ngs which he did not
himself care to reprint, can be obtained now in one volume; but the
print is not to be recommended to aged or weakly sight.

Sydney Smith had no false modesty, and in not a few letters to Jeffrey
he speaks of his own contributions to the _Edinburgh_ with the greatest
freedom, combating and quite refusing to accept his editor's suggestion
as to their flippancy and fantasticality, professing with much frankness
that this is the way he can write and no other, and more than once
telling Jeffrey that whatever they may think in solemn Scotland, his,
Sydney's, articles are a great deal more read in England and elsewhere
than any others. Although there are maxims to the contrary effect, the
judgment of a clever man, not very young and tolerably familiar with the
world, on his own work, is very seldom far wrong. I should say myself
that, putting aside the historic estimate, Sydney Smith's articles are
by far the most interesting nowadays of those contributed by any one
before the days of Macaulay, who began just as Sydney ceased to write
anonymously in 1827, on his Bristol appointment. They are also by far
the most distinct and original. Jeffrey, Brougham, and the rest wrote,
for the most part, very much after the fashion of the ancients: if a
very few changes were made for date, passages of Jeffrey's criticism
might almost be passages of Dryden, certainly passages of the better
critics of the eighteenth century, as far as manner goes. There is
nobody at all like Sydney Smith before him in England, for Swift's style
is wholly different. To begin with, Sydney had a strong prejudice in
favour of writing very short articles, and a horror of reading long
ones--the latter being perhaps less peculiar to himself than the former.
Then he never made the slightest pretence at systematic or dogmatic
criticism of anything whatever. In literature proper he seems indeed to
have had no particular principles, and I cannot say that he had very
good taste. He commits the almost unpardonable sin of not merely
blaspheming Madame de Sevigne, but preferring to her that second-rate
leader-writer in petticoats, Madame de Stael. On the other hand, if he
had no literary principles, he had (except in rare cases where politics
came in, and not often then) few literary prejudices, and his happily
incorrigible good sense and good humour were proof against the frequent
bias of his associates. Though he could not have been very sensible,
f