I. BIOGRAPHICAL.
Sydney Smith was born in 1771, the son of an eccentric Mr Robert Smith and his wife, who was the daughter of a French émigré. Robert Smith is said to have bought and re-sold something like twenty houses in the course of his life. This may help to account for Sydney being early dependent on his own resources. When he was engaged to be married, he threw six silver teaspoons into his fiancée’s lap, saying: “There Kate, you lucky girl, I give you my whole fortune!” [175b]
The only one of Sydney’s brothers who need be mentioned was Robert, commonly called Bobus [175c] (an Eton nickname). He once spoke of his mother’s beauty in the presence of Talleyrand, who, “with a shrug and a sly disparaging look,” said, “Ah! mon
ami, c’était donc apparemment monsieur votre père qui n’était pas bien.” [176a]
Sydney went to Winchester on the foundation, where he had to endure “years of misery and positive starvation.” He used to say that he had at school made about ten thousand Latin verses, “and no man in his senses would dream in after-life of ever making another.”
Sydney passed from Winchester to New College, Oxford, where his rank as Captain of the School apparently entitled him to a fellowship. In spite of this he seems to have been poor and to have lived in consequence very much out of society. Between Winchester and Oxford he was sent to Mont Villiers in Normandy to learn French, in which he succeeded admirably. The revolution was then at its height, and he had to be enrolled in a Jacobin Club as “Le Citoyen Smit, Membre Affilié, etc.” It speaks well for Sydney’s self-restraint and powers of self-management, that after he became a Fellow [176b] of his college he never received a farthing from his father. On leaving Oxford he was faute de mieux ordained, and became a curate at a small village in the middle of Salisbury Plain. Here he made the acquaintance of the neighbouring squire, Mr Beach. He became tutor to the squire’s son, and it was arranged that they should go to the University of Weimar; but this turned out impracticable, and (says Sydney) “in stress of politics we put into Edinburgh,” where he
remained five years. Here he came in contact with a number of interesting people—Jeffrey, [177a] Horner, [177b] Playfair, Walter Scott, Dugald Stewart, Brougham, Murray, Leyden and others, many of whom were life-long friends of Sydney. Another eminent person whose acquaintance he made later, may be mentioned here. Sydney wrote to Lady Holland in 1831 (ii., p. 326):—“Philosopher Malthus came here last week. I got an agreeable party for him of unmarried people. There was only one lady who had had a child; but he is a good-natured man, and if there are no appearances of approaching fertility, is civil to every lady.”
Sydney’s housekeeping difficulties at Edinburgh
proved an unexpected difficulty; his servants “always pulled off their stockings, in spite of my repeated objurgations, the moment my back was turned.” I cannot resist quoting, apropos des bottes, the following story. The reigning bore at Edinburgh was X, his favourite subject the North Pole. Sydney met X, indignant at Jeffrey having darted past him exclaiming, “Damn the North Pole.” Sydney tried to console him: “Why, you will scarcely believe it, but it is not more than a week ago that I heard him speak disrespectfully of the Equator.”
In 1799 or 1800 he was married to Miss Pybus, and in 1802, when a child was about to be born, Sydney hoped it would be a girl, and that she might have but one eye so that she might never marry. Part of the wish was fulfilled; the baby was a girl, but, unfortunately, quite normal in every way. Saba, for so she was called (a name [178a] invented by her father), ultimately became the wife of Sir Henry Holland, the well-known physician.