Sydney Smith Part 4

[22] Jeffrey's house near Edinburgh.

[23] (1778-1817.) Barrister and M.P. On his death, Sydney Smith wrote---"I say nothing of the great and miserable loss we have all sustained. He will always live in our recollection; and it will be useful to us all, in the great occasions of life, to reflect how Horner would act and think in them, if G.o.d had prolonged his life."

[24] Sydney Smith used to say, "Bobus and I have inverted the laws of nature. He rose by his gravity; I sank by my levity."

[25] Henry Richard (1773-1840), 3rd Lord Holland.

[26] Macaulay, "Lord Holland."

[27] The Lady Holland who figures so frequently in Sydney Smith's correspondence was Elizabeth Va.s.sall (1770-1845), wife of the 3rd Lord Holland. Sydney Smith's daughter, Saba, did not become Lady Holland till 1853, when her husband, Dr. Holland, was made a baronet.

[28] (1750-1818).

[29] William Whewell (1794-1866), Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, author of _Elements of Morality_, 1845.

[30] Sydney Smith wrote his friend Sir George Philips in 1836--"Thomas Brown was an intimate friend of mine, and used to dine with me regularly every Sunday in Edinburgh. He was a Lake poet, a profound metaphysician, and one of the most virtuous men that ever lived. As a metaphysician, Dugald Stewart was a humbug to him. Brown had real talents for the thing. You must recognize, in reading Brown, many of those arguments with which I have so often reduced you to silence in metaphysical discussions. Your discovery of Brown is amusing. Go on!

You will detect Dryden if you persevere; bring to light John Milton, and drag William Shakspeare from his ill-deserved obscurity!"

[31] See p. 185.

[32] See his Essay on "Toleration":--"A chapel belonging to the Swedenborgians, or Methodists of the New Jerusalem, was offered, two or three years since, in London, to a clergyman of the Establishment.

The proprietor was tired of his irrational tenants, and wished for better doctrine. The rector, with every possible compliment to the fitness of the person in question, positively refused the application; and the church remains in the hands of Methodists."

[33] Sir David Wilkie (1785-1841) wrote in 1808:--"To church, where I heard Sydney Smith preach a sermon, which, for its eloquence and power of reasoning, exceeded anything I had ever heard. The subject was the Conversion of St. Paul, of which he proved the authenticity, in opposition to all the objections and doubts of infidelity."

[34] William Wyndham Grenville (1759-1834), created Lord Grenville in 1790.

[35] Morton Eden (1751-1830), created Lord Henley in 1799.

[36] (1745-1836), created Lord Stowell in 1821.

[37] (1792-1878).

[38] A house which Lord Stowell acquired by his marriage with an heiress, Anna Maria Bagnall.

[39] James, 8th Earl of Lauderdale (1759-1839).

[40] Byron, in _English Bards and Scotch Reviewers_, attributes the authorship of Peter Plymley to "Smug Sydney." See also his allusion to "Peter Pith" in _Don Juan_, canto xvi.

CHAPTER III

PETER PLYMLEY

_Peter Plymley's Letters_ are supposed to be written by a Londoner, who is in favour of removing the secular disabilities of Roman Catholics, to his brother Abraham, the parson of a rural parish. They proceed throughout on the a.s.sumption that the parson is a kind-hearted, honest, and conscientious man; but rather stupid, grossly ignorant of public affairs, and frightened to death by a bogy of his own imagining. That bogy is the idea of a Popish conspiracy against the crown, church, and commonwealth. Abraham communicates his alarms to his brother Peter in London, and Peter's _Letters_ are replies to these outpourings.

Letter I. begins by a.s.suring Abraham that there is no truth in the rumour that the Pope has landed on English soil, and has been housed by the Spencers or the Hollands or the Grenvilles. "The best-informed clergy in the neighbourhood of the metropolis are convinced that the rumour is without foundation." Having set this fear at rest, Peter deals with Abraham's argument.--

"You say that the Roman Catholics interpret the Scriptures in an unorthodox manner, Very likely.... But I want soldiers and sailors for the state; I want to make a greater use than I now can do of a poor country full of men; I want to render the military service popular among the Irish; to check the power of France; to make every possible exertion for the safety of Europe, which in twenty years' time will be nothing but a ma.s.s of French slaves: and then you, and ten thousand other such b.o.o.bies as you, call out--'For G.o.d's sake, do not think of raising cavalry and infantry in Ireland! They interpret the Epistle to Timothy in a different manner from what we do.... 'What! when Turk, Jew, Heretic, Infidel, Catholic, Protestant, are all combined against this country; when men of every religious persuasion, and no religious persuasion, when the population of half the globe, is up in arms against us; are we to stand examining our generals and armies as a bishop examines candidates for holy orders? and to suffer no one to bleed for England who does not agree with you about the Second of Timothy!"

