emigrant, from Languedoc. Every one may remember the charming attributes
given by Miss Kavanagh, in her delicious tale, 'Nathalie,' to the French
women of the South. This Miss Olier seems to have realized all one's
ideas of the handsome, sweet-tempered, high-minded Southrons of _la
belle France_. To her Sydney Smith traced his native gaiety; her beauty
did not, certainly, pass to him as well as to some of her other
descendants. When Talleyrand was living in England as an emigrant, on
intimate terms with Robert Smith, Sydney's brother, or Bobus, as he was
called by his intimates, the conversation turned one day on hereditary
beauty. Bobus spoke of his mother's personal perfections: _'Ah, mon
ami,'_ cried Talleyrand, _c'était apparemment, monsieur: volre père qui
n'était pas bien.'_
This Bobus was the schoolfellow at Eton of Canning and Frere; and with
John Smith and those two youths, wrote the 'Microcosm.' Sydney, on the
other hand, was placed on the Foundation, at Winchester, which was then
a stern place of instruction for a gay, spirited, hungry boy. Courtenay,
his younger brother, went with him, but ran away twice. To owe one's
education to charity was, in those days, to be half starved. Never was
there enough, even of the coarsest food, to satisfy the boys, and the
urchins, fresh from home, were left to fare as they might. 'Neglect,
abuse, and vice were,' Sydney used to say, 'the pervading evils of
Winchester; and the system of teaching, if one may so call it, savoured
of the old monastic narrowness.... I believe, when a boy at school, I
made above ten thousand Latin verses, and no man in his senses would
dream of ever making another in after-life. So much for life and time
wasted.' The verse-inciting process is, nevertheless, remorselessly
carried on during three years more at Oxford and is much oftener the
test of patient stupidity than of aspiring talent, Yet of what
stupendous importance it is in the attainment of scholarships and
prizes; and how zealous, how tenacious, are dons and 'coaches' in
holding to that which far higher classics, the Germans, regard with
contempt!
Sydney's proficiency promoted him to be captain of the school, and he
left Winchester for New College, Oxford---one of the noblest and most
abused institutions then of that grand university. Having obtained a
scholarship, as a matter of course, and afterwards a fellowship, he
remarked that the usual bumpers of port wine at college were as much the
order of the day among the Fellows as Latin verses among the
undergraduates. We may not, however, picture to ourselves Sydney as
partaking of the festivities of the common room; with more probability
let us imagine him wandering with steady gait, even _after_ Hall--a
thing not even then or now certain in colleges--in those evergreen,
leafy, varied gardens, flanked by that old St. Peter's church on the one
side, and guarded by the high wall, once a fortification, on the other.
He was poor, and therefore safe, for poverty is a guardian angel to an
undergraduate, and work may protect even the Fellow from utter
deterioration.
He was turned out into the world by his father with his hundred a year
from the Fellowship, and never had a farthing from the old destroyer of
country-seats afterwards. He never owed a sixpence; nay, he paid a debt
of thirty pounds, which Courtenay, who had no _iron_ in his character,
had incurred at Winchester, and had not the courage to avow. The next
step was to choose a profession. The bar would have been Sydney's
choice; but the church was the choice of his father. It is the cheapest
channel by which a man may pass into genteel poverty; 'wit and
independence do not make bishops,' as Lord Cockburn remarks. We do not,
however, regard, as he does, Sydney Smith as 'lost' by being a
churchman. He was happy, and made others happy; he was good, and made
others good. Who can say the same of a successful barrister, or of a
popular orator? His first sphere was in a curacy on Salisbury Plain; one
of his earliest clerical duties was to marry his brother Robert (a
barrister) to Miss Vernon, aunt to Lord Lansdowne. 'All I can tell you
of the marriage,' Sydney wrote to his mother, 'is that he cried, she
cried, I cried.' It was celebrated in the library at Bowood, where
Sydney so often enchanted the captivating circle afterwards by his wit.
Nothing could be more gloomy than the young pastor's life on Salisbury
Plain: 'the first and poorest pauper of the hamlet,' as he calls a
curate, he was seated down among a few scattered cottages on this vast
flat; visited even by the butcher's cart only once a week from
Salisbury; accosted by few human beings; shunned by all who loved social
life. But the probation was not long; and after being nearly destroyed
by a thunder-storm in one of his rambles, he quitted Salisbury Plain,
after two years, for a more genial scene.
