m a stall at Bristol, and he was able to
exchange Foston for Combe-Florey, in the more genial latitude of
Somerset. The rest of his life was fortunate in worldly ways; for the
Reform Ministry, though they would not give him a bishopric, gave him a
canonry at St. Paul's, and divers legacies and successions made him
relatively a rich man. He died five years before Jeffrey, in February
1845.

Besides the differences of their Scotch and English nationality and
education, the contrast between the two friends and founders of the
"Blue and Yellow" was curiously pervading. Jeffrey, for all his supposed
critical savagery, was a sentimentalist, and had the keenest love of
literature as literature; Sydney cared very little for books as books,
and had not a grain of sentiment in his composition. Jeffrey had little
wit and no humour; Smith abounded in both, and was one of the very
wittiest of Englishmen. Even in his _Review_ articles he constantly
shocked his more solemn and pedagogic editor by the stream of banter
which he poured not merely upon Tories and High Churchmen, but on
Methodists and Non-conformists; his letters are full of the most
untiring and to this day the most sparkling pleasantry; and his two
chief works outside his reviews, the earlier _Peter Plymley's Letters_
and the later _Letters to Archdeacon Singleton_ (written when the
author's early Whiggism had crystallised into something different, and
when he was stoutly resisting the attempts of the reformed government to
meddle with cathedral establishments), rank among the capital light
pamphlets of the world, in company with those of Pascal and Swift and
Courier. The too few remnants of his abundant conversation preserve
faint sparks of the blaze of impromptu fun for which in his day he was
almost more famous than as a writer. Sydney Smith had below the surface
of wit a very solid substratum of good sense and good feeling; but his
literary appeal consisted almost wholly in his shrewd pleasantry,
which, as it has been observed, might with even more appropriateness
than Coleridge said it of Fuller, have been said to be "the stuff and
substance of his intellectual nature." This wit was scarcely ever in
writing--it seems to have been sometimes in conversation--forced or
trivial; it was most ingeniously adjusted to the purpose of the moment,
whether that purpose was a political argument, a light summary of a book
of travels, or a mere gossiping letter to a friend; and it