tions about his schooldays--one of a benevolent stranger who found him
reading Virgil when other boys were playing cricket, patted his head, and
foretold his future greatness; another of a round-robin from his
schoolfellows, declining to compete against him for prizes, "because he
always gained them." But this is not history.

From Winchester Sydney Smith passed in natural course to the other of "the
two colleges of St. Mary Winton"; and, in the interval between Winchester
and Oxford, his father sent him for six months to Normandy, with a view to
improving his French. Revolution was in the air, and it was thought a
salutary precaution that he should join one of the Jacobin clubs in the
town where he boarded, and he was duly entered as "Le Citoyen Smit, Membre
Affilie au Club des Jacobins de Mont Villiers."

But he was soon recalled to more tranquil scenes. He was elected Scholar of
New College, Oxford, on the 5th of January 1789, and at the end of his
second year he exchanged his Scholarship for a Fellowship. From that time
on he never cost his father a farthing, and he paid a considerable debt for
his younger brother Courtenay, though, as he justly remarks, "a hundred
pounds a year was very difficult to spread over the wants of a College
life." Ten years later he wrote--"I got in debt by buying books. I never
borrowed a farthing of anybody, and never received much; and have lived in
poverty and economy all my life."

His career at Oxford is buried in even deeper obscurity than his schooltime
at Winchester. This is no doubt to be explained, on the intellectual side,
by the fact that members of New College were at that time exempt from
public examination; and, on the social side, by the straitened
circumstances which prevented him from showing hospitality, and the pride
which made him unwilling to accept what he could not return. We are left to
gather his feelings about Oxford and the system pursued there, from casual
references in his critical writings; and these are uncomplimentary enough.
When he wishes to stigmatize a proposition as enormously and preposterously
absurd, he says that there is "no authority on earth (always excepting the
Dean of Christ Church), which could make it credible to me." When stirred
to the liveliest indignation by the iniquities which a Tory Government is
practising in Ireland, he exclaims--"A Senior Proctor of the University of
Oxford, the Head of a House, or the examining chaplain to a Bis