There was an hospitable squire, a Mr. Beach, living in Smith's parish;
the village of Netherhaven, near Amesbury. Mr. Beach had a son; the
quiet Sundays at the Hall were enlivened by the curate's company at
dinner, and Mr. Beach found his guest both amusing and sensible, and
begged him to become tutor to the young squire. Smith accepted; and went
away with his pupil, intending to visit Germany. The French Revolution
was, however, at its height. Germany was impracticable, and 'we were
driven,' Sydney wrote to his mother, 'by stress of politics, into
Edinburgh.'
This accident,--this seeming accident,--was the foundation of Sydney
Smith's opportunities; not of his success, for that his own merits
procured, but of the direction to which his efforts were applied. He
would have been eminent, wherever destiny had led him; but he was thus
made to be useful in one especial manner; 'his lines had, indeed, fallen
in pleasant places.'
Edinburgh, in 1797, was not, it is almost needless to say, the Edinburgh
of 1860. An ancient, picturesque, high-built looking city, with its
wynds and closes, it had far more the characteristics of an old French
_ville de province_ than of a northern capital. The foundation-stone of
the new College was laid in 1789, but the building was not finished
until more than forty years afterwards. The edifice then stood in the
midst of fields and gardens. 'Often.' writes Lord Cockburn, 'did we
stand to admire the blue and yellow crocuses rising through the clean
earth in the first days of spring, in the house of Doctor Monro (the
second), whose house stood in a small field entering from Nicolson
Street, within less than a hundred yards from the college.'
The New Town was in progress when Sydney Smith and his pupil took refuge
in 'Auld Reekie.' With the rise of every street some fresh innovation in
manners seemed also to begin. Lord Cockburn, wedded as he was to his
beloved Reekie, yet unprejudiced and candid on all points, ascribes the
change in customs to the intercourse with the English, and seems to date
it from the Union. Thus the overflowing of the old town into fresh
spaces, 'implied,' as he remarks, 'a general alteration of our habits.'
As the dwellers in the Faubourg St. Germain regard their neighbours
across the Seine, in the Faubourg St. Honoré, with disapproving eyes, so
the sojourners in the Canongate and the Cowgate considered that the
inundation of modern population vulgarized their 'prescriptive
gentilities.' Cockburn's description of a Scottish assembly in the olden
time is most interesting.
'For example, Saint Cecilia's Hall was the only public resort of the
musical; and besides being our most selectly fashionable place of
amusement, was the best and most beautiful concert-room I have ever
seen. And there have I myself seen most of our literary and fashionable
gentlemen, predominating with their side curls and frills, and ruffles,
and silver buckles; and our stately matrons stiffened in hoops, and
gorgeous satin; and our beauties with high-heeled shoes, powdered and
pomatumed hair, and lofty and composite head-dresses. All this was in
the Cowgate; the last retreat now-a-days of destitution and disease. The
building still stands, through raised and changed. When I last saw it,
it seemed to be partly an old-clothesman's shop and partly a brazier's.'
Balls were held in the beautiful rooms of George Square, in spite of the
'New Town piece of presumption,' that is, an attempt to force the
fashionable dancers of the reel into the George Street apartments.
'And here,' writes Lord Cockburn, looking back to the days when he was
that 'ne'er-do-weel' Harry Cockburn, 'were the last remains of the
ball-room discipline of the preceding age. Martinet dowagers and
venerable beaux acted as masters and mistresses of ceremonies, and made
all the preliminary arrangements. No couple could dance unless each
party was provided with a ticket prescribing the precise place, in the
precise dance. If there was no ticket, the gentleman or the lady was
dealt with as an intruder, and turned out of the dance. If the ticket
had marked upon it---say for a country-dance, the figures, 3, 5; this
meant that the holder was to place himself in the 3rd dance, and 5th
from the top; and if he was anywhere else, he was set right or excluded.
And the partner's ticket must correspond. Woe on the poor girl who with
ticket 2, 7, was found opposite a youth marked 5, 9! It was flirting
without a licence, and looked very ill, and would probably be reported
by the ticket director of that dance to the mother.'
All this had passed away; and thus the aristocracy of a few individuals
was ended; and society, freed from some of its restraints, flourished in
another and more enlightened way than formerly.
