soners in wit of whom our country can boast. His intellect strong, sharp, clear, and decided-wrought and moved in a rich medium of humour. Each thought, as it came forth from his brain, issued as "in dance,” and amid a flood of inextinguishable laughter. The march of his mind through his subject resembled the procession of Bacchus from the conquest of India-joyous, splendid, straggling to the sound of flutes and hautboys-rather a victory than a march—rather a revel than a contest. His logic seemed always hurrying into the arms of his wit. Some men argue in mathematical formulæ ; others, like Burke, in the figures and flights of poetry; others in the fire and fury of passion; Sidney Smith in exuberant and riotous fun. And yet the matter of his reasoning was solid, and its inner spirit earnest and true. But though his steel was strong and sharp, his hand steady, and his aim clear, the management of the motions of his weapon was always fantastic. He piled, indeed, like a Titan, his Pelion on Ossa, but at the oddest of angles; he lifted and carried his load bravely, and like a man, but laughed as he did so; and so carried it that beholders forgot the strength of the arm in the strangeness of the attitude. He thus sometimes disarmed anger; for his adversaries could scarcely believe that they had received a deadly wound while their foeman was roaring in their face. He thus did far greater execution; for the flourishes of his weapon might distract his opponents, but never himself, from the direct and terrible line of the blow. His laughter sometimes stunned, like the cachinnation of the Cyclops, shaking the sides of his cave. In this moodand it was his common one-what scorn was he wont to pour upon the opponents of Catholic emancipation-upon the enemies of all change in legislation-upon any individual or party who sought to obstruct measures which, in his judgment, were likely to benefit the country. Under such, he could at any moment spring a mine of laughter;

Cammoed. Steder Less, are gone: some burst to shivers jy der vi mperius mecio: others, in the course of incare late satis reased or shine. Three of that cluster HILL 1 Trisvrà Mare, and Montgomery. Let 18 TOMI ÚĪSIZĒ and mormandy denying merit to our ESOL CHILENCES, with peralise tenderness cherish these, back for ther 2w1 si mi as Enking us to a period

SIDNEY SMITH.

It is melancholy to observe how speedily, successively, may, almost simultaneously, our literary luminaries are disappearing from the sky. Every year another and another member of the bright clusters which arose about the close of the last, or at the beginning of this century, is fading from our view. Within nineteen years, what havoc, by the “insatiate archer," among the ruling spirits of the time! Since 1831, Robert Hall, Andrew Thomson, Goethe, Cuvier, Mackintosh, Crabbe, Foster, Coleridge, Edward Irving, Sir Walter Scott, Charles Lamb, Southey, Thomas Campbell, &c., have entered on the silent land;"

and latterly has dropped down one of the wittiest and shrewdest of them all the projector of the "Edinburgh Review ”—the author of “Peter Plymley's Letters "—the preacher the politician-the brilliant converser-the "mad wag"-Sidney Smith.

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and what neither the fierce invective of Brougham nor the light and subtle raillery of Jeffrey could do, his contemptuous explosion effected, and, himself crying with mirth, saw them hoisted toward heaven in ten thousand comical splinters. Comparing him with other humorists of a similar class, we might say, that while Swift's ridicule resembles something between a sneer and a spasm (half a sneer of mirth, half a spasm of misery)-while Cobbett's is a grin -Fonblanque's a light but deep and most significant smile-Jeffrey's a sneer, just perceptible on his fastidious lip--Wilson's a strong, healthy, hearty laugh-Carlyle's a wild unearthly sound, like the neighing of a homeless steed-Sidney Smith's is a genuine guffaw, given forth with his whole heart, and soul, and mind, and strength. Apart from his matchless humour, strong, rough, instinctive, and knotty sense was the leading feature of his mind. Everything like mystification, sophistry, and humbug, fled before the first glance of his piercing eye; everything in the shape of affectation excited in him a disgust "as implacable" as even a Cowper could feel. If possible, with still deeper aversion did his manly nature regard cant in its various forms and disguises; and his motto in reference to it was, "spare no arrows.” But the mean, the low, the paltry, the dishonourable, in nations or in individuals, moved all the fountains of his bile, and awakened all the energy of his invective. Always lively, generally witty, he is never eloquent, except when emptying out his vials of indignation upon baseness in all its shapes. His is the ire of a genuine "English gentleman, all of the olden time." It was in this spirit that he recently explained, in his own. way, the old distinctions of Meum and Tuum to Brother Jonathan, when the latter was lamentably inclined to forget them. It was the same sting of generous indignation which, in the midst of his character of Mackintosh, prompted the memorable picture of that extraordinary being who, by his transcendent talents and his tortuous

movements his head of gold, and his feet of miry clay— has become the glory, the riddle, and the regret of his country, his age, and his species.

As a writer, Smith is little more than a very clever, witty, and ingenious pamphleteer. He has effected no permanent chef d'œuvre; he has founded no school; he has left little behind him that the "world will not willingly let die;" he has never drawn a tear from a human eye, nor excited a thrill of grandeur in a human bosom. His reviews are not preserved by the salt of original genius, nor are they pregnant with profound and comprehensive principle; they have no resemblance to the sibylline leaves which Burke tore out from the vast volume of his mind, and scattered with imperial indifference among the nations; they are not the illuminated indices of universal history, like the papers of Macaulay; they are not specimens of pure and perfect English, set with modest but magnificent ornaments, like the criticisms of Jeffrey or of Hall; nor are they the excerpts, rugged and rent away by violence, from the dark and iron tablet of an obscure and original mind, like the reviews of Foster; but they are exquisite jeux d'esprit, admirable occasional pamphlets, which, though now they look to us like spent arrows, yet assuredly have done execution, and have not been spent in vain. And as, after the lapse of a century and more, we can still read with pleasure Addison's "Old Whig and Freeholder," for the sake of the exquisite humour and inimitable style in which forgotten feuds and dead logomachies are embalmed, so may it be, a century still, with the articles on Bentham's Fallacies and on the Game Laws, and with the letters of the witty and ingenious Peter Plymley. There is much at least in those singular productions-in their clear and manly sense—in their broad native fun—in their rapid, careless, and energetic style-and in their bold, honest, liberal, and thoroughly English spirit to interest several succeeding generations, if not to secure the "rare and regal" palm of immortality.