A Memoir of the Reverend Sydney Smith
Letters 1813
Sydney Smith to John Archibald Murray, 1 September 1813
Heslington, Sept. 1st, 1813.
My dear Murray,
Barring accidents, I undertake for Broughton’s ‘Letters from a Mahratta Camp,’ and
Porter’s ‘Russian Campaign;’
perhaps also Milner and Marsh. I would with pleasure comply with your
request about Walpole, but find a most
alarming good-nature increasing upon me from year to year, which renders me
almost incapable of the task; but I will try.
I do not want the proofs, if any of the Commissioners will
be so good as to attend to the corrections; for, I assure you, little Jeffrey sometimes leaves the printing in such
a state of absolute nonsense as throws me into the
coldest of sweats.
Yours, my dear Murray, very
sincerely,
Sydney Smith.
Thomas Duer Broughton (1778-1835)
Educated at Eton, he was a military officer in India, writer, and honorary secretary of
the Royal Asiatic Society. The surgeon and writer Samuel Daniel Broughton was his younger
brother.
Francis Jeffrey, Lord Jeffrey (1773-1850)
Scottish barrister, Whig MP, and co-founder and editor of the
Edinburgh
Review (1802-29). As a reviewer he was the implacable foe of the Lake School of
poetry.
Isaac Milner (1750-1820)
He was professor of natural philosophy at Cambridge (1783-92), FRS, president of Queen's
College (1788-1820), dean of Carlisle (1791), vice-chancellor (1792, 1809) and a friend of
William Wilberforce.
Sir Robert Ker Porter [Reynold Steinkirk] (1777-1842)
English painter and writer, brother of the novelists Jane and Anna Maria Porter; after
marrying a Russian princess he pursued a career as a diplomat. He contributed to the
Literary Gazette.