And then Peter disclaims the reproach of unfriendliness to the Established Church.--

"I love the Church as well as you do; but you totally mistake the nature of an Establishment, when you contend that it ought to be connected with the military and civil careers of every individual in the state. It is quite right that there should be one clergyman in every parish interpreting the Scriptures after a particular manner, ruled by a regular hierarchy, and paid with a rich proportion of hayc.o.c.ks and wheat sheaves. When I have laid this foundation for a national religion in the state--when I have placed ten thousand well-educated men in different parts of the kingdom to preach it up, and compelled every one to pay them, whether they hear them or not--I have taken such measures as I know must always procure an immense majority in favour of the Established Church; but I can go no farther.

I cannot set up a civil inquisition, and say to one--'You shall not be a butcher, because you are not orthodox'; and prohibit another from brewing, and a third from administering the law, and a fourth from defending the country. If common justice did not prohibit me from such a conduct, common sense would."

Persecution, Peter goes on to say, makes martyrs. Fanatics delight in the feeling that they are persecuted for righteousness' sake; and, the more they are harried, the more tenaciously they cling to their misbeliefs.--

"This is just the effect your disqualifying laws have produced. They have fed Dr. Rees and Dr. Kippis;[41] crowded the congregation of the Old Jewry[42] to suffocation; and enabled every sublapsarian, and supralapsarian, and semipelagian, clergyman to build himself a neat brick chapel, and live with some distant resemblance to the state of a gentleman."

But, says Abraham, the King is bound by his Coronation Oath to resist the emanc.i.p.ation of the Roman Catholics. Peter replies--

"Suppose Bonaparte were to retrieve the only very great blunder he has made, and were to succeed, after repeated trials, in making an impression upon Ireland, do you think we should bear anything of the impediment of a Coronation Oath? or would the spirit of this country tolerate for an hour such ministers and such unheard-of nonsense, if the most distant prospect existed of conciliating the Catholics by every species even of the most abject concession? And yet, if your argument is good for anything, the Coronation Oath ought to reject, at such a moment, every tendency to conciliation, and to bind Ireland for ever to the Crown of France."

After a cursory reference to Abraham's fears about Popish fires and f.a.ggots, and a reminder that "there were as many persons put to death for religious opinions under the mild Elizabeth as under the b.l.o.o.d.y Mary,"

Peter concludes with these vigorous sentences--

"You tell me I am a party man. I hope I shall always be so, when I see my country in the hands of a pert London joker[43] and a second-rate lawyer.[44] Of the first, no other good is known than that he makes pretty Latin verses; the second seems to me to have the head of a country parson and the tongue of an Old Bailey barrister. If I could see good measures pursued, I care not who is in power; but I have a pa.s.sionate love for common justice and for common sense, and I abhor and despise every man who builds up his political fortune upon their ruin."

Abraham's next objection to emanc.i.p.ation appears to have been that a Roman Catholic will not respect an oath. "Why not?" asks Peter in Letter II.

"What upon earth has kept him out of Parliament, or excluded him from all the offices whence he is excluded, but his respect for oaths? There is no law which prohibits a Catholic to sit in Parliament. There could be no such law; because it is impossible to find out what pa.s.ses in the interior of any man's mind.... The Catholic is excluded from Parliament because he will not swear that he disbelieves the leading doctrines of his religion. The Catholic asks you to abolish some oaths which oppress him; your answer is, that he does not respect oaths. Then why subject him to the test of oaths?

The oaths keep him out of Parliament; why, then he respects them. Turn which way you will, either your laws are nugatory, or the Catholic is bound by religious obligations as you are."

From Roman Catholics in general, Peter now turns to the Roman Catholics of Ireland.--

"The moment the very name of Ireland is mentioned, the English seem to bid adieu to common feeling, common prudence, and common sense, and to act with the barbarity of tyrants and the fatuity of idiots. Whatever your opinion may be of the follies of the Roman Catholic religion, remember they are the follies of four millions of human beings, increasing rapidly in numbers, wealth and intelligence, who, if firmly united with this country, would set at defiance the power of France, and, if once wrested from their alliance with England, would in three years render its existence as an independent nation absolutely impossible. You speak of danger to the Establishment; I request to know when the Establishment was ever so much in danger as when Hoche was in Bantry Bay, and whether all the books of Bossuet, or the arts of the Jesuits, were half so terrible?... Whatever you think of the Catholics, there they are--you cannot get rid of them. Your alternative is to give them a lawful place for stating their grievances, or an unlawful one. If you do not admit them to the House of Commons, they will hold their Parliament in Potatoe Place, Dublin, and be ten times as violent and inflammatory as they would be in Westminster. Nothing would give me such an idea of security as to see twenty or thirty Catholic gentlemen in Parliament, looked upon by all the Catholics as the fair and proper organ of their party. I should have thought it the height of good fortune that such a wish existed on their part, and the very essence of madness and ignorance to reject it."

