The sum, however, was all important to the thrifty couple.  It distanced the nightmare of the poor and honest,—­debt.  L750 was presented by Mr. Beach, in gratitude for the care of his son, to Smith.  It was invested in the funds, and formed the nucleus of future savings,—­’Ce n’est que le premier pas qui coute’ is a trite saying. ’C’est le premier pas qui gagne, might be applied to this and similar cases.  A little daughter—­Lady Holland, the wife of the celebrated physician, Sir Henry Holland—­was sent to bless the sensible pair.  Sydney had wished that she might be born with one eye, so that he might never lose her; nevertheless, though she happened to be born with two, he bore her secretly from the nursery, a few hours after her birth, to show her in triumph to the future Edinburgh Reviewers.

The birth of the ‘Edinburgh Review’ quickly followed that of the young lady.  Jeffrey,—­then an almost starving barrister, living in the eighth or ninth flat of a house in Buccleuch Place,—­Brougham, and Sydney Smith were the triumvirate who propounded the scheme, Smith being the first mover.  He proposed a motto:  ‘Tenui Musam meditanum avenir:’  We cultivate literature on a little oatmeal; but this being too near the truth, they took their motto from Publius Syrus; ‘of whom,’ said Smith, ’none of us had, I am sure, read a single line.’  To this undertaking Sydney Smith devoted his talents for more than twenty-eight years.

Meantime, during the brief remainder of his stay in Edinburgh, his circumstances improved.  He had done that which most of the clergy are obliged to do—­taken a pupil.  He had now another, the son of Mr. Gordon, of Ellon; for each of these young men he received L400 a year.  He became to them a father and a friend; he entered into all their amusements.  One of them saying that he could not find conversation at the balls for his partners, ‘Never mind,’ cried Sydney Smith, ’I’ll fit you up in five minutes.’  Accordingly he wrote down conversations for them amid bursts of laughter.

Thus happily did years, which many persons would have termed a season of adversity, pass away.  The chance which brought him to Edinburgh introduced him to a state of society never likely to be seen again in Scotland.  Lord Cockburn’s ‘Memorials’ afford an insight into manners, not only as regarded suppers, but on the still momentous point, of dinners.  Three o’clock was the fashionable hour, so late as the commencement of the present century.  That hour, ’not without groans and predictions,’ became four—­and four was long and conscientiously adhered to.  ‘Inch by inch,’ people yielded, and five continued to be the standard polite hour from 1806 to 1820.  ‘Six has at length prevailed.’