One part of his suffering comes of hay fever, as to which he says:
“Light, dust, contradiction—the sight of a dissenter—anything sets me sneezing; and if I begin sneezing at twelve, I don’t leave off till two, and am heard distinctly in Taunton (when the wind sets that way), a distance of six miles.”
This does not show quite so large a reserve and continence of speech as we naturally look for in the clerical profession; but this, and other such do, I think, set the Rev. Sydney Smith before us, with his witty proclivities, and his unreserve, and his spirit of frolic, as no citations from his moral and intellectual philosophy could ever do. And I easily figure to myself this portly, well-preserved gentleman of St. Paul’s, fighting the weaknesses of the gout with a gold-headed cane, and picking his way of an afternoon along the pavements of Piccadilly, with eye as bright as a bird’s, and beak as sharp as a bird’s—regaling himself with the thought of the dinner for which he is booked, and of the brilliant talkers he is to encounter, with the old parry and thrust, at Rogers’s rooms, or under the noble ceiling of Holland House.
A Highlander.
Another writer—whose sympathies from the beginning were with the Liberalism of the Edinburgh Review (though not a contributor till some years after its establishment) was Sir James Mackintosh.[36] A Highlander by birth—he was at Aberdeen University—afterwards in Edinboro’, where he studied medicine, and getting his Doctorate, set up in London—eking out a support, which his medical practice did not bring, by writing for the papers.
This was at the date when the recent French Revolution and its issues were at the top of all men’s thoughts; and when Burke had just set up his glittering bulwark of eloquence and of sentiment in his famous “Reflections”; and our young Doctor (Mackintosh)—full of a bumptious Whiggism, undertook a reply to the great statesman—a reply so shrewd, so well-seasoned, so sound—that it brought to the young Scotchman (scarce twenty-five in those days) a fame he never outlived. It secured him the acquaintance of Fox and Sheridan, and the friendship of Burke, who in his latter days invited the young pamphleteer, who had so strongly, yet respectfully, antagonized his views, to pass a Christmas with him at his home of Beaconsfield. Of course, such a success broke up the doctoring business, and launched Mackintosh upon a new career. He devoted himself to politics; was some time an accredited lecturer upon the law of nations; was knighted presently and sent to Bombay on civil service. His friends hoped he might find financial equipment there, but this hope was vain; red-tape was an abomination to him always; cash-book and ledger represented unknown quantities; he knew no difference between a shilling and a pound, till he came to spend them. He was in straits all his life.
His friendship for Jeffrey, Sydney Smith, and Brougham was maintained by correspondence, and on his return from India he became an occasional contributor to the great Scotch Review on various subjects.
His range of acquirements was most wide—too wide and too unceasing for the persistency which goes with great single achievements. His histories are fragments. His speeches are misplaced treatises; his treatises are epitomes of didactic systems. When we weigh his known worth, his keenness of intellect, his sound judgment, his wealth of language, his love for thoroughness—which led him to remotest sources of information—his amazing power in colloquial discourse, we are astonished at the little store of good things he has left. There was a lack in him, indeed, of the salient and electrical wit of Sydney Smith; a lack of the easy and graceful volubility of Jeffrey; lack of the abounding and illuminating rhetoric of Macaulay; but a greater lack was of that dogged, persistent working habit which gave to Brougham his triumphs.
Yet Mackintosh was always plotting great literary designs; but his fastidious taste, and his critical hunger for all certainties, kept him forever in the search of new material and appliances. He was dilatory to the last degree; his caution always multiplied delays; no general was ever so watchful of his commissariat—none ever so unready for a “Forward, march!” Among his forecasts was that of a great history of England. Madame de Staël urged her friend to take possession of her villa on Lake Geneva and, like Gibbon, write his way there to a great fame. He did for awhile set himself resolutely to a beginning at the country home of Weedon Lodge in Buckinghamshire—accumulated piles of fortifying MSS. and private records; but for outcome we have only that clumsy torso which outlines the Revolution of 1688.[37]
His plans wanted a hundred working years, instead of the thirty which are only allotted to men. What Jeffrey left behind him marks, I think, the full limit of his powers; the same is true of Brougham, and true probably of Macaulay; and I think no tension and no incentive would have wrought upon Sydney Smith to work greater and brighter things than he did accomplish. A bishopric would only have set his gibes into coruscation at greater tables, and perhaps given larger system to his charities. But Mackintosh never worked up to the full level of his best power and large learning, except in moments of conversational exaltation.