erent ways
pillars of Toryism, set him against his own Romantic contemporaries in a
very strange fashion. Still, in some ways he was a very great critic.
His faculty of summarising a period of literature has rarely been
equalled, and perhaps never surpassed; he had, when prejudice of some
sort did not blind him, an extraordinary faculty of picking out the best
passages in a book; and, above all, he arranged his critical judgments
on something like a regular and co-ordinated system. Even his prejudices
and injustices were systematic: they were linked to each other by
arguments which might sometimes be questionable, but which were always
arguments. And though, even when, as in the cases of Keats and Shelley,
his extra-literary bias was not present to induce him wrong, he showed a
deplorable insensibility to the finer strokes of poetry, he was in
general, and taking literature all round, as considerable a critic as we
have had in English.

Sydney Smith was a curious contrast to Jeffrey in almost every respect
except in politics, and even there the resemblance was rather fortuitous
than essential. The second son of a man of eccentric character and some
means, he was born in 1771, was sent to Winchester, and proceeded thence
to New College, Oxford, where he became Fellow and resided for a
considerable time; but unusually little is recorded either of his school
or of his college days. He took orders and was appointed to a curacy on
Salisbury Plain, where the squire of the parish took a fancy to him and
made him tutor to his eldest son. Tutor and pupil went to Edinburgh,
just then in great vogue as an educational centre, in 1798; and there
Sydney, besides doing clerical duty, stumbled upon his vocation as
reviewer. He abode in the Scottish capital for about five years, during
which he married, and then removed to London, where he again did duty of
various kinds, lectured on Moral Philosophy, and, when the Grenville
administration came in, received a fairly valuable Yorkshire living,
that of Foston. Here, after a time, he had, owing to new legislation
about clerical absentees, to take up his residence, which involved
building a parsonage. He had repaid his Whig patrons by writing the
exceedingly brilliant and passably scurrilous _Letters of Peter Plymley
on Catholic Emancipation_, and he reviewed steadily for the _Edinburgh_,
as indeed he did during almost the whole editorship of Jeffrey. At last
Lord Lyndhurst, a Tory, gave hi