“Sydney Smith preached yesterday a sermon on the Catholic question.... 
    It would have made an admirable party speech in Parliament, but as a
    sermon, the author deserved the Star Chamber, if it still existed.”

During the summer of 1807, the Smiths lived in a hired house at Sonning on the Thames; and one of their neighbours was the great civilian Sir William Scott,[36] afterwards Lord Stowell (who deserves to be honoured for having coined the phrase—­“The elegant simplicity of the Three per cents").  The old judge took a fancy to the young clergyman, and pointed out, in a friendly spirit, how much he had lost by his devotion to Whiggism.  In later life, Sydney Smith wrote to Lord John Russell[37]—­“I remember with pleasure, thirty years ago, old Lord Stowell saying to me, ’Mr. Smith, you would have been a much richer man if you had joined us.’”

But the Tory table-talk of Earley[38] was powerless to seduce this staunch partisan from his political allegiance; and, just at this period, he was meditating the most skilful and the most resounding blow which he ever struck for freedom and justice.

It was a critical time.  The besotted resistance of the King to the slightest concession in favour of his Roman Catholic subjects had driven the ministry of “All the Talents” out of office in the spring.  The High Tories succeeded them, and the General Election which ensued on the change of government gave a strong majority for “No Popery” and reaction.  Meanwhile the greatest genius that the world has ever seen was wading through slaughter to a universal throne, and no effective resistance had as yet been offered to a progress which menaced the freedom of Europe and the existence of its states.  At such a juncture it seemed to Sydney Smith that England could not spare a single soldier or sailor, nor afford to alienate the loyalty of a single citizen.  “Buonaparte,” he wrote, “is as rapid and as terrible as the lightning of God; would he were as transient.”  It was nothing short of national suicide to reject men desirous of serving in the army and navy on account of their beliefs, to madden English Romanists by defrauding them of their civil rights, and to outrage the whole people of Ireland by affixing a legal stigma to their religion.

His musings on this pregnant theme took shape in—­

  A LETTER
  ON
  THE SUBJECT
  OF
  THE CATHOLICS
  TO
  MY BROTHER ABRAHAM
  WHO
  LIVES IN THE COUNTRY
  BY PETER PLYMLEY.

This Letter was published in the summer of 1807, and “its effect was like a spark on a heap of gunpowder,” It was followed by nine more, bearing the same title, four of which appeared in the same year and five in the next.  A little later Sydney Smith wrote to Lord Grey—­“I wish I could write as well as Plymley:  but, if I could, where is such a case to be found?  When had any lawyer such a brief?”