SYDNEY SMITH the Edinburgh Reviewer could have found no more
appreciative biographer than Mr. George Russell, the last of the Whigs ; and Sydney Smith the wit could have found no more faithful chronicler than the author of Collec- tions and Recollections ; indeed, Mr. Russell's volume makes one of the best jest-books we have ever seen, for there is just enough flour of biography to keep the plums of quotation properly apart. If we may hint a fault, it is that in the matter of Smith's churchmanship Mr. Russell seems to make the worst of what he considers a bad job. He sums up his clerical career in a sentence : " He assumed the sacred character without enthusiasm, and looked back on its adop- tion with regret." However true the first clause of this in- dictment may be, we demur to the second, which is obviously incapable of proof. Mr. Russell makes it abundantly clear in the course of his memoir that Smith did admirable work as a parish clergyman, both in his curacy and his living. At the former place he established day and Sunday schools ; at the latter, "his Bible class for boys was affectionately remem- bered sixty years afterwards." Mr. Russell refers again and again to his passionate advocacy of all kinds of humanitarian reform, " his over-flowing sympathy for the poor, the abject, and the suffering "; and as to his clerical work proper, he records Lady Holland's recollection of the impression made by his preaching ; how, " on entering the pulpit, the calm dignity of his eye, mien, and voice, made one feel that he was indeed and felt himself to be the pastor standing between our God and his people' to teach his laws, to declare his judgments, and proclaim his mercies." That being so, we a little resent Mr. Russell's de )taut en bas appraisement of his churchmanship in the final pages. It can never be fair to judge a clergyman's theology by the standard of a later generation, and having said that "from his earliest manhood he was ready to sacrifice all that the sordid world thought precious for Religious Equality and National Freedom," it is a tame and insufficient conclusion to speak of him as "a genuinely religious man according to his light and opportunity." Probably Mr. Russell, like Archbishop Tait, found it hard to forgive Sydney Smith's attitude to missions ; but he will agree that nothing in the Church has changed so much during the last quarter of a century as its missionary methods.
The two great controversies with which Sydney Smith's name has come to be associated were the struggle for Catholic emancipation, in which he was an ardent reformer, and the attempt to regulate the distribution of Church property by the appointment of the Ecclesiastical Commission, in which he was a no less ardent defender of the existing state of things. To the former controversy he contributed Peter Plyntley' s Letters ; to the latter the Letters to Archdeacon Singleton. The Plyniley Letters, written by Peter, in London, to his brother Abraham, a country parson, aim at convincing him that to treat Roman Catholics like human beings will not bring England again under the heel of the Pope ; and that what is only a matter of simple justice to Ireland becomes • Sydney Smith. By George W. E. Russell. "English Men of Letters." London Macmillan and Co. 12s. net.]
England's destinies depend are Canning and Spencer Perceval. For both these gentlemen, as became a good Whig, Smith had the greatest contempt, and Perceval's jobberies laid him
peculiarly open to the lash. Here are a few specimens of the writer's skill in using his enemy to point his moral:— "[Mr. Perceval] will bestow the strictest attention on the smaller parts of ecclesiastical government. In the last agonies of England he will bring in a bill to regulate Easter offerings; and he will adjust the stipends of curates, when the flag of France is unfurled on the hills of Kent." [It was Perceval's Residence Bill that later compelled Sydney Smith to quit London for Yorkshire, and so avenged these gibes.] "The whole sum now appropriated by Government to the religious education of four millions of Christians is £13,000—a sum about one hundred times as largo being appropriated in the same country [Ireland] to about one-eighth part of this number of Protestants. When it was proposed to raise this grant from £8,000 to £13,000, its present amount, this sum was objected to by that most indulgent of Christians, Mr. Spencer Perceval, as enormous; he himself having secured for his own eating and drinking, and the eating and drinking of the Master and Miss Percevals, the reversionary sum of £21,000 a year of the public money, and having just failed in a desperate and rapacious attempt to secure to himself for life the revenues of the Duchy of Lancaster."
