Sydney Smith

"Ah, you flavour everything; you are the vanilla of society."

"My living in Yorkshire was so far out of the way, that it was actually twelve miles from a lemon."

"As the French say, there are three sexes — men, women, and clergymen."

"To take Macaulay out of literature and society and put him in the House of Commons, is like taking the chief physician out of London during a pestilence."

"Praise is the best diet for us, after all."

"Daniel Webster struck me much like a steam-engine in trousers."

"Heat, ma'am!" I said; "it was so dreadful here, that I found there was nothing left for it but to take off my flesh and sit in my bones."

"Live always in the best company when you read."

"Never give way to melancholy; resist it steadily, for the habit will encroach."

"He was a one-book man. Some men have only one book in them; others, a library."

"Did you ever hear my definition of marriage? It is, that it resembles a pair of shears, so joined that they can not be separated; often moving in opposite directions, yet always punishing anyone who comes between them."

"Macaulay is like a book in breeches...He has occasional flashes of silence, that make his conversation perfectly delightful."

"Let onion atoms lurk within the bowl And, scarce suspected, animate the whole."

"Serenely full, the epicure would say, Fate cannot harm me, I have dined today."

"You remember Thurlow's answer to some one complaining of the injustice of a company. "Why, you never expected justice from a company, did you? they have neither a soul to lose, nor a body to kick.""

"Ah! what you don't know would make a great book."

"In composing, as a general rule, run your pen through every other word you have written; you have no idea what vigour it will give your style."

"Thank God for tea! What would the world do without tea? how did it exist? I am glad I was not born before tea."

"I am old, but I certainly have not that sign of old age, extolling the past at the expense of the present."

"We know nothing of tomorrow; our business is to be good and happy today."

"If you could be alarmed into the semblance of modesty, you would charm everybody; but remember my joke against you about the Moon and the Solar System;—"Damn the solar system! bad light — planets too distant — pestered with comets — feeble contriviance; — could make a better with great ease.""

"I look upon Switzerland as an inferior sort of Scotland."

"What would life be without arithmetic, but a scene of horrors?"

"I have no relish for the country; it is a kind of healthy grave."

"Correspondences are like small clothes before the invention of suspenders; it is impossible to keep them up."

"A comfortable house is a great source of happiness. It ranks immediately after health and a good conscience."

"He was an admirable joker; he had the art of placing ordinary things in an infinitely ludicrous point of view. I have seen him at dinner at Foston, (his living near York) drive the servants from the room with the tears running down their faces, in peals of inextinguishable laughter: but he was too much of a jack-pudding."

"Smith's reputation here then was the same as it has was throughout his life, that of a wise wit. Was there ever more sense combined with more hilarious jocularity? But he has been lost by being placed within the pale of holy orders. He has done his duty there decently well, and is an admirable preacher. But he ought to have been in some freer sphere; especially since wit and independence do not make bishops."

"The character which emerges from these letters is wholly admirable, possessing besides the qualities of cleverness and wit, which we suspect in England, the qualities we all admire: kindness, humility, industry, courage and tolerance—and how seldom it is that champions of toleration as public policy are tolerant men in private life!"

"Sydney Smith was a clergyman of the eighteenth-century kind, devoted to good food, good wine and good society; he believed in rational religion and hated evangelical "enthusiasm"; he liked order and propriety and he was universally acclaimed the wittiest man of his time."

"I never see Sydney Smith without thinking him too much of a buffoon."

"He is a very clever fellow, but he will never be a bishop."

"I once dined with him (at Holland House), and a more profligate parson I never met."

"Humour's pink primate Sydney Smith."

"The ancient and amusing defender of our faith."

"His great delight was to produce a succession of ludicrous images: these followed each other with a rapidity that scarcely left time to laugh; he himself laughing louder and with more enjoyment than any one. This electric contact of mirth came and went with the occasion; it cannot be repeated or reproduced. Anything would give occasion to it. For instance, having seen in the newspapers that Sir Æneas Mackintosh was come to town, he drew such a ludicrous caricature of Sir Æneas and Lady Dido, for the amusement of their namesake, that Sir James Mackintosh rolled on the floor in fits of laughter, and Sydney Smith, striding across him, exclaimed, "Ruat Justitia!" His powers of fun were at the same time united with the strongest, and most practical common sense. So that while he laughed away seriousness at one minute, he destroyed in the next some rooted prejudice which had braved for a thousand years the battle of reason, and the breeze of ridicule."

"In March 1802 Smith proposed to his friends Jeffrey and Brougham to start the Edinburgh Review ... Smith's articles are among the best, and are now the most readable. Many of them are mere trifles, but nearly all show his characteristic style. He deserves the credit of vigorously defending doctrines then unpopular, and now generally accepted. Smith was a thorough whig of the more enlightened variety, and his attacks upon various abuses, though not in advance of the liberalism of the day, gave him a bad name among the dispensers of patronage at the time. His honesty and manliness are indisputable."

"His wildest extravagances, too, were often the vehicle of sound arguments, and his humour generally played over the surface of strong good sense. His exuberant fun did not imply scoffing. He was sensitive to the charge of indifference to the creed which he professed. He took pains to protest against any writing by his allies which might shock believers. He had strong religious convictions, and could utter them solemnly and impressively. It must, however, be admitted that his creed was such as fully to account for the suspicion. In theology he followed Paley, and was utterly averse to all mysticism in literature or religion. He ridiculed the ‘evangelicals,’ and attacked the methodists with a bitterness exceptional in his writings. He equally despised in later days the party then called ‘Puseyites.’ He was far more suspicious of an excess than of a defect of zeal. His writings upon the established church show a purely secular view of the questions at issue. He assumes that a clergyman is simply a human being in a surplice, and the church a branch of the civil service. He had apparently few clerical intimacies, and his chief friends of the Edinburgh Review and Holland House were anything but orthodox. Like other clergymen of similar tendencies, he was naturally regarded by his brethren as something of a traitor to their order. Nobody, however, could discharge the philanthropic duties of a parish clergyman more energetically, and his general goodness and the strength of his affections are as unmistakable as his sincerity and the masculine force of his mind."