hich
all through life he studied diligently and practised courageously. But he
recommended Botany, with some confidence, as "certain to delight little
girls"; and his friendship with the amiable and instructive Mrs.
Marcet[170] gave him a smattering of scientific terms. In a discussion on
the _Inferno_ he invented a new torment especially for that excellent
lady's benefit.--

"You should be doomed to listen, for a thousand years, to
conversations between Caroline and Emily, where Caroline should always
give wrong explanations in chemistry, and Emily in the end be unable
to distinguish an acid from an alkali."

When we turn, from these smaller matters of taste and accomplishment, to
the general view of life, Sydney Smith would seem, at first sight, to have
been a Utilitarian: and yet he declared himself in vigorous terms an
opponent of the Utilitarian School.--

"That school treat mankind as if they were mere machines; the feelings
or affections never enter into their calculations. If everything is to
be sacrificed to utility, why do you bury your grandmother? why don't
you cut her into small pieces at once, and make portable soup of her?"

In a similar vein, he said of his friend George Grote that he would have
been an important politician if the world had been a chess-board. Any
system, social, political, or philosophical, which did not directly concern
itself with the wants and feelings and impulses of human flesh and blood,
appealed to him in vain.

"How foolish," he wrote, "and how profligate, to show that the
principle of general utility has no foundation; that it is often
opposed to the interests of the individual! If this be true, there is
an end of all reasoning and all morals: and if any man asks, Why am I
to do what is generally useful? he should not be reasoned with, but
called rogue, rascal, etc., and the mob should be excited to break his
windows."

He liked what he called "useful truth." He could make no terms with
thinkers who were "more fond of disputing on mind and matter than on
anything which can have a reference to the real world, inhabited by real
men, women, and children." Indeed, all his thinking was governed by his
eager and generous humanitarianism. He thought all speculation, which did
not bear directly on the welfare and happiness of human beings, a waste of
ingenuity; and yet, at the same time, he taught that all practical syst