us
people, as well as some wise and useful ones, who defended the abuses.
Sydney Smith was an ideal soldier of reform for his time, and in his
way. He was not extraordinarily long-sighted--indeed (as his famous and
constantly-repeated advice to "take short views of life" shows) he had a
distinct distrust of taking too anxious thought for political or any
other morrows. But he had a most keen and, in many cases, a most just
scent and sight for the immediate inconveniences and injustices of the
day, and for the shortest and most effective ways of mending them. He
was perhaps more destitute of romance and of reverence (though he had
too much good taste to be positively irreverent) than any man who ever
lived. He never could have paralleled, he never could have even
understood, Scott's feelings about the Regalia, or that ever-famous
incident of Sir Walter's life, when returning with Jeffrey and other
Whig friends from some public meeting, he protested against the
innovations which, harmless or even beneficial individually and in
themselves, would by degrees destroy every thing that made Scotland
Scotland. I am afraid that his warmest admirers, even those of his own
political complexion, must admit that he was, as has been said, more
than a little of a Philistine; that he expressed, and expressed
capitally in one way, that curious middle-class sentiment, or denial of
sentiment, which won its first triumph in the first Reform Bill and its
last in the Exhibition of twenty years later, which destroyed no doubt
much that was absurd, and some things that were noxious, but which
induced in England a reign of shoddy in politics, in philosophy, in art,
in literature, and, when its own reign was over, left England weak and
divided, instead of, as it had been under the reign of abuses, united
and strong. The bombardment of Copenhagen may or may not have been a
dreadful thing: it was at any rate better than the abandonment of
Khartoum. Nor can Sydney any more than his friends be acquitted of
having held the extraordinary notion that you can "rest and be thankful"
in politics, that you can set Demos at bishops, but stave and tail him
off when he comes to canons; that you can level beautifully down to a
certain point, and then stop levelling for ever afterwards; that because
you can laugh Brother Ringletub out of court, laughter will be equally
effective with Cardinal Newman; and that though it is the height of
"anility" (a favourite word