LORD  BYRON  and  his  TIMES
Byron
Documents Biography Criticism
A Memoir of the Reverend Sydney Smith
Letters 1807
Sydney Smith to Francis Jeffrey, [November] 1807
INTRODUCTION & INDEXES
DOCUMENT INFORMATION
GO TO PAGE NUMBER:
Author's Preface
Contents
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Index
Editor’s Preface
Letters 1801
Letters 1802
Letters 1803
Letters 1804
Letters 1805
Letters 1806
Letters 1807
Letters 1808
Letters 1809
Letters 1810
Letters 1811
Letters 1812
Letters 1813
Letters 1814
Letters 1815
Letters 1816
Letters 1817
Letters 1818
Letters 1819
Letters 1820
Letters 1821
Letters 1822
Letters 1823
Letters 1824
Letters 1825
Letters 1826
Letters 1827
Letters 1828
Letters 1829
Letters 1830
Letters 1831
Letters 1832
Letters 1833
Letters 1834
Letters 1835
Letters 1836
Letters 1837
Letters 1838
Letters 1839
Letters 1840
Letters 1841
Letters 1842
Letters 1843
Letters 1844
Creative Commons License

Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
Produced by CATH
 
London, 1807.
My dear Jeffrey,

I may perhaps furnish you with a sheet this time. Nothing but illness or occupation will prevent me. It is not probable that these causes of interruption will occur, but I beg to provide against them in case they do. I wish you could give Constable a lecture respecting his inattention to the contributors to the Review. Everybody gets the Review before me by land-carriage, and I am defrauded with a sea Review: this is not right.

You take politics to heart more than any man I know; I do not mean questions of party, but questions of national existence. I wish we lived in the same place, for many reasons; but, among others, that we might plan some publication which would not be useless. These things are not to be despised, though they are not equal in importance to questions respecting the existence of another world, etc.

I was much amused by hearing —— was at Lord
28MEMOIR OF THE REV. SYDNEY SMITH.
Lauderdale’s. I suppose a mutual treaty of peace was first signed, in which both surrendered part of their doctrines; or some mutual friend, skilled in political economy, stepped in,—probably Horner. Brougham, I am sorry to hear, does not come into Parliament by this vacancy, occasioned by Lord Howick’s elevation to the peerage. His loss will be grievous to the Whigs.

Pray have the goodness to tell me, in your next letter, whether there is a man in Edinburgh whom you can recommend as an instructor of youth, in whose house a young Englishman could be safely deposited, without peril of marrying a Scotch girl with a fortune of 1s. 6d. sterling.

I humbly beseech you and earnestly exhort you to come to town this spring. You should revisit the Metropolis more frequently than you do, on many accounts.

Sydney Smith.

P.S.—I think you have spoilt many of my jokes; but this, I suppose, every writer thinks, whose works you alter; and I am unfortunately, as you know, the vainest and most irritable of human beings.