A Memoir of the Reverend Sydney Smith
Letters 1813
Sydney Smith to John Archibald Murray, 15 October 1813
October 15th, 1813.
My dear Murray,
I am quite ashamed of not having better fulfilled my
promise; but, first, Mrs. Sydney has
been confined; second, I am building a house; third, educating a son; fourth,
entering upon a farm; fifth, after reading half through Porter’s ‘Russian Campaign,’ I find it such
an incorrigible mass of folly and stupidity, that nothing could be said of it
but what was grossly abusive.
I have read the controversy about the Auxiliary Bible
Society, and will speedily send you an article upon it.
I can give you no account of Mackintosh, nor tell you how he is to be
stimulated.
Sir James Mackintosh (1765-1832)
Scottish philosopher and man of letters who defended the French Revolution in
Vindiciae Gallicae (1791); he was Recorder of Bombay (1803-1812) and
MP for Knaresborough (1819-32).
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.
Catharine Amelia Smith [née Pybus] (1768-1852)
The daughter of John Pybus, English ambassador to Ceylon; in 1800 she married Sydney
Smith, wit and writer for the
Edinburgh Review.