Later in the same year:—­

“I have just read The Abbot; it is far above common novels, but of very inferior execution to his others, and hardly worth reading.  He has exhausted the subject of Scotland, and worn out the few characters that the early periods of Scotch history could supply him with.  Meg Merrilies appears afresh in every novel.”

In 1821:—­

“The Pirate is certainly one of the least fortunate of Sir Walter’s productions.  It seems now that he cannot write without Meg Merrilies and Dominie Sampson.  One other such novel, and there’s an end; but who can last for ever? who ever lasted so long?”

In 1823:—­

    “Peveril is a moderate production, between his best and his worst;
    rather agreeable than not.”

His judgment on The Bride of Lammermoor is indeed deplorable.  He thought it like Scott’s previous work, but “laboured in an inferior way, and more careless, with many repetitions of himself.  Caleb is overdone....  The catastrophe is shocking and disgusting."[168]

Incidentally we find him praising Lister’s Granby, and Hope’s Anastasius.  He early discovered and consistently admired Macaulay, though he drew the line at the Lays of Ancient Rome, on the ground that he “abhorred all Grecian and Roman subjects.”  It is curious to note the number and variety of new books which he more or less commends, and which are now equally and completely forgotten.  As we come nearer our own times, however, we find an important conversion.  In 1838 he writes:—­

    “Nickleby is very good.  I stood out against Mr. Dickens as long as I
    could, but he has conquered me.”

In 1843 he writes to Dickens:—­

    “Pecksniff and his daughters, and Pinch, are admirable—­quite
    first-rate painting, such as no one but yourself can execute.  Chuffey
    is admirable.  I never read a finer piece of writing.”

And, when Dickens asks him to dinner, he replies:—­

“I accept your obliging invitation conditionally.  If I am invited by any man of greater genius than yourself, or one by whose works I have been more completely interested, I will repudiate you, and dine with the more splendid phenomenon of the two.”

His crowning glory in the matter of literary criticism is that, as Ruskin told us, he was the first man in the literary circles of London to assert the value of Modern Painters.  “He said it was a work of transcendent talent, presented the most original views in the most elegant and powerful language, and would work a complete revolution in the world of taste."[169]

With the physical sciences Sydney Smith seems to have had no real acquaintance, unless we include among them the art of the apothecary, which all through life he studied diligently and practised courageously.  But he recommended Botany, with some confidence, as “certain to delight little girls”; and his friendship with the amiable and instructive Mrs. Marcet[170] gave him a smattering of scientific terms.  In a discussion on the Inferno he invented a new torment especially for that excellent lady’s benefit.—­