The house which was furnished with the products of this Moral Philosophy was No. 18 Orchard Street, Portman Square, and here the Smiths lived till they left London for a rural parish. Meanwhile, the excellent Bernard had secured some clerical employment for his friend. Through his influence the Rev. Sydney Smith was elected "alternate Evening Preacher at the Foundling Hospital," on the 27th of March 1805. He tried to open a Proprietary Chapel on his own account, but was foiled by the obstinacy of the Rector in whose parish it was situate.[32] He was appointed Morning Preacher at Berkeley Chapel, Mayfair, and combined his duties there with similar duties at Fitzroy Chapel, now St. Saviour's Church, Fitzroy Square.[33] These various appointments, coupled with his lectures at the Royal Institution, brought him increasingly into public notice. His preaching was admired by some important people. His contributions to the Edinburgh, so entirely unlike anything else in periodical literature, were eagerly anticipated and keenly canvassed. It was reported that King George III. had read them, and had said, "He is a very clever fellow, but he will never be a bishop." His social gifts won him friends wherever he went; and Lord and Lady Holland, though themselves not addicted to the public observances of religion, were anxious to promote his professional advancement; but this was not easy. "From the beginning of the century," he wrote, "to the death of Lord Liverpool, was an awful period for those who had the misfortune to entertain Liberal opinions, and were too honest to sell them for the ermine of the judge or the lawn of the prelate—a long and hopeless career in your profession, the chuckling grin of noodles, the sarcastic leer of the genuine political rogue—prebendaries, deans, and bishops made over your head—reverend renegadoes advanced to the highest dignities of the Church, for helping to rivet the fetters of Catholic and Protestant dissenters, and no more chance of a Whig administration than of a thaw in Zembla."
But this gloomy period of oppression and exclusion was broken by a transient gleam. Pitt died on the 23rd of January 1806, and Lord Grenville[34] succeeded him, at the head of the ministry of "All the Talents." In this place, perhaps, may be not unsuitably inserted the epitaph which Sydney Smith suggested for Pitt's statue in Hanover Square.
To the Right Honourable William Pitt
Whose errors in foreign policy
And lavish expenditure of our Resources at home
Have laid the foundation of National Bankruptcy
And scattered the seeds of Revolution,
This Monument was erected
By many weak men, who mistook his eloquence for wisdom
And his insolence for magnanimity,
By many unworthy men whom he had ennobled,
And by many base men, whom he had enriched at the Public
Expense.
But for Englishmen
This Statue raised from such motives
Has not been erected in vain.
They learn from it those dreadful abuses
Which exist under the mockery
Of a free Representation,
And feel the deep necessity
Of a great and efficient Reform.
In Lord Grenville's ministry Lord Erskine became Lord Chancellor, and Lord Holland Lord Privy Seal. In the autumn of 1806 the living of Foston-le-Clay, eight miles from York, fell vacant. It was in the Chancellor's gift; the Lord Privy Seal said a word to his colleague; the Chancellor cordially accepted "the nominee of Lord and Lady Holland"; and that nominee was Sydney Smith. Foston was worth £500 a year, and Dr. Markham, Archbishop of York, allowed the new Rector to be non-resident, accepting his duties at the Foundling Hospital as a sufficient justification for absence from his parish. Early in 1807 he preached at the Temple Church, and published by request, a sermon on Toleration, which drew this testimony from a scandalized peer:[35]—
"Sydney Smith preached yesterday a sermon on the Catholic question…. It would have made an admirable party speech in Parliament, but as a sermon, the author deserved the Star Chamber, if it still existed."
During the summer of 1807, the Smiths lived in a hired house at Sonning on the Thames; and one of their neighbours was the great civilian Sir William Scott,[36] afterwards Lord Stowell (who deserves to be honoured for having coined the phrase—"The elegant simplicity of the Three per cents"). The old judge took a fancy to the young clergyman, and pointed out, in a friendly spirit, how much he had lost by his devotion to Whiggism. In later life, Sydney Smith wrote to Lord John Russell[37]—"I remember with pleasure, thirty years ago, old Lord Stowell saying to me, 'Mr. Smith, you would have been a much richer man if you had joined us.'"
But the Tory table-talk of Earley[38] was powerless to seduce this staunch partisan from his political allegiance; and, just at this period, he was meditating the most skilful and the most resounding blow which he ever struck for freedom and justice.
It was a critical time. The besotted resistance of the King to the slightest concession in favour of his Roman Catholic subjects had driven the ministry of "All the Talents" out of office in the spring. The High Tories succeeded them, and the General Election which ensued on the change of government gave a strong majority for "No Popery" and reaction. Meanwhile the greatest genius that the world has ever seen was wading through slaughter to a universal throne, and no effective resistance had as yet been offered to a progress which menaced the freedom of Europe and the existence of its states. At such a juncture it seemed to Sydney Smith that England could not spare a single soldier or sailor, nor afford to alienate the loyalty of a single citizen. "Buonaparte," he wrote, "is as rapid and as terrible as the lightning of God; would he were as transient." It was nothing short of national suicide to reject men desirous of serving in the army and navy on account of their beliefs, to madden English Romanists by defrauding them of their civil rights, and to outrage the whole people of Ireland by affixing a legal stigma to their religion.
His musings on this pregnant theme took shape in—