It has been said of Sydney Smith that he was not only a humourist, but a "good-humourist," and this is undoubtedly true. Politics, indeed, according to their usual custom, sometimes rather acidulated his good humour; but anybody possessed of the noun, with the least allowance of the adjective, should be propitiated by the way in which the almost Radical reformer of Peter Plymley's Letters in 1807 became the almost Tory and wholly conservative maintainer of ecclesiastical rights in those to Archdeacon Singleton thirty years later.

Both, however, were "Letters" of the sophisticated kind: but we have plenty of perfectly genuine correspondence, also agreeable and sometimes extremely amusing. Whether Sydney (his friends always abbreviated him thus, and he accepted the Christian name) describes the makeshifts of his Yorkshire parish or the luxuries of his Somerset one; whether he discusses the effect of a diet of geraniums on pigs or points out that as Lord Tankerville has given him a whole buck "this takes up a great deal of my time"—he is always refreshing. He has no great depth, but we do not go to him for that: and he is not shallow in the offensive sense of the word. His gaiety does not get on one's nerves as does that of some—perhaps most—professional jokers: neither, as is too frequently the case with them, does it bore. His letters are not the easiest to select from: for they are usually short and their excellence lies rather in still shorter flashes such as those glanced at above; as the grave proposition that "the information of very plain women is so inconsiderable that I agree with you in setting no store by it;" or as this other (resembling a short newspaper paragraph) "The Commissioner will have hard work with the Scotch atheists: they are said to be numerous this season and in great force, from the irregular supply of rain." But the following specimens are fairly representative. They were written at an interval of about ten years: the first from Foston, the second from Combe Florey. "Miss Berry," the elder of the famous sisters who began by fascinating Horace Walpole and ended by charming Thackeray: "Donna Agnes" was the younger. "Lady Rachel," the famous wife of the person who suffered for the Rye House plot (Lady Rachel Wriothesley, of Rachel Lady Russell, but Miss Berry had written a Life of her under her maiden name). Sydney's politics show in his allusion to the assassination of the Duc de Berri, son of Charles X. of France (who had, however, not then come to the throne); in his infinitely greater sorrow for the dismissal of the mildly Liberal minister Decazes; and in his spleen at the supporters of the English Tory government of Lord Liverpool. (The "little plot" was Thistlewood's). In the second letter the "hotel" is his new parsonage in Somerset: "Bowood," Lord Lansdowne's Wiltshire house, a great Whig rallying place. I suppose "Sea-shore Calcott" is Sir A. W. Calcott the painter. "Luttrell" (Henry), a talker and versifier very well known in his own day, but of less enduring reputation than some others. "Napier's Book," the brilliant if somewhat partisan History of the Peninsular War. I am not quite certain in which of two senses Sydney uses the word caractÈre. As ought to be well known this does not exactly correspond to our "character"—but most commonly means "temper" or "disposition." It has, however, a peculiar technical meaning of "official description" or "estimate" which would suit Sir William Napier well. The Napiers were "kittle cattle" from the official point of view.