thought the important improvement was to equalize
preferment in the English Church--that such a measure was not the one
thing foolish, but the one thing needful--I should take care, as a
mitred Commissioner, to reduce my own species of preferment to the
narrowest limits, before I proceeded to confiscate the property of any
other grade of the Church.... Frequently did Lord John meet the
destroying Bishops; much did he commend their daily heap of ruins;
sweetly did they smile on each other, and much charming talk was there
of meteorology and catarrh, and the particular Cathedral they were
pulling down at each period; till one fine day the Home
Secretary,[126] with a voice more bland, and a look more ardently
affectionate, than that which the masculine mouse bestows on his
nibbling female, informed them that the Government meant to take all
the Church property into their own hands, to pay the rates out of it
and deliver the residue to the rightful possessors. Such an effect,
they say, was never before produced by a _coup de theatre_. The
Commission was separated in an instant, London clenched his fist.
Canterbury was hurried out by his chaplains, and put into a warm bed.
A solemn vacancy spread itself over the face of Gloucester. Lincoln
was taken out in strong hysterics. What a noble scene Serjeant
Talfourd[127] would have made of all this? Why are such talents wasted
on _Ion_ and _The Athenian Captive_?"

And then Sydney Smith went on to a stricture on his friend Lord John
Russell, which has been quoted in a thousand forms from that day to this.
It is only fair both to the critic and to the criticized that this
stricture should be read in connexion with its history.

When, in November 1834, Lord Althorp's removal to the House of Lords
vacated the Leadership of the House of Commons, Lord Melbourne and the rest
of the Cabinet decided that Lord John must take it. He doubted his fitness
for the post, but said that even if he were called to take command of the
Channel Fleet, he supposed he must obey the call and do his best, Sydney
Smith heard of this modest and patriotic saying, and wove it into his most
celebrated passage,--

"There is not a better man in England than Lord John Russell; but his
worst failure is that he is utterly ignorant of all moral fear; there
is nothing he would not undertake, I believe he would perform the