uld
certainly adduce would be the instance of Sydney Smith. I more than
suspect that his actual works are less and less read as time goes on,
and that the brilliant virulence of _Peter Plymley_, the even greater
brilliance, not marred by virulence at all, of the _Letters to
Archdeacon Singleton_, the inimitable quips of his articles in the
_Edinburgh Review_, are familiar, if they are familiar at all, only to
the professed readers of the literature of the past, and perhaps to some
intelligent newspaper men who find Sydney[8] to be what Fuseli
pronounced Blake, "d----d good to steal from." But the _Life_ which
Lady Holland, with her mother's and Mrs. Austin's aid, produced more
than thirty years ago has had a different fate; and a fresh lease of
popularity seems to have been secured by another _Life_, published by
Mr. Stuart Reid in 1883. This was partly abridged from the first, and
partly supplied with fresh matter by a new sifting of the documents
which Lady Holland had used. Nor do the authors of these works, however
great must be our gratitude to them, take to themselves any such share
of the credit as is due to Boswell in the case of Johnson, to Lockhart
in the case of Scott, to Carlyle in the case of Sterling. Neither can
lay claim to the highest literary merit of writing or arrangement; and
the latter of the two contains digressions, not interesting to all
readers, about the nobility of Sydney's cause. It is because both books
let their subject reveal himself by familiar letters, scraps of journal,
or conversation, and because the revelation of self is so full and so
delightful, that Sydney Smith's immortality, now that the generation
which actually heard him talk has all but disappeared, is still secured
without the slightest fear of disturbance or decay. With a few
exceptions (the Mrs. Partington business, the apologue of the dinners at
the synod of Dort, "Noodle's Oration," and one or two more), the things
by which Sydney is known to the general, all come, not from his works,
but from his _Life_ or _Lives_. No one with any sense of fun can read
the Works without being delighted; but in the Life and the letters the
same qualities of wit appear, with other qualities which in the Works
hardly appear at all. A person absolutely ignorant of anything but the
Works might possibly dismiss Sydney Smith as a brilliant but bitter and
not too consistent partisan, who fought desperately against abuses when
his party was out,