ncome and large
expenses, her father never bought any books. He had brought a small but
serviceable library with him from London, and his friends made additions to
it from time to time. He wrote to a friend in 1810:--

"I have read, since I saw you, Burke's works, some books of Homer,
Suetonius, a great deal of agricultural reading, Godwin's
_Enquirer_, and a great deal of Adam Smith. As I have scarcely
looked at a book for five years, I am rather hungry."

Here are some of the plans which, year by year, he laid down for the
regulation of his studies:--

"Translate every day ten lines of the _De Officiis_, and
re-translate into Latin. Five chapters of Greek Testament. Theological
studies. Plato's _Apology for Socrates_; Horace's _Epodes, Epistles,
Satires_, and _Ars Poetica_."

"Write sermons and reviews, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Read,
Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday. Write ten lines of Latin on writing days.
Read five chapters of Greek Testament on reading days. For morning
reading, either Polybius, or Diodorus Siculus, or some tracts of
Xenophon or Plato; and for Latin, Catullus, Tibullus, and Propertius.

"Monday: write, morning; read Tasso, evening. Tuesday: Latin or Greek,
morning; evening, theology. Wednesday, same as Monday. Friday, ditto.
Thursday and Saturday, same as Tuesday. Read every day a chapter in
Greek Testament, and translate ten lines of Latin. Good books to
read:--Terrasson's _History of Roman Jurisprudence_; Bishop of
Chester's _Records of the Creation_."

His daughter says that he read with great rapidity. "He galloped through
the pages so rapidly that we often laughed at him when he shut up a thick
quarto as his morning's work. 'Cross-examine me, then,' he said; and we
generally found that he knew all that was worth knowing in it." Here,
obviously, is the stuff out of which reviewers are made, and this was the
very zenith of Sydney Smith's power and usefulness in the _Edinburgh
Review_.

He wrote as quickly as he read. When once he had amassed the necessary
facts, he sate down amid all the distracting sights and sounds of a
drawing-room crowded with femininity, and wrote at full speed, without
deliberations, embellishments, or erasures; only betraying by the movements
of his expressive face his amusement and interest "as fresh images came
clustering round his pen." As soon as the essay was finished, he would
thro