by being a churchman.  He was happy, and made others happy; he was good, and made others good.  Who can say the same of a successful barrister, or of a popular orator?  His first sphere was in a curacy on Salisbury Plain; one of his earliest clerical duties was to marry his brother Robert (a barrister) to Miss Vernon, aunt to Lord Lansdowne.  ’All I can tell you of the marriage,’ Sydney wrote to his mother, ’is that he cried, she cried, I cried.’  It was celebrated in the library at Bowood, where Sydney so often enchanted the captivating circle afterwards by his wit.

Nothing could be more gloomy than the young pastor’s life on Salisbury Plain:  ‘the first and poorest pauper of the hamlet,’ as he calls a curate, he was seated down among a few scattered cottages on this vast flat; visited even by the butcher’s cart only once a week from Salisbury; accosted by few human beings; shunned by all who loved social life.  But the probation was not long; and after being nearly destroyed by a thunder-storm in one of his rambles, he quitted Salisbury Plain, after two years, for a more genial scene.

There was an hospitable squire, a Mr. Beach, living in Smith’s parish; the village of Netherhaven, near Amesbury.  Mr. Beach had a son; the quiet Sundays at the Hall were enlivened by the curate’s company at dinner, and Mr. Beach found his guest both amusing and sensible, and begged him to become tutor to the young squire.  Smith accepted; and went away with his pupil, intending to visit Germany.  The French Revolution was, however, at its height.  Germany was impracticable, and ’we were driven,’ Sydney wrote to his mother, ’by stress of politics, into Edinburgh.’

This accident,—­this seeming accident,—­was the foundation of Sydney Smith’s opportunities; not of his success, for that his own merits procured, but of the direction to which his efforts were applied.  He would have been eminent, wherever destiny had led him; but he was thus made to be useful in one especial manner; ’his lines had, indeed, fallen in pleasant places.’

Edinburgh, in 1797, was not, it is almost needless to say, the Edinburgh of 1860.  An ancient, picturesque, high-built looking city, with its wynds and closes, it had far more the characteristics of an old French ville de province than of a northern capital.  The foundation-stone of the new College was laid in 1789, but the building was not finished until more than forty years afterwards.  The edifice then stood in the midst of fields and gardens.  ‘Often.’ writes Lord Cockburn, ’did we stand to admire the blue and yellow crocuses rising through the clean earth in the first days of spring, in the house of Doctor Monro (the second), whose house stood in a small field entering from Nicolson Street, within less than a hundred yards from the college.’

The New Town was in progress when Sydney Smith and his pupil took refuge in ‘Auld Reekie.’  With the rise of every street some fresh innovation in manners seemed also to begin.  Lord Cockburn, wedded as he was to his beloved Reekie, yet unprejudiced and candid on all points, ascribes the change in customs to the intercourse with the English, and seems to date it from the Union.  Thus the overflowing of the old town into fresh spaces, ‘implied,’ as he remarks, ‘a general alteration of our habits.’