This exactly corresponds with the impression of a listener to his famous sermon on Toleration, in Bristol Cathedral.  “Never did anybody to my mind look more like a High Churchman, as he walked up the aisle to the altar—­there was an air of so much proud dignity in his appearance.”

Perhaps this account of Sydney Smith’s relations with St. Paul’s Cathedral cannot be better concluded than with some extracts from the noble sermon which he preached there on the occasion of Queen Victoria’s accession.  It is a remarkably fine instance of his rhetorical manner.  It reveals an ardent and sagacious patriotism.  It breathes a spirit of fatherly interest which excellently becomes a minister of religion, glancing, from the close of a long life spent in public affairs, at the possibilities, at once awful and splendid, which lay before the Girl-Queen.

The preacher, in his opening paragraphs, briefly announces his theme.  His starting-point is the death of the King.—­

“From the throne to the tomb—­wealth, splendour, flattery, all gone!  The look of favour—­the voice of power, no more;—­the deserted palace—­the wretched monarch on his funeral bier—­the mourners ready—­the dismal march of death prepared.  Who are we, and what are we? and for what has God made us? and why are we doomed to thus frail and unquiet existence?  Who does not feel all this? in whose heart does it not provoke appeal to, and dependence on, God? before whose eyes does it not bring the folly and the nothingness of all things human?”

He pauses to pay a tribute to the honesty and patriotism of William IV., and then proceeds:—­

“But the world passes on, and a new order of things arises.  Let us take a short view of those duties which devolve upon the young Queen, whom Providence has placed over us:  what ideas she ought to form of her duties; and on what points she should endeavour to place the glories of her reign.

“First and foremost, I think the new Queen should bend her mind to the very serious consideration of educating her people.  Of the importance of this I think no reasonable doubt can exist; it does not in its effects keep pace with the exaggerated expectations of its injudicious advocates; but it presents the best chance of national improvement.

“Reading and writing are mere increase of power.  They may be turned, I admit, to a good or a bad purpose; but for several years of his life the child is in your hands, and you may give to that power what bias you please.  Thou shalt not kill—­Thou shalt not steal—­Thou shalt not bear false witness:—­by how many fables, by how much poetry, by how many beautiful aids of imagination, may not the fine morality of the Sacred Scriptures be engraven on the minds of the young?  I believe the arm of the assassin may be often stayed by the lessons of his early life.  When I see the village school, and the tattered scholars,