Sydney Smith | Page 4

and
spoke thus with himself:--
"Have I read through Lilly? Have I learnt by heart that most atrocious
monument of absurdity, the Westminster Grammar? Have I been whipt
for the substantives? whipt for the verbs? and whipt for and with the
interjections? Have I picked the sense slowly, and word by word, out of
Hederich? and shall my son be exempt from all this misery?... Ay, ay,
it's all mighty well; but I went through this myself, and I am determined
my children shall do the same."
Another grotesque abuse with regard to which Sydney Smith was a
reformer fifty years before his time was compulsory versification.--
"There are few boys who remain to the age of eighteen or nineteen at a
Public School without making above ten thousand Latin verses--a
greater number than is contained in the _Aeneid_; and, after he has
made this quantity of verses in a dead language, unless the poet should
happen to be a very weak man indeed, he never makes another as long
as he lives."[4]
"The English clergy, in whose hands education entirely rests, bring up
the first young men of the country as if they were all to keep
grammar-schools in little country-towns; and a nobleman, upon whose
knowledge and liberality the honour and welfare of his country may
depend, is diligently worried, for half his life, with the small pedantry
of longs and shorts."
The same process is applied at the other end of the social scale. The
baker's son, young Crumpet, is sent to a grammar-school, "takes to his
books, spends the best years of his life, as all eminent Englishmen do,
in making Latin verses, learns that the Crum in Crumpet is long and the
pet short, goes to the University, gets a prize for an essay on the
Dispersion of the Jews, takes Orders, becomes a Bishop's chaplain, has
a young nobleman for his pupil, publishes a useless classic and a
Serious Call to the Unconverted, and then goes through the Elysian
transitions of Prebendary, Dean, Prelate, and the long train of purple,

profit, and power."
In this vivacious passage, Sydney Smith caricatures his own career;
which, though it neither began in a baker's shop nor ended in an
episcopal palace, followed pretty closely the line of development here
indicated. At Winchester he "took to his books" with such goodwill that,
in spite of all hindrances, he became an excellent scholar, and laid the
strong foundations for a wide and generous culture. His family indeed
propagated some pleasing traditions about his schooldays--one of a
benevolent stranger who found him reading Virgil when other boys
were playing cricket, patted his head, and foretold his future greatness;
another of a round-robin from his schoolfellows, declining to compete
against him for prizes, "because he always gained them." But this is not
history.
From Winchester Sydney Smith passed in natural course to the other of
"the two colleges of St. Mary Winton"; and, in the interval between
Winchester and Oxford, his father sent him for six months to
Normandy, with a view to improving his French. Revolution was in the
air, and it was thought a salutary precaution that he should join one of
the Jacobin clubs in the town where he boarded, and he was duly
entered as "Le Citoyen Smit, Membre Affilié au Club des Jacobins de
Mont Villiers."
But he was soon recalled to more tranquil scenes. He was elected
Scholar of New College, Oxford, on the 5th of January 1789, and at the
end of his second year he exchanged his Scholarship for a Fellowship.
From that time on he never cost his father a farthing, and he paid a
considerable debt for his younger brother Courtenay, though, as he
justly remarks, "a hundred pounds a year was very difficult to spread
over the wants of a College life." Ten years later he wrote--"I got in
debt by buying books. I never borrowed a farthing of anybody, and
never received much; and have lived in poverty and economy all my
life."
His career at Oxford is buried in even deeper obscurity than his
schooltime at Winchester. This is no doubt to be explained, on the
intellectual side, by the fact that members of New College were at that

time exempt from public examination; and, on the social side, by the
straitened circumstances which prevented him from showing
hospitality, and the pride which made him unwilling to accept what he
could not return. We are left to gather his feelings about Oxford and the
system pursued there, from casual references in his critical writings;
and these are uncomplimentary enough. When he wishes to stigmatize
a proposition as enormously and preposterously absurd, he says that
there is "no authority on earth (always excepting the Dean of Christ
Church), which could make