SYDNEY SMITH.

1771-1845.

SYDNEY SMITH's name is a synonym of wit; but he has left behind him evidences of far higher mental powers than those which are called into exercise in the effort to amuse. He was born at Woodford, Essex, England, in 1771, and died in 1845. He was educated at Oxford, took holy orders and held a curacy in Wiltshire; in 1796 he removed to Edinburgh, where, in conjunction with Brougham and other distinguished men, he founded the Edinburgh Review. Removing to London in 1804, he continued to write for the Review, and speedily won a brilliant reputation as a critic. Ecclesiastical preferment frequently came to him, and at the time of his death he was Canon Residentiary of St. Paul's Cathedral. His writings were mainly in the form of sermons; but he wrote many notable letters on political and religious questions which go far toward justifying Mr. Everett's opinion that if he (Smith) "had not been known as the wittiest man of his day, he would have been accounted one of the wisest." It is believed that his Letters on Catholic Emancipation were largely instrumental in pushing that measure to success. Macaulay said of him: "He is universally admitted to have been a great reasoner, and the greatest master of ridicule that has appeared among us since Swift."

THE PLEASURES OF KNOWLEDGE.

IT is noble to seek Truth, and it is beautiful to find it. It is the ancient feeling of the human heart, that knowledge is better than riches; and it is deeply and sacredly true. To mark the course of human passions as they have flowed on in the ages that are past; to see why nations have risen, and why they have fallen; to speak of heat, and light, and the winds; to know what man has discovered in the heavens above and in the earth beneath; to hear the chemist unfold the marvelous properties that the Creator has locked up in a speck of earth; to be told that there are worlds so distant from our own, that the quickness of light, traveling from the world's creation, has never yet reached us; to wander in the creations of poetry, and grow warm again with that eloquence which swayed the democracies of the Old World; to go up with great reasoners to the First Cause of all, and to perceive, in the midst of all this dissolution and decay and cruel separation, that there is one thing unchangeable, indestructible, and everlasting ; it is worth while in the days of our youth to strive hard for this great discipline; to pass sleepless nights for it; to give up for it laborious days; to spurn for it present pleasures; to endure for it afflicting poverty; to wade for it through darkness, and sorrow, and contempt, as the great spirits of the world have done in all ages and all times.

I appeal to the experience of any man who is in the habit of exer

cising his mind vigorously and well, whether there is not a satisfaction in it which tells him he has been acting up to one of the great objects of his existence? The end of nature has been answered: his faculties have done that which they were created to do, — not languidly occupied upon trifles, not enervated by sensual gratification, but exercised in that toil which is so congenial to their nature, and so worthy of their strength.

A life of knowledge is not often a life of injury and crime. Whom does such a man oppress? with whose happiness does he interfere? whom does his ambition destroy? and whom does his fraud deceive ? In the pursuit of science he injures no man, and in the acquisition he does good to all. A man who dedicates his life to knowledge, becomes habituated to pleasure which carries with it no reproach : and there is one security that he will never love that pleasure which is paid for by anguish of heart, his pleasures are all cheap, all dignified, and all innocent; and, as far as any human being can expect permanence in this changing scene, he has secured a happiness which no malignity of fortune can ever take away, but which must cleave to him while he lives, ameliorating every good, and diminishing every evil of his existence.

I solemnly declare, that, but for the love of knowledge, I should consider the life of the meanest hedger and ditcher preferable to that of the greatest and richest man in existence; for the fire of our minds is like the fire which the Persians burn on the mountains, it flames night and day, and is immortal, and not to be quenched! Upon something it must act and feed, upon the pure spirit of knowledge, or upon the foul dregs of polluting passions.

Therefore, when I say, in conducting your understanding, love knowledge with a great love, with a vehement love, with a love coeval with life, what do I say but love innocence; love virtue; love purity of conduct; love that which, if you are rich and great, will sanctify the providence which has made you so, and make men call it justice; love that which, if you are poor, will render your poverty respectable, and make the proudest feel it unjust to laugh at the meanness of your fortunes; love that which will comfort you, adorn you, and never quit you, which will open to you the kingdom of thought, and all the boundless regions of conception, as an asylum against the cruelty, the injustice, and the pain that may be your lot in the outer world, that which will make your motives habitually great and hon

orable, and light up in an instant a thousand noble disdains at the very thought of meanness and of fraud?

Therefore, if any young man have embarked his life in the pursuit of knowledge, let him go on without doubting or fearing the event: let him not be intimidated by the cheerless beginnings of knowledge, by the darkness from which she springs, by the difficulties which hover around her, by the wretched habitations in which she dwells, by the want and sorrow which sometimes journey in her train; but let him ever follow her as the Angel that guards him, and as the Genius of his life. She will bring him out at last into the light of day, and exhibit him to the world comprehensive in acquirements, fertile in resources, rich in imagination, strong in reasoning, prudent and powerful above his fellows in all the relations and in all the offices of life.

WIT AND WISDOM.