There were still a sufficient number of peculiarities to gratify one who
had an eye to the ludicrous. Sydney Smith soon discovered that it is a
work of time to impart a humorous idea to a true Scot. 'It requires,' he
used to say, 'a surgical operation to get a joke well into a Scotch
understanding.' 'They are so embued with metaphysics, that they even
make love metaphysically. I overheard a young lady of my acquaintance,
at a dance in Edinburgh, exclaim in a sudden pause of the music, "What
you say, my Lord, is very true of love in the _abstract_, but,--" here
the fiddlers began fiddling furiously, and the rest was lost.' He was,
however, most deeply touched by the noble attribute of that nation which
retains what is so rare--the attribute of being true friends. He did
ample justice to their kindliness of heart. 'If you meet with an
accident,' he said, 'half Edinburgh immediately flocks to your doors to
inquire after your _pure_ hand, or your _pure_ foot.' 'Their temper,' he
observed, 'stands anything but an attack on their climate; even Jeffrey
cannot shake off the illusion that myrtles flourish at Craig Crook.' The
sharp reviewer stuck to his myrtle allusions, and treated Smith's
attempts with as much contempt as if he had been a 'wild visionary, who
had never breathed his caller air,' nor suffered under the rigours of
his climate, nor spent five years in 'discussing metaphysics and
medicine in that garret end of the earth,--that knuckle end of
England--that land of Calvin, oat-cakes, and sulphur,' as Smith termed
Scotland.
During two years he braved the winters, in which he declared
hackney-coaches were drawn by four horses on account of the snow; where
men were blown flat down on the face by the winds; and where even
'experienced Scotch fowls did not dare to cross the streets, but sidled
along, tails aloft, without venturing to encounter the gale.' He
luxuriated, nevertheless, in the true Scotch supper, than which nothing
more pleasant and more unwholesome has ever been known in Christendom.
Edinburgh is said to have been the only place where people dined twice a
day. The writer of this memoir is old enough to remember the true
Scottish _Attic_ supper before its final 'fading into wine and water,'
as Lord Cockburn describes its decline. 'Suppers,' Cockburn truly says,
'are cheaper than dinners,' and Edinburgh, at that time, was the
cheapest place in Great Britain. Port and sherry were the staple wines:
claret, duty free in Scotland until 1780, was indeed beginning to be a
luxury; it was no longer the ordinary beverage, as it was when as
Mackenzie, the author of the 'Man of Feeling,' described--it used, upon
the arrival of a cargo, to be sent through the town on a cart with a
horse before it, so that every one might have a sample, by carrying a
jug to be filled for sixpence: still even at the end of the eighteenth
century it was in frequent use. Whisky toddy and plotty (red wine mulled
with spices) came into the supper-room in ancient flagons or _stoups_
after a lengthy repast of broiled chickens, roasted moorfowl, pickled
mussels, flummery, and numerous other good things had been discussed by
a party who ate as if they had not dined that day. 'We will eat,' Lord
Cockburn used to say after a long walk, 'a profligate supper,'--a supper
without regard to discretion, or digestion; and he usually kept his
word.
In Edinburgh, Sydney Smith formed the intimate acquaintance of Lord
Jeffrey, and that acquaintance ripened into a friendship only closed by
death. The friendship of worthy, sensible men he looked upon as one of
the greatest pleasures in life.
The 'old suns,' Lord Cockburn tells us, 'were setting when the band of
great thinkers and great writers who afterwards concocted the "Edinburgh
Review," were rising into celebrity.' Principal Robertson, the
historian, had departed this life in 1793, a kindly old man. With
beaming eyes underneath his frizzed and curled wig, and a trumpet tied
with a black ribbon to the button-hole of his coat, for he was deaf,
this most excellent of writers showed how he could be also the most
zealous of diners. Old Adam Ferguson, the historian of Rome, had 'set,'
also: one of the finest specimens of humanity had gone from among his
people in him. Old people, not thirty years ago, delighted to tell you
how 'Adam,' when chaplain to the Black Watch, that glorious 42nd,
refused to retire to his proper place, the rear, during an action, but
persisted in being engaged in front. He was also gone; and Dugald
Stewart filled his vacant place in the professorship of moral
philosophy. Dr. Henry, the historian, was also at rest; after a long
laborious life, and the compilation of a dull, though admirable History
of England, the design of which, in making a chapter on arts, manners,
and literature separate from the narrative, appears to have suggested to
Macaulay his inimitable disquisition on the same topics. Dr. Henry
showed to a friend a pile of books which he had gone through, merely to
satisfy himself and the world as to what description of trousers was
worn by the Saxons. His death was calm as his life. 'Come out to me
directly,' he wrote to his friend, Sir Harry Moncrieff: 'I have got
something to do this week; I have got to die.'
