viously was not quite the profession for him.
He is said to have wished for the Bar, but to have deferred to his
father's wishes for the Church. That Sydney was an affectionate and
dutiful son nobody need doubt: he was always affectionate, and in his
own way dutiful. But he is about the last man one can think of as likely
to undertake an uncongenial profession out of high-flown dutifulness to
a father who had long left him to his own resources, and who had neither
influence nor prospects in the Church to offer him. The Fellowship would
have kept him, as it had kept him already, till briefs came. However, he
did take orders; and the later _Life_ gives more particulars than the
first as to the incumbency which indirectly determined his career. It
was the curacy of Netheravon on Salisbury Plain; and its almost complete
seclusion was tempered by a kindly squire, Mr. Hicks-Beach,
great-grandfather of the present Sir Michael Hicks-Beach. Mr.
Hicks-Beach offered Sydney the post of tutor to his eldest son; Sydney
accepted it, started for Germany with his pupil, but (as he
picturesquely though rather vaguely expresses it) "put into Edinburgh
under stress of war" and stayed there for five years.

The sojourn at Edinburgh began in June 1798: it ended in August 1803. It
will thus be seen that Sydney was by no means a very young man even when
he began reviewing, the year before leaving the Scotch capital. Indeed
the aimless prolongation of his stay at Oxford, which brought him
neither friends, money, nor professional experience of any kind, threw
him considerably behindhand all his life; and this delay, much more than
Tory persecution or Whig indifference, was the cause of the comparative
slowness with which he made his way. His time at Edinburgh was, however,
usefully spent even before that invention of the _Review_, over which
there is an amicable and unimportant dispute between himself and
Jeffrey. His tutorship was so successful that Mr. Hicks-Beach rewarded
it with a cheque for a thousand pounds: he did duty in the Episcopal
churches of Edinburgh: he made friends with all the Whigs and many of
the Tories of the place: he laughed unceasingly at Scotchmen and liked
them very much. Also, about the middle of his stay, he got married, but
not to a Scotch girl. His wife was Miss Catherine Pybus, of Cheam, and
the marriage was as harebrained a one, from the point of view of
settlements, as Jeffrey's own.[9] Sydney's settlement on his w