"I cannot describe the horror and disgust which I felt at hearing Mr. Perceval call for measures of vigour in Ireland. If I lived at Hampstead upon stewed meats and claret; if I walked to church every Sunday morning before eleven young gentlemen of my own begetting, with their faces washed and their hair pleasingly combed; if the Almighty had blessed me with every earthly comfort—how awfully would I pause before I sent forth the flame and the sword over the cabins of the poor, brave, generous, open-hearted peasants of Ireland."
"God save the King, in these times, too often means—God save my pension and my place, God give my sisters an allowance out of the privy purse—make me Clerk of the Irons, let me survey the Meltings [Spencer Perceval's sinecures], let me live upon the fruits of other men's industry, and fatten upon the plunder of the public."
The best and best-known passage in the Letters to Archdeacon Singleton is the description of Lord John Russell, with whose reforming energies, when they were turned upon the Church, his friend ceased to have any sympathy :— "There is nothing he would not undertake. I believe he would perform the operation for the stone—build St. Peter's—or assume (with or without ten minutes' notice) the command of the Channel Fleet; and no one would discover by his manner that the patient had died, and the Church tumbled down, and the Channel Fleet been knocked to atoms."
But the main edge of his wit in these letters is directed upon the Bishops. He has a well-deserved thrust against the old-fashioned way of enthroning the Archbishop of Canterbury—" a proxy sent down in the Canterbury Fly to take the Creator to witness that the Archbishop, detained in town by business or pleasure, will never violate that founda- tion of piety over which he presides "—a detail introduced in order to picture the scandal of the proxy at the Archbishop's scheme of taking from the property of his Cathedral to augment poor benefices. "The attorney who took the oath for the Archbishop is, they say, seized with religious horrors at the approaching confiscation of Canterbury property, and has in vain tendered back his 6s. 8d. for taking the oath. The Archbishop refuses to accept it ; and feeling himself light and disencumbered, wisely keeps the saddle upon the back of the writhing and agonized scrivener." Sydney Smith's serious arguments against the proposed changes
were, first, that there ought to be prizes in the Church; and
secondly, that the Bishops should leave the Cathedrals alone until they had reduced their own incomes to the narrowest limits. Perhaps Sydney Smith, being at this time a Canon of St. Paul's, somewhat overestimated the income necessary to the adequate discharge of the canonical office, and underestimated that necessary for the episcopate. It is hard to say. Neither Bishops nor Canons in those undemocratic days published balance-sheets. But we are quite sure that Sydney Smith was right in pointing to the very imperfect sympathy that exists between Bishops and capitular foundations. Even to-day, if money is wanted, as wanted it continually is, to repair the Cathedral fabric, the first idea that crosses the
mind of the Episcopal Commissioners is to suppress another canonry. A still more vigorous attack upon the Episcopate was delivered in an Edinburgh article called "Persecuting Biahops." (Mr. Russell quotes, a propos of the title, the grim in- quiry of a living prelate "Is Bishops in that title a nominative
or accusative P") Bishop Marsh of Peterborough had drawn up in 1820 a set of eighty-seven questions of his own, failure to give a satisfactory answer to which meant exclusion from the diocese. With a few passages from this article we must conclude our extracts from Mr. Russell's vivacious book :—
"Six such Bishops, multiplied by eighty-seven, and working with five hundred and twenty-two questions would fetch every- thing to the ground in six months. But what if it pleased Divine Providence to afflict every prelate with the spirit of putting eighty-seven questions, and the two Archbishops with the spirit of putting twice as many, and the Bishop of Sodor and Man with the spirit of putting forty-three questions P" " Prelates are fond of talking about my see, my clergy, my diocese, as if those things belonged to them as their pigs and dogs belonged to them."
" Men of very small incomes have often very acute feelings, and a curate trod on feels a pang as great as a bishop confuted."
" The Bishop boasts that he has actually excluded only two curates from his diocese : so the Emperor of Hayti boasted that he had only cut off two persons' heads for disagreeable behaviour at his table. In spite of the paucity of the visitors executed, the example operated as a considerable impediment to conversation."
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