there is a reason, connected with my bodily and mental state, for all the previous matters to be sought for in my contemptible abode, and which I have so minutely particularised.

If possible, I would wish my little house to have a sunny aspect; sun into all possible windows every day that the glorious material god shines. I am a shivering being, and require, and rejoice in his invigorating rays as does the drooping sickly plant.

If this little house could be within view of our Nore stream, along the banks of which you and I have so often bounded, but along which I shall never bound again, it would enhance my pleasure.

I will begin to go home the 10th of the next month (May) : travelling is to me a most expensive and tedious process. Every league of the road will take a shackle off me. My mind is fixed on a little sunny nook in Kilkenny, where I may set myself down and die easily, or live a little longer as happily as I can."*

He was impatient, as we have stated, to leave Paris, and commence his homeward journey; and so, to use the words of Mrs. Banim, he "bundled every thing," and started for Boulogne. Even here, on his journey, his invariable attendant, sickness, pursued him-Mrs. Banim was attacked by typhus fever. He thus announces his position to Michael :—

My dear Michael,

"Boulogne-Sur-Mer, May 20th, 1835.

I left Paris the 10th, as I told you I should do, although much weakened from a regimen to arrest throwing up blood, which happened to me some weeks before. I arrived here the 13th, and was about to cross to England the 16th, when my

This description of the house in which he would pass his future life is very beautiful, and it may interest some readers to mark the similarity between it and that poet's home which Tennyson has so exquisitely described in "The Gardener's Daughter" :

"Not wholly in the busy world, nor quite
Beyond it, blooms the garden that I love.
News from the humming city comes to it
In sound of funeral or of marriage bells;
And, sitting muffled in dark leaves, you hear
The windy clanging of the minster clock;
Although between it and the garden lies
A league of grass, wash'd by a slow broad stream,
That, stirr'd with languid pulses of the oar,
Waves all its lazy lilies, and creeps on,
Barge-laden, to three arches of a bridge
Crown'd with the minster-towers."

poor Ellen was struck down by Typhus Fever-which fastening on a previous cold, has so inflamed her chest and side, that I don't yet know if she is to be spared to me. At any rate, do as well as she can, I must not stir for a month at least-God's will be done. There is always something to be grateful for. Had Ellen taken ill on the road from Paris, amongst strangers, instead of here, surrounded by real affec tion, how much more must I have suffered.

Indeed, from men and women, French, and English, and Irish, in Boulogne, we find nothing but great kindness.

May 24th. I am glad I did not send this yesterday; Ellen is better to-day, and the chances are all in her favour."

As "Ellen is better to-day, and the chances are all in her favour," and as he is on the road towards home, towards Kilkenny, with the garden not overlooked, and the flowers, and the sunshine, and the sparkling, winding, shady Nore, and with the soft warm wind of summer playing around him, and with kind English and French friends smiling by him, and helping him to restore Ellen, he must take up his pen, and he writes, and encloses, in the last quoted letter to Michael

THE CALL FROM HOME.

From home, and hearth, and garden it resounds,
From chamber, stair, and all the old house bounds,
And from our boyhood's old play grounds.

And from my native skies and airs, which you
Tell me must nerve my wretched form anew,
Breathing forth hopes of life, alas! how few.
And from the humble chapel path we've trod
So often 'morn and eve, to worship God,
Or kneel, boy penitents, beneath his rod.
And from its humble grave yard, where repose

Our grandsire's ashes and our mother's woes,

That saint, who suffered with a smile to life's last close.

Brother, I come, you summon and I come;

From love like yours I never more will roam,

Yours is the call from brother and from home.

From the world's glare and struggle, loving some
And hating none; to share my mother's tomb,
Hoping to share her bliss, brother, I come.

In the succeeding parts of this Biography, we shall describe Banim in his own Irish home; somewhat improved in health; writing and hoping, and his heart cheered by visits from distinguished friends; and, strangest of all in Ireland, recognized as a man of genius, and respected, in his native town, though owing nothing to politics, and being merely a sick man, who was an honor to his country's literature.

ART. III-SYDNEY SMITH.

A Memoir of the Reverend Sydney Smith. By his Daughter, Lady Holland. With a Selection from his Letters, Edited by Mrs. Austin. 2 vols. London: Longman and Co., 1855. Men talk of that fiction called history, and of its twin-sister, historical romance, as instructive, amusing reading; but, in our mind, the biography of distinguished writers, particularly of men who have been, within the last fifty years, remarkable as political writers, is infinitely more useful and interesting; and the interest and usefulness are immeasurably increased when, as in the book before us, the biography is the work of writers intimately acquainted with the every-day life of him whose thoughts, words, and actions are recorded.

:

We have heard, and read it, objected to this Memoir, that it deals only with the private life of Sydney Smith, and that his public career receives little notice. To us, this complete picture of home life is the best, and chief attraction. We have been, thousands, in these Kingdoms, and in America, have been, earnest students of Sydney Smith's political and literary writings: we have longed to know how he wrote and how he lived his services to rational freedom and civil liberty are to all men known. He sprang into literary and political life at a time which, as he thirty-six years afterwards wrote, "was an awful period for those who had the misfortune to entertain liberal opinions, and who were too honest to sell them for the ermine of the judge, or the lawn of the prelate :—a long and hopeless career in your profession, the chuckling grin of noodles, the sarcastic leer of the genuine political rogueprebendaries, deans, and bishops made over your headreverend renegades advanced to the highest dignities of the Church, for helping to rivet the fetters of Catholic and Protestant Dissenters, and no more chance of a Whig administration than of a thaw in Zembla-these were the penalties exacted for liberality of opinion at that period; and not only was there no pay, but there were many stripes: the man who breathed a syllable against the senseless bigotry of the two Georges, or hinted at the abominable tyranny and persecution exercised upon Catholic Ireland, was shunned as unfit for the relations of social life. Not a murmur against any abuse was permitted; to say a word against the suitorcide delays of

the Court of Chancery, or the cruel punishments of the Game Laws, or against any abuse which a rich man inflicted or a poor man suffered, was treason against the Plousiocracy, and was bitterly and steadily resented."* Without fortune, without patronage, but with every thing to hope from a pliant, judicious dedication of his genius to the service of the Ministry, in his thirty-first year he abandoned all avenues to advancement by political prostitution of his intellect, and from that time to the hour of his death, we may apply to him his own noble eulogium upon the character of GRATTAN.

Men such as this require no record of their public lives from the pen of the biographer. Do we want a record of