those days : he saved the library from decay, and cleansed the defaced altar. To heat the place was impossible : " My sentences are frozen as they come out of my mouth, and are thawed in the course of the summer, making strange noises and unexpected assertions in various parts of the church." But the times were going beyond him : he fought the Ecclesiastical Com- mission, and could make nothing of the Tractarian movement when it came to disturb his old age. He was repelled by " Newrnania," since he still found there was no enthusiasm in the Bible : but he hailed Modern Painters with delight, at the age of 78 taught himself new songs—frequently encoring himself—and till his mellow end disseminated cheerfulness.

It is as an example to us that Mr. Burdett has compiled his book, an example of high sanity for our diseased age, and an example of the courage we shall need in a crumbling world. We see less here of the gay humorist than of the telling preacher (it might have been better to divide the book French fashion into Sa Vie, Son Oeuvre), and perhaps Mr. Burdett might have been as serious without being quite so solemn : but the book is a refreshing reminder that one can be gay and laughter-loving without being silly or shallow. and there is much to be learnt from the life of a man who. though a fellow of infinite jest, was an example of as good an eighteenth-century parson as one could wish to see.

BONAMY DOBREE.