It was in 1801, that Dugald Stewart began his course of lectures on
political economy. Hitherto all public favour had been on the side of
the Tories, and independence of thought was a sure way to incur
discouragement from the Bench, in the Church, and from every Government
functionary. Lectures on political economy were regarded as innovations;
but they formed a forerunner of that event which had made several
important changes in our literary and political hemisphere: the
commencement of the 'Edinburgh Review.' This undertaking was the work of
men who were separated from the mass of their brother-townsmen by their
politics; their isolation as a class binding them the more closely
together by links never broken, in a brotherhood of hope and ambition,
to which the natural spirits of Sydney Smith, of Cockburn, and of
Jeffrey, gave an irresistible charm.
Among those who the most early in life ended a career of promise was
Francis Horner. He was the son of a linen-draper in Edinburgh; or, as
the Scotch call it, following the French, a merchant. Homer's best linen
for sheets, and table-cloths, and all the _under garments_ of
housekeeping, are still highly esteemed by the trade.
'My desire to know Horner,' Sydney Smith states, 'arose from my being
cautioned against him by some excellent and feeble-minded people to whom
I brought letters of introduction, and who represented him as a person
of violent political opinions.' Sydney Smith interpreted this to mean
that Horner was a man who thought for himself; who loved truth better
than he loved Dundas (Lord Melville), then the tyrant of Scotland. 'It
is very curious to consider,' Sydney Smith wrote, in addressing Lady
Holland, in 1817, 'in what manner Horner gained, in so extraordinary a
degree, the affections of such a number of persons of both sexes, all
ages, parties, and ranks in society; for he was not remarkably good
tempered, nor particularly lively and agreeable; and an inflexible
politician on the unpopular side. The causes are, his high character for
probity, honour, and talents; his fine countenance; the benevolent
interest he took in the concerns of all his friends; his simple and
gentlemanlike manners; his untimely death.' 'Grave, studious,
honourable, kind, everything Horner did,' says Lord Cockburn, 'was
marked by thoughtfulness and kindness;' a beautiful character, which was
exhibited but briefly to his contemporaries, but long remembered after
his death.
Henry Brougham was another of the Edinburgh band of young spirits. He
was educated in the High School under Luke Fraser, the tutor who trained
Walter Scott and Francis Jeffrey. Brougham used to be pointed out 'as
the fellow who had beat the master.' He had dared to differ with Fraser,
a hot pedant, on some piece of Latinity. Fraser, irritated, punished the
rebel, and thought the matter ended. But the next day 'Harry,' as they
called him, appeared, loaded with books, renewed the charge, and forced
Luke to own that he was beaten. 'It was then,' says Lord Cockburn, 'that
I first saw him.'
After remaining two years in Edinburgh, Sydney Smith went southwards to
marry a former schoolfellow of his sister Maria's--a Miss Pybus, to whom
he had been attached and engaged at a very early period of his life. The
young lady, who was of West Indian descent, had some fortune; but her
husband's only stock, on which to begin housekeeping, consisted of six
silver tea-spoons, worn away with use. One day he rushed into the room
and threw these attenuated articles into her lap--'There, Kate, I give
you all my fortune, you lucky girl!'
With the small _dôt_, and the thin silver-spoons, the young couple set
up housekeeping in the 'garret end of the earth.' Their first difficulty
was to know how money could be obtained to begin with, for Mrs. Smith's
small fortune was settled on herself by her husband's wish. Two rows of
pearls had been given her by her thoughtful mother. These she converted
into money, and obtained for them £500. Several years afterwards, when
visiting the shop at which she sold them, with Miss Vernon and Miss Fox,
Mrs. Smith saw her pearls, every one of which she knew. She asked what
was the price. '£1,500,' was the reply.
The sum, however, was all important to the thrifty couple. It distanced
the nightmare of the poor and honest,--debt. £750 was presented by Mr.