A n.o.ble lord--his name unluckily has perished--had attempted to salve his own conscience and that of his colleagues in hostility to the Roman claims, by affirming that exclusion from civil office was not persecution; and Peter handles him with delighted vigour, in a pa.s.sage which, more than eighty years later, was quoted with enthusiasm by Mr. Gladstone.[45]--

"A distinction, I perceive, is taken by one of the most feeble n.o.blemen in Great Britain, between persecution and the deprivation of political power; whereas there is no more distinction between these two things than there is between him who makes the distinction and a b.o.o.by. If I strip off the relic-covered jacket of a Catholic and give him twenty stripes, I persecute. If I say, 'Everybody in the town where you live shall be a candidate for lucrative and honourable offices but you, who are a Catholic,' I do not persecute! What barbarous nonsense is this! As if degradation was not as great an evil as bodily pain, or as severe poverty; as if I could not be as great a tyrant by saying, 'You shall not enjoy,' as by saying, 'You shall suffer.'... You may not be aware of it, most reverend Abraham, but you deny their freedom to the Catholics upon the same principle that Sarah your wife refuses to give the receipt for a ham or a gooseberry dumpling. She values her receipts, not because they secure to her a certain flavour, but because they remind her that her neighbours want it--a feeling laughable in a priestess, shameful in a priest; venial when it withholds the blessings of a ham, tyrannical and execrable when it narrows the boon of religious freedom."

Letter III. gives utterance to a genuine alarm inspired by Bonaparte's uninterrupted progress. England is confronted by the most formidable adversary whom she has ever known, and her defence is entrusted to Canning and Perceval. Canning's armoury contains nothing more serviceable than "schoolboy jokes and doggerel rhymes, an affronting petulance, and the tones and gesticulations of Mr. Pitt." Perceval, instead of looking after the national defences,

"will bestow the strictest attention on the smaller parts of ecclesiastical government. In the last agonies of England he will bring in a bill to regulate Easter offerings; and he will adjust the stipends of curates, when the flag of France is unfurled on the hills of Kent.[46]... Whatever can be done by very mistaken notions of the piety of a Christian, and by very wretched imitations of the eloquence of Mr. Pitt, will be done by these two gentlemen";

but these are no adequate defences against the genius and ambition of Bonaparte. "There is nothing to oppose to the conqueror of the world but a small table-wit, and the sallow Surveyor of the Meltings."[47]

Abraham, terrified by those prognostics, asks Peter if he thinks it possible for England to survive the recent misfortunes of Europe. Peter replies that if Bonaparte lives, and a great deal is not immediately conceded to the Roman Catholics, England must perish, and perish in disgrace.--

"It is doubly miserable to become slaves abroad, because we would be tyrants at home; and to perish because we have raised up worse enemies within, from our own bigotry, than we are exposed to without from the unprincipled ambition of France."

Then he goes on to a famous apologue. England is a frigate, attacked by a corsair of immense strength and size. The rigging is cut, there is water in the hold, men are dropping off very fast, the peril is extreme. How do you think the captain (whom we will call Perceval) acts? Does he call all hands on deck and talk to them of king, country, glory, sweethearts, gin, French prisons, wooden shoes, old England, and hearts of oak--till they give three cheers, rush to their guns, and, after a tremendous conflict, succeed in beating off the enemy?--

"Not a syllable of all this: this is not the manner in which the honourable commander goes to work. The first thing he does is to secure twenty or thirty of his prime sailors who happen to be Catholics, to clap them in irons, and set over them a guard of as many Protestants. Having taken this admirable method of defending himself against his infidel opponents, he goes upon deck, reminds the sailors, in a very bitter harangue, that they are of different religions; exhorts the Episcopal gunner not to trust to the Presbyterian quartermaster, issues positive orders that the Catholics should be fired at upon the first appearance of discontent; rushes through blood and brains, examining his men in the Catechism and x.x.xix. articles, and positively forbids every one to sponge or ram who has not taken the Sacrament according to the Church of England.... Built as she is of heart of oak, and admirably manned, is it possible with such a captain to save this ship from going to the bottom?"

Abraham's next argument against a policy of concession is that it would only lead to further demands in the future. In reply to this Peter makes vigorous use of Spencer Perceval's official career. Perceval had held a sinecure for several years; at the time of writing he was Chancellor of the Exchequer; and he had just attempted, and been defeated in attempting, a most nefarious job, by which the revenues of the Duchy of Lancaster were to have been secured to him for life.