“I well remember, when Mrs. Sydney and I were young, in London, with no other equipage than my umbrella, when we went out to dinner in a hackney coach (a vehicle, by the bye, now become almost matter of history), when the rattling step was let down, and the proud, powdered red-plushes grinned, and her gown was fringed with straw, how the iron entered into my soul.”

One of the most useful friends whom the Smiths discovered in London was Mr. Thomas Bernard,[28] afterwards a baronet of good estate in Buckinghamshire, and a zealous worker in all kinds of social and educational reform.  Mr. Bernard was Treasurer of the Royal Institution in Albemarle Street, which had been founded in 1799; and, with the laudable desire of putting a few pounds into a friend’s pocket, he suggested that Sydney Smith should be invited to lecture before the Institution.  The invitation was cordially given and gratefully accepted.  The lecturer chose “Moral Philosophy” for his subject, and the Introductory Lecture, in which he defined his terms, was delivered on the 10th of November 1804.  The second and third lectures dealt with the History of Moral Philosophy; the fourth, with the Powers of External Perception; the fifth, with Conception; the sixth, with Memory; the seventh, with Imagination; the eighth, with Reason and Judgment; and the ninth, with the Conduct of the Understanding.

These lectures were treated by the author as forming one course, their general subject being “The Understanding.”  In February 1805 he wrote to his friend Jeffrey:—­“I got through my first course I think creditably; whether any better than creditably others know better than myself.  I have still ten to read.”  This second course followed immediately on the first, and, under the general head of “Taste,” discussed topics so various as “Wit and Humour,” “The Beautiful,” “The Sublime,” “The Faculties of Animals as compared with those of Man,” and “The Faculties of Beasts.”  By this time the lectures had become fashionable.  One eye-witness writes:—­

“All Albemarle Street, and a part of Grafton Street, was rendered impassable by the concourse of carriages assembled there during the time of their delivery.  There was not sufficient room for the persons assembling; the lobbies were filled, and the doors into them from the lecture-room were left open.”

Horner reckoned “from six to eight hundred hearers and not a seat to be procured, even if you go there an hour before the time.”  Sir Robert Peel, who had just left Harrow, was one of the audience, and remembered the lectures forty years after their delivery.  As late as 1843, Dr. Whewell[29] inquired if they were still accessible.  Sydney Smith, according to Lord Houghton, described his performances as “the most successful swindle of the season”; and, writing to Jeffrey in April 1805, he says:—­