THERE is an association in men's minds between dullness and wisdom, amusement and folly, which has a very powerful influence in decision upon character, and is not overcome without considerable difficulty. The reason is, that the outward signs of a dull man and a wise man are the same, and so are the outward signs of a frivolous man and a witty man; and we are not to expect that the majority will be disposed to look to much more than the outward sign. I believe the fact to be, that wit is very seldom the only eminent quality which resides in the mind of any man; it is commonly accompanied by many other talents of every description, and ought to be considered as a strong evidence of a fertile and superior understanding. Almost all the great poets, orators, and statesmen of all times have been witty.

The meaning of an extraordinary man is, that he is eight men, not one man; that he has as much wit as if he had no sense, and as much sense as if he had no wit; that his conduct is as judicious as if he were the dullest of human beings, and his imagination as brilliant as if he were irretrievably ruined. But when wit is combined with sense and information; when it is softened by benevolence, and restrained by strong principle; when it is in the hands of a man who can use it and despise it, who can be witty, and something much better than witty, who loves honor, justice, decency, good-nature, morality, and religion, ten thousand times better than wit; — wit is

then a beautiful and delightful part of our nature. There is no more interesting spectacle than to see the effects of wit upon the different characters of men; than to observe it expanding caution, relaxing dignity, unfreezing coldness, teaching age and care and pain to smile, extorting reluctant gleams of pleasure from melancholy, and charming even the pangs of grief. It is pleasant to observe how it penetrates through the coldness and awkwardness of society, gradually bringing men nearer together, and, like the combined force of wine and oil, giving every man a glad heart and a shining counteGenuine and innocent wit like this is surely the flavor of the mind! Man could direct his ways by plain reason, and support his life by tasteless food; but God has given us wit, and flavor, and laughter, and perfumes, to enliven the days of man's pilgrimage, and to "charm his painful steps over the burning marle."

nance.

SCIENCE OF GOVERNMENT.

It would seem that the science of government is an unappropriated region in the universe of knowledge. Those sciences with which the passions can never interfere are considered to be attainable only by study and by reflection; while there are not many young men who doubt of their ability to make a constitution, or to govern a kingdom, at the same time there cannot, perhaps, be a more decided proof of a superficial understanding than the depreciation of those difficulties which are inseparable from the science of government. To know well the local and the natural man; to track the silent march of human affairs; to seize, with happy intuition, on those great laws which regulate the prosperity of empires; to reconcile principles to circumstances, and be no wiser than the times will permit; to anticipate the effects of every speculation upon the entangled relations and awkward complexity of real life; and to follow out the theorems of the senate to the daily comforts of the cottage, is a task which they will fear most who know it best, a task in which the great and the good have often failed, and which it is not only wise, but pious and just, in common men to avoid.

COLERIDGE.

1772-1834.

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE was born at Ottery St. Mary, Devonshire, where his father was vicar, in 1772, and died in 1834. He spent two years at Jesus College, Cambridge, but did not complete his course. A little later, being in London without resources or employment, he enlisted in a dragoon regiment. One day he wrote a Latin verse on the stable-wall, which fact coming to the knowledge of his captain, the latter procured his discharge from the service. Coleridge at once entered on a literary and political career, publishing his first work, The Fall of Robespierre, An Historical Drama, in 1794, and soon after several pamphlets in which he advocated democratic and Unitarian doctrines. With Southey and Lovell he projected a Pantisocracy to be established in Pennsylvania, but the scheme came to naught, and Coleridge settled down as a writer on the Morning Post, in support of the government. In 1798 he visited Germany and studied there diligently. In 1812 his series of Essays, called The Friend, was published, and in 1816 Christabel. He had acquired the habit of opium-eating, which obtained the mastery over him and reduced him to a condition of unproductive indolence. He passed the last eighteen years of his life in retirement. So able a judge as De Quincey has said that Coleridge's was "the largest and most spacious intellect, the subtlest and most comprehensive, that has yet existed among men." He excelled in every department of literature, and several of his poems rank among the finest in our language. As a conversationist he has never been equaled.

THE IMPORTANCE OF METHOD.

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WHAT is that which first strikes us, and strikes us at once, in a man of education, and which, among educated men, so instantly distinguishes the man of superior mind, that (as was observed with eminent propriety of the late Edmund Burke) we cannot stand under the same archway during a shower of rain, without finding him out"? Not the weight or novelty of his remarks; not any unusual interest of facts communicated by him: for we may suppose both the one and the other precluded by the shortness of our intercourse, and the triviality of the subjects. The difference will be impressed and felt, though the conversation should be confined to the state of the weather or the pavement. Still less will it arise from any peculiarity in his words and phrases. Unless where new things necessitate new terms, he will avoid an unusual word as a rock. It must have been among the earliest lessons of his youth, that the breach of this precept, at all times hazardous, becomes ridiculous in the topics of ordinary conversation. There remains but one other point of distinction possible; and this must be, and in fact is, the true cause of the impression made on us. It is the unpremeditated and evidently habitual arrangement of his words, grounded on the habit of foreseeing, in each integral part, or (more plainly) in every sentence, the whole that he then in