Beach, in gratitude for the care of his son, to Smith. It was invested
in the funds, and formed the nucleus of future savings,--'_Ce n'est que
le premier pas qui coûte_' is a trite saying. '_C'est le premier pas qui
gagne_, might be applied to this and similar cases. A little
daughter--Lady Holland, the wife of the celebrated physician, Sir Henry
Holland--was sent to bless the sensible pair. Sydney had wished that she
might be born with one eye, so that he might never lose her;
nevertheless, though she happened to be born with two, he bore her
secretly from the nursery, a few hours after her birth, to show her in
triumph to the future Edinburgh Reviewers.
The birth of the 'Edinburgh Review' quickly followed that of the young
lady. Jeffrey,--then an almost starving barrister, living in the eighth
or ninth flat of a house in Buccleuch Place,--Brougham, and Sydney Smith
were the triumvirate who propounded the scheme, Smith being the first
mover. He proposed a motto: 'Tenui Musam meditanum avenir:' We cultivate
literature on a little oatmeal; but this being too near the truth, they
took their motto from Publius Syrus; 'of whom,' said Smith, 'none of us
had, I am sure, read a single line.' To this undertaking Sydney Smith
devoted his talents for more than twenty-eight years.
Meantime, during the brief remainder of his stay in Edinburgh, his
circumstances improved. He had done that which most of the clergy are
obliged to do--taken a pupil. He had now another, the son of Mr. Gordon,
of Ellon; for each of these young men he received £400 a year. He became
to them a father and a friend; he entered into all their amusements. One
of them saying that he could not find conversation at the balls for his
partners, 'Never mind,' cried Sydney Smith, 'I'll fit you up in five
minutes.' Accordingly he wrote down conversations for them amid bursts
of laughter.
Thus happily did years, which many persons would have termed a season of
adversity, pass away. The chance which brought him to Edinburgh
introduced him to a state of society never likely to be seen again in
Scotland. Lord Cockburn's 'Memorials' afford an insight into manners,
not only as regarded suppers, but on the still momentous point, of
dinners. Three o'clock was the fashionable hour, so late as the
commencement of the present century. That hour, 'not without groans and
predictions,' became four--and four was long and conscientiously adhered
to. 'Inch by inch,' people yielded, and five continued to be the
standard polite hour from 1806 to 1820. 'Six has at length prevailed.'
The most punctilious ceremony existed. When dinner was announced, a file
of ladies went first in strict order of precedence. 'Mrs. Colonel Such
an One;' 'Mrs. Doctor Such an One,' and so on. Toasts were _de rigueur_:
no glass of wine was to be taken by a guest without comprehending a
lady, or a covey of ladies. 'I was present,' says Lord Cockburn, 'when
the late Duke of Buccleuch took a glass of sherry by himself at the
table of Charles Hope, then Lord Advocate, and this was noticed as a
piece of ducal contempt.' Toasts, and when the ladies had retired,
_rounds_ of toasts, were drunk. 'The prandial nuisance,' Lord Cockburn
wrote, 'was horrible. But it was nothing to what followed.'
At these repasts, though less at these than at boisterous suppers, a
frequent visitor at the same table with Sydney Smith was the illustrious
Sir James Mackintosh, a man to whose deep-thinking mind the world is
every day rendering justice. The son of a brave officer, Mackintosh was
born on the banks of Loch Ness: his mother, a Miss Fraser, was aunt to
Mrs. Fraser Tytler, wife of Lord Woodhouselee, one of the judges of the
Court of Session and mother of the late historian of that honoured name.
Mackintosh had been studying at Aberdeen, in the same classes with
Robert Hall, whose conversation, he avowed, had a great influence over
his mind. He arrived in Edinburgh about 1784, uncertain to what
profession to belong; somewhat anxious to be a bookseller, in order to
revel in 'the paradise of books;' he turned his attention, however, to
medicine, and became a Brunonian, that is, a disciple of John Brown, the
founder of a theory which he followed out to the extent in practice. The
main feature of the now defunct system, which set scientific Europe in a
blaze, seems to have been a mad indulgence of the passions; and an
unbridled use of intoxicating liquors. Brown fell a victim to his vices.
Years after he had been laid in his grave, his daughter, Euphemia, being
in great indigence, received real kindness from Sir James and Lady
Mackintosh, the former of whom used to delight in telling the story of
her father's saying to her: 'Effy, bring me the mooderate stimulus of a
hoonderd draps o' laudanum in a glass o' brandy.'