thing, but our transversed descendants would
regard the matter as a commonplace. New proposals in the arts, and new
discoveries in the sciences are always at first laughed at. Thus wit
is only thought that is beyond the present capacity of the listeners,
thought of whose meaning they can catch only a glimpse; it is the
forerunner of what our very stupid race, which is always a little behind
the times, is wont to call wisdom. If the race should ever become
completely sage, nothing less than a joke would ever be uttered.

The likenesses of Charles Lamb and Sydney Smith make them both very
severe-looking men. Like marble, which in costume takes the appearance
of the finest lace, so that it seems as if it would yield to the touch
of a finger, their delicate fancies and sentiments were but the surface
of a solid and thorough character.

They lived in different spheres, corresponding to the difference in
their genius. Sydney Smith had the more versatile and fruitful mind.
With restless energy he supported various characters, being equally
famous as a wit, Whig, Edinburgh reviewer, eloquent preacher, brilliant
man of society, and canon of Saint Paul's. His biographer well describes
him as a rough rider of subjects, and with surpassing good sense he
overran every problem with which the public mind was occupied. He was a
reformer, but it was after the English and not the French fashion. He
had unbounded respect for existing human blessings, believed in things
substantially as they were, and couldn't have been persuaded to try an
experiment that had much of hazard in it. A Frenchman is always at
home amid earthquakes and volcanoes and hurricanes, and the immediate
prospect of an end to everything that is and a beginning of something
the like of which never has been. The spirit of the great French
Revolution was to exterminate all the results of time up to that point,
and, having made a clear field, to begin over again. Hence heads went
off, religion was proscribed, thrones were burned, the calendar was
changed; even the heavenly bodies should no longer bear down their
freight of old associations, and Orion received the name of Napoleon.
Could the earth have in any way been transformed, could grass possibly
have been made blue and the heavens green, or could man have been done
over into any other sort of animal, there is not the slightest doubt
that those Frenchmen would have undertaken it. In comparison with such
men, Sydney Smi