man of society, and canon of Saint Paul's. His biographer well describes
him as a rough rider of subjects, and with surpassing good sense he
overran every problem with which the public mind was occupied. He was a
reformer, but it was after the English and not the French fashion. He
had unbounded respect for existing human blessings, believed in things
substantially as they were, and couldn't have been persuaded to try an
experiment that had much of hazard in it. A Frenchman is always at
home amid earthquakes and volcanoes and hurricanes, and the immediate
prospect of an end to everything that is and a beginning of something
the like of which never has been. The spirit of the great French
Revolution was to exterminate all the results of time up to that point,
and, having made a clear field, to begin over again. Hence heads went
off, religion was proscribed, thrones were burned, the calendar was
changed; even the heavenly bodies should no longer bear down their
freight of old associations, and Orion received the name of Napoleon.
Could the earth have in any way been transformed, could grass possibly
have been made blue and the heavens green, or could man have been done
over into any other sort of animal, there is not the slightest doubt
that those Frenchmen would have undertaken it. In comparison with such
men, Sydney Smith sank into insignificance as a reformer. He lived under
a religion, government, and system of manners, all of which he was
desirous to retain. He did not wish for his children any institutions
very much more comfortable than England offered at the moment. He
regarded the advantages of life with great complacency, thinking,
doubtless, that men had better opportunities than they availed
themselves of; and the chief intensity of his purpose was not to make
better opportunities, but to improve them better. He probably did not
approve of all the men and customs that he saw, was decidedly opposed
both to wickedness and stupidity; but he did not propose, like a
Frenchman, at the first fault, to blot out the heavens and the earth.