When, in November 1834, Lord Althorp's removal to the House of Lords vacated the Leadership of the House of Commons, Lord Melbourne and the rest of the Cabinet decided that Lord John must take it. He doubted his fitness for the post, but said that even if he were called to take command of the Channel Fleet, he supposed he must obey the call and do his best, Sydney Smith heard of this modest and patriotic saying, and wove it into his most celebrated passage,—
"There is not a better man in England than Lord John Russell; but his worst failure is that he is utterly ignorant of all moral fear; there is nothing he would not undertake, I believe he would perform the operation for the stone—build St. Peter's—or assume (with or without ten minutes' notice) the command of the Channel Fleet; and no one would discover by his manner that the patient had died—the Church tumbled down—and the Channel Fleet been knocked to atoms. I believe his motives are always pure, and his measures often able; but they are endless, and never done with that pedetentous pace and pedetentous mind in which it behoves the wise and virtuous improver to walk. He alarms the wise Liberals; and it is impossible to sleep soundly while he has the command of the watch."
Once again, in 1839, Sydney Smith returned to the same subject through the same medium. He rejoiced in great improvements which had been introduced into the measures of the Commissioners, claimed some credit for these improvements, and pointed out that they materially affected the well-being of the parochial clergy. But, as regards the dealings of the Commission with Chapters and Cathedrals, he remains convinced that they were rash, foolish, and dangerous to the Church, "Milton asked where the nymphs were when Lycidas perished? I ask where the Bishops are when the remorseless deep is closing over the head of their beloved Establishment."
One of the Bishops had emerged from silence and security to rebuke the correspondent of Archdeacon Singleton, and now he had his reward.—
"You must have read an attack upon me by the Bishop of Gloucester,[128] in the course of which he says that I have not been appointed to my situation as Canon of St. Paul's for my piety and learning but because I am a scoffer and a jester. Is not this rather strong for a Bishop, and does it not appear to you, Mr. Archdeacon, as rather too close an imitation of that language which is used in the apostolic occupation of trafficking in fish? Whether I have been appointed for my piety or not, must depend upon what this poor man means by piety. He means by that word, of course, a defence of all the tyrannical and oppressive abuses of the Church which have been swept away within the last fifteen or twenty years of my life; the Corporation and Test Acts; the Penal Laws against the Catholics; the Compulsory Marriages of Dissenters, and all those disabling and disqualifying laws which were the disgrace of our Church, and which he has always looked up to as the consummation of human wisdom. If piety consisted in the defence of these—if it was impious to struggle for their abrogation, I have indeed led an ungodly life…. To read, however, his Lordship a lesson of good manners, I had prepared for him a chastisement which would have been echoed from the Segrave who banqueteth in the castle,[129] to the idiot who spitteth over the bridge at Gloucester."
But the Bishop had made a rather misplaced appeal for compassion, on account of his failing eyesight; and Sydney, flinging him contemptuously on one side, passed on to the more formidable Bishop of London.—
"I was much amused with what old Hermann says of the Bishop of London's Æschylus. 'We find,' he says, 'a great arbitrariness of proceeding, and much boldness of innovation, guided by no sure principle'; here it is: qualis ab incepto. He begins with Æschylus, and ends with the Church of England; begins with profane, and ends with holy innovations—scratching out old readings which every commentator had sanctioned; abolishing ecclesiastical dignities which every reformer had spared; thrusting an anapæest into a verse, which will not bear it; and intruding a Canon into a Cathedral, which does not want it; and this is the Prelate by whom the proposed reform of the Church has been principally planned, and to whose practical wisdom the Legislature is called upon to defer. The Bishop of London is a man of very great ability, humane, placable, generous, munificent; very agreeable, but not to be trusted with great interests where calmness and judgment are required: unfortunately, my old and amiable school-fellow, the Archbishop of Canterbury, has melted away before him, and sacrificed that wisdom on which we all founded our security…. Whatever happens, I am not to blame. I have fought my fight. Farewell"
A little later he wrote to an old friend:—
"I don't like writing to the Bishop of London: it is making a fuss, and looks as if I regretted the part I had taken on Church Reform, which I certainly do not—but I should be much annoyed if the Bishop were to consider me as a perpetual grumbler against him and his measures—I really am not: I like the Bishop and like his conversation—the battle is ended, and I have no other quarrel with him and the Archbishop but that they neither of them ever ask me to dinner. You see a good deal of the Bishop, and as you have always exhorted me to be a good boy, take an opportunity to set him right as to my real dispositions towards him, and exhort him, as he has gained the victory, to forgive a few hard knocks."
In the summer of 1839 Courtenay Smith died suddenly, and left no will.[130]
He had accumulated wealth in India, and a third part of it now passed to
his brother Sydney. Referring to these circumstances four years later,
Sydney wrote:—