of his) to believe in a country gentleman,
it is the height of rational religion to believe in a ten-pound
householder.

But however open to exception his principles may be, and that not merely
from the point of view of highflying Toryism, his carrying out of them
in life and in literature had the two abiding justifications of being
infinitely amusing, and of being amusing always in thoroughly good
temper. It is, as I have said, impossible to read Sydney Smith's _Life_,
and still more impossible to read his letters, without liking him warmly
and personally, without seeing that he was not only a man who liked to
be comfortable (that is not very rare), that he was not only one who
liked others to be comfortable (that is rarer), but one who in every
situation in which he was thrown, did his utmost to make others as well
as himself comfortable (which is rarest of all). If the references in
_Peter Plymley_ to Canning were unjustifiable from him, there is little
or no reason to think that they were prompted by personal jealousy; and
though, as has been said, he was undoubtedly sore, and unreasonably
sore, at not receiving the preferment which he thought he had deserved,
he does not seem to have been personally jealous of any man who had
received it. The parson of Foston and Combe Florey may not have been
(his latest biographer, admiring though he be, pathetically laments that
he was not) a spiritually minded man. But happy beyond almost all other
parishioners of the time were the parishioners of Combe Florey and
Foston, though one of them did once throw a pair of scissors at his
provoking pastor. He was a fast and affectionate friend; and though he
was rather given to haunting rich men, he did it not only without
servility, but without that alternative of bearishness and freaks which
has sometimes been adopted. As a prince of talkers he might have been a
bore to a generation which (I own I think in that perhaps single point),
wiser than its fathers, is not so ambitious as they were to sit as a
bucket and be pumped into. But in that infinitely happier system of
conversation by books, which any one can enjoy as he likes and interrupt
as he likes at his own fireside, Sydney is still a prince. There may be
living somewhere some one who does not think so very badly of slavery,
who is most emphatically of opinion that "the fools were right," in the
matters of Catholic emancipation and Reform, who thinks well of public
schools and