1 June

Sydney Smith defends his style as the model English clergyman

1820 ‘The Chancellor is quite right about political sermons’, he wrote to his friend, the Whig peer Lord Holland, ‘and in this I have erred; but I have a right to preach on general principles of toleration and the fault is not mine if the congregation apply my doctrines to passing events.’ These ‘passing events’ included the abolition of the slave trade and the issue of Catholic emancipation. He was for both.

Thus the Reverend Sydney Smith, the essayist, reformer, farmer and popular lecturer on moral philosophy, the man who thought up the Edinburgh Review, and the man who asked: ‘In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book?’ Here, though, he was holding his fire; he loathed the reactionary chancellor, John Scott (later Earl of Eldon), whom he would later describe as ‘a cunning canting old Rogue’.

Smith loved London, where his best (and best-connected) friends lived – loved its gossip and good conversation – but when the Residence Act of 1808 made his living in Foston-le-Clay, in Yorkshire, conditional on his actually living there (instead of sending a curate to fill his place), he made the best of it, spending £4,000 on refurbishing the house and farm buildings where there had been no resident clergyman for 150 years, and (as he wrote in this same letter) playing ‘my part in the usual manner, as doctor, justice, road-maker, pacifist, preacher, farmer, neighbor, and diner-out’.

‘If I can mend my fortunes’, he added, ‘I shall be very glad; if I cannot, I shall be not be very sorry.’ Later he would go through the same process at the other end of the country, in Combe Florey, Somerset: doctoring, preaching, farming and rebuilding the rectory, just 200 yards away from the house in which Evelyn Waugh was later to spend the last decade of his life.