Smith The Rev Sydney

Smith, THE REV. SYDNEY, was born in 1771, bcqame captain of Winchester, and entering at New College, Oxford, obtained a fellowship and drifted into the Church. After holding a curacy on Salisbury Plain, he went to Edinburgh as a private tutor, there met Jeffrey, and joined him, Brougham, and other advanced Whigs in founding the Edinburgh Review, the first issue of which he edited in 1802, He had now estabhshed his reputation as a thinker of independent views, a brilliant writer, and above all, a wit of the keenest, yet most genial, order, He came to London, marned happily, figured for a while as a social lion and a popular preacher and lecturer, and then took the living of Foston-le-Clay, in a desolate part of Yorkshire. He had, in the meanwhile, published anonymously Peter Plymley's Letters, which did much to pave the way for Catholic Emancipation, In 1828, Lord Lyndhurst, though a Tory, gave him a canonry at Bristol and a living at Combe Florey, near Taunton, but it was not until 1831 that his party got into power and then he received a prebendal stall at St. Paul's. The premature death of his eldest son was a cruel blow, but the marriage of his daughter with Lord Holland added much to the happmess of his later years. He died in 1845.