This Bobus was the schoolfellow at Eton of Canning and Frere; and with John Smith and those two youths, wrote the ‘Microcosm.’  Sydney, on the other hand, was placed on the Foundation, at Winchester, which was then a stern place of instruction for a gay, spirited, hungry boy.  Courtenay, his younger brother, went with him, but ran away twice.  To owe one’s education to charity was, in those days, to be half starved.  Never was there enough, even of the coarsest food, to satisfy the boys, and the urchins, fresh from home, were left to fare as they might.  ’Neglect, abuse, and vice were,’ Sydney used to say, ’the pervading evils of Winchester; and the system of teaching, if one may so call it, savoured of the old monastic narrowness....  I believe, when a boy at school, I made above ten thousand Latin verses, and no man in his senses would dream of ever making another in after-life.  So much for life and time wasted.’  The verse-inciting process is, nevertheless, remorselessly carried on during three years more at Oxford and is much oftener the test of patient stupidity than of aspiring talent, Yet of what stupendous importance it is in the attainment of scholarships and prizes; and how zealous, how tenacious, are dons and ‘coaches’ in holding to that which far higher classics, the Germans, regard with contempt!

Sydney’s proficiency promoted him to be captain of the school, and he left Winchester for New College, Oxford—–­one of the noblest and most abused institutions then of that grand university.  Having obtained a scholarship, as a matter of course, and afterwards a fellowship, he remarked that the usual bumpers of port wine at college were as much the order of the day among the Fellows as Latin verses among the undergraduates.  We may not, however, picture to ourselves Sydney as partaking of the festivities of the common room; with more probability let us imagine him wandering with steady gait, even after Hall—­a thing not even then or now certain in colleges—­in those evergreen, leafy, varied gardens, flanked by that old St. Peter’s church on the one side, and guarded by the high wall, once a fortification, on the other.  He was poor, and therefore safe, for poverty is a guardian angel to an undergraduate, and work may protect even the Fellow from utter deterioration.

He was turned out into the world by his father with his hundred a year from the Fellowship, and never had a farthing from the old destroyer of country-seats afterwards.  He never owed a sixpence; nay, he paid a debt of thirty pounds, which Courtenay, who had no iron in his character, had incurred at Winchester, and had not the courage to avow.  The next step was to choose a profession.  The bar would have been Sydney’s choice; but the church was the choice of his father.  It is the cheapest channel by which a man may pass into genteel poverty; ’wit and independence do not make bishops,’ as Lord Cockburn remarks.  We do not, however, regard, as he does, Sydney Smith as ‘lost’