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The Selected Writings of Sydney Smith (Paperback, Main)
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The Selected Writings of Sydney Smith (Paperback, Main)
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'He is a very clever fellow, but he will never be a bishop.' George
III 'A more profligate parson I never met.' George IV 'I sat next
to Sydney Smith, who was delightful ... I don't remember a more
agreeable party.' Benjamin Disraeli 'I wish you would tell Mr
Sydney Smith that of all the men I ever heard of and never saw, I
have the greatest curiosity to see ... and to know him.' Charles
Dickens How one agrees with Dickens. Without doubt, Sydney Smith
was the most famous wit of his generation. But there was more to
him than that, he was an outstanding representative of the English
liberal tradition. Starting as an impoverished village curate he
went to Edinburgh as a tutor, and co-founded the Edinburgh Review,
the first major nineteenth-century periodical. Happily married, he
moved in 1803 to London, where he was introduced into the Holland
House circle - of which he quickly became an admired and popular
member - but at the age of thirty-eight a Tory government banished
him to a village parsonage. There he became 'one of the best
country vicars of whom there is a record', and after his two chief
causes - the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829 and the Reform Bill
of 1832 - triumphed, he was rewarded by a canonry of St. Paul's.
This generous selection of his writings gives the full flavour of
his mind and intellectual personality. In a characteristically
stimulating introduction in which he discusses Sydney Smith both as
an individual and as a shining exemplar of the liberal mind, W. H.
Auden places him with Jonathan Swift and Bernard Shaw among the few
polemic authors 'who must be ranked very high by any literary
standard.' As Macaulay said he was 'The Smith of Smiths'.
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