Smith, Sydney

Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)

Sydney (1771-1845), a British wit, editor, and clergyman. He was the son of an Essex gentleman who "bought, altered, spoiled, and sold about nineteen estates in England." A natural gaiety is traced to an inheritance of French Huguenot blood. Sydney was educated at Oxford. He became the curate of a small, uncongenial parish on Salisbury Plain. Later, while in Edinburgh supervising the education of a young Englishman, he fell in with a knot of bright young men who were dissatisfied with social, literary, and government conditions. He proposed the establishment of a radical periodical. The result was the appearance, October, 1802, of The Edinburgh Review, of which Smith was made the first editor-in-chief. Some idea of Smith's wit, seeing that the promoters were all without money, may be had from his suggesting a Latin motto for the new review, meaning in English, "We cultivate literature on a little oatmeal." His friends thought the proposed motto too literal. Subsequently Smith held pastoral charges in London and in Yorkshire. He wrote for the Review twenty-five years. He held good livings, but his views were too radical to permit his appointment to a bishopric, an advancement on which his friends had set their hearts. SAYINGS. It requires a surgical operation to get a joke well into a Scotch understanding. No one minds what Jeffrey says; . . . it is not more than a week ago that I heard him speak disrespectfully of the equator. Looked as if she had walked straight out of the ark. Not body enough to cover his mind decently with; his intellect is improperly exposed. You find people ready enough to do the Samaritan, without the oil and twopence. My living in Yorkshire was so far out of the way, that it was actually twelve miles from a lemon. Daniel Webster struck me much like a steam engine in trousers. In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book, or goes to an American play, or looks at an American picture or statue?