Sydney Smith | Page 4

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 it credible to me." When stirred to the liveliest indignation by the iniquities which a Tory Government is practising in Ireland, he exclaims--"A Senior Proctor of the University of Oxford, the Head of a House, or the examining chaplain to a Bishop, may believe these things can last; but every man of the world, whose understanding has been exercised in the business of life, must see (and