Bluecoat is an indigenous animal-not so the Quaker; and now be so good as to give your whole mind to the facts I have to communicate. I have seen and talked much with Sir R. Kerr Porter on this interesting subject. He has travelled over the whole habitable globe, and has penetrated with a scientific and scrutinising eye into regions hitherto unexplored by civilised man; and yet he has never seen a Quaker baby. He has lived for years in Philadelphia (the national nest of Quakers); he has roamed up and down Broadways and lengthways in every nook and corner of Pennsylvania; and yet he never saw a Quaker baby; and what is new and most striking, never did he see a Quaker lady in a situation which gave hope that a Quaker baby might be seen hereafter. This is a stunning fact, and involving the question in such impenetrable mystery as will, I fear, defy even your sagacity, acuteness, and industry to elucidate. But let us not be checked and cast down; truth is the end and object of our research. Let us not bate one jot of heart and hope, but still bear up, and steer our course right onward. "Yours most truly,

"F. MORLEY."

It would be difficult to find a more pleasing specimen of his letters to ladies than the following to Lady Dufferin :

"Combe Florey [no date].

"I am just beginning to get well from that fit of gout, at the beginning of which you were charitable enough to pay me a visit, and I said the same Providence which inflicts gout, creates Dufferins! We must take the good and the evils of life.

too.

"I am charmed, I confess, with the beauty of this country. I hope some day you will be charmed with it It banished, however, every Arcadian notion to see walk in at the gate to-day. I seemed to be transported instantly to Piccadilly, and the innocence went out of me.

"I hope the process of furnishing goes on well. Attend, I pray you, to the proper selection of an easy chair, where you may cast yourself down in the weariness and distresses of life, with the absolute certainty that every joint of the human frame will receive all the comfort which can be derived from easy position and soft materials; then the glass,

on which your eyes are so often fixed, knowing that you have the great duty imposed on the Sheridans, of looking well. You may depend upon it, happiness depends mainly on these little things.

"I hope you remain in perfect favour with Rogers, and that you are not omitted in any of the dress breakfast parties. Remember me to the Norton: tell her I am glad to be sheltered from her beauty by the insensibility of age; that I shall not live to see its decay, but die with that unfaded image before my eyes: but don't make a mistake, and deliver the message to instead of your sister.

"I remain, dear Lady Dufferin, very sincerely yours, "SYDNEY SMITH."

We had thoughts of attempting, with the aid of Mr. Thackeray's Lectures, to draw a parallel between Sydney Smith and the other leading English humourists; but comparisons are proverbially odious, and in a case like the present they would be both unjust and inconclusive. Sydney Smith stands alone: none but himself can be his parallel; and he is the first in his line, although his line may not be the first. He possessed the faculty of simplifying and popularising reason and argument in a way which must be pronounced inimitable, and during forty years he uniformly exerted it for noble and useful ends. He weeded out a mass of noxious errors, and he placed a number of valuable truths and principles in new and striking points of view, thereby adding incalculably to their exchangeable value and beneficial influence. The good he has done in this way cannot be measured by what passes current, or is ticketed, as his; for so fertile was his mind that thoughts and images fell from him and were picked up and appropriated by others, like the carelessly set jewels which dropped from Buckingham's dress at the Court of Anne of Austria. He never came into society without naturally and easily taking the lead as, beyond all question, the most

agreeable, sensible, and instructive guest and companion that the oldest person living could remember. These are his titles to the celebrity which still attaches to his name, but unluckily they sound transitory, perishable, and inappreciable when contrasted with the claims of the first-class humourists to the undisturbed enjoyment of their immortality. Each of these has produced at least one standard work, which will rank as an English classic so long as the English language endures. Sydney Smith is similarly situated in this respect to what Swift would be if he had never written "The Tale of a Tub" or "Gulliver's Travels." But if the Canon of St. Paul's was inferior to the Dean of St. Patrick's as a writer, he was superior as a moralist and a man. The prime of his life was not wasted in the barren and abortive struggles of faction. His temper was not soured by disappointment, nor his heart corroded by misanthropy. He was not like the scathed elm which had begun to wither at the top. His intellect retained to the last its original brightness; and he died in the fulness of years, with glowing affections and unimpaired faculties, surrounded by all that should accompany old age, and able to say with Addison to any sorrowing relative who may have needed the lesson, "I have sent for you that you may see how a Christian can die."

We may apply to him, with the alteration of a word or two, what he said in his letter to Sir James Mackintosh's son: "The impression which the great talents and amiable qualities of your father made upon me will remain as long as I remain. When I turn from living spectacles of stupidity, ignorance, and malice, and wish to think better of the world, I remember my great and benevolent friend Mackintosh." How often, in an analogous mood of mind, have we not thus thought of him! How ardently,

when we see folly or bigotry reviving and putting forth fresh offshoots, do we long for one of his racy pamphlets or pithy letters! Oh, for one hour of Peter Plymley! What a subject for his pen would be the intolerance of the Sabbatarian party, the call for new bishops as the one thing needful in India, the cry for the simultaneous conversion and extermination of the Hindoo race, or the new-fangled commercial system in which accommodation bills and paper money were to perform all the functions of capital. When we turn from such spectacles, and wish to think better of the world, we remember our great, wise, and benevolent friend, Sydney Smith.

60

SAMUEL ROGERS.

(FROM THE EDInburgh Review, July, 1856.)

Recollections of the Table Talk of SAMUEL ROGERS; to which is added Porsoniana. London: 1856.

FOR more than half a century a small house in a quiet nook of London has been the recognised abode of taste, and the envied resort of wit, beauty, learning, and genius. There, surrounded by the choicest treasures of art, and in a light reflected from Guidos and Titians, have sat and mingled in familiar converse the most eminent poets, painters, actors, artists, critics, travellers, historians, warriors, orators, and statesmen of two generations. Under that roof celebrities of all sorts, matured or budding, and however contrasted in genius or pursuit, met as on the table land where (according to D'Alembert) Archimedes and Homer may stand on a perfect footing of equality. The man of mind was introduced to the man of action, and modest merit which had yet its laurels to win, was first brought acquainted with the patron who was to push its fortunes, or with the hero whose name sounded like a trumpet tone. It was in that dining-room that Erskine told the story of his first brief, and Grattan that of his last duel: that the "Iron Duke " described Waterloo as a "battle of giants:" that Chantrey, placing his hand on a mahogany pedestal, said, "Mr. Rogers, do you remember a workman at five shillings a day who came in at that door to receive your orders for this work? I was that workman." It was there, too, that Byron's intimacy with Moore commenced over the famous mess of potatoes and vinegar: that