“You should be doomed to listen, for a thousand years, to conversations between Caroline and Emily, where Caroline should always give wrong explanations in chemistry, and Emily in the end be unable to distinguish an acid from an alkali.”

When we turn, from these smaller matters of taste and accomplishment, to the general view of life, Sydney Smith would seem, at first sight, to have been a Utilitarian:  and yet he declared himself in vigorous terms an opponent of the Utilitarian School.—­

“That school treat mankind as if they were mere machines; the feelings or affections never enter into their calculations.  If everything is to be sacrificed to utility, why do you bury your grandmother? why don’t you cut her into small pieces at once, and make portable soup of her?”

In a similar vein, he said of his friend George Grote that he would have been an important politician if the world had been a chess-board.  Any system, social, political, or philosophical, which did not directly concern itself with the wants and feelings and impulses of human flesh and blood, appealed to him in vain.

“How foolish,” he wrote, “and how profligate, to show that the principle of general utility has no foundation; that it is often opposed to the interests of the individual!  If this be true, there is an end of all reasoning and all morals:  and if any man asks, Why am I to do what is generally useful? he should not be reasoned with, but called rogue, rascal, etc., and the mob should be excited to break his windows.”

He liked what he called “useful truth.”  He could make no terms with thinkers who were “more fond of disputing on mind and matter than on anything which can have a reference to the real world, inhabited by real men, women, and children.”  Indeed, all his thinking was governed by his eager and generous humanitarianism.  He thought all speculation, which did not bear directly on the welfare and happiness of human beings, a waste of ingenuity; and yet, at the same time, he taught that all practical systems, which left out of account the emotional and sentimental side of man, were incomplete and ineffectual.  This higher side of his nature showed itself in his lively affections, his intense love of home and wife and children, his lifelong tenacity of friendship, and his overflowing sympathy for the poor, the abject, and the suffering.

“The haunts of Happiness,” he wrote, “are varied, and rather unaccountable; but I have more often seen her among little children, and by home firesides, and in country houses, than anywhere else,—­at least, I think so.”

When his mother died, he wrote—­“Everyone must go to his grave with his heart scarred like a soldier’s body,” and, when he lost his infant boy, he said—­“Children are horribly insecure; the life of a parent is the life of a gambler.”

His more material side was well exhibited by the catalogue of “Modern Changes” which he compiled in old age, heading it with the characteristic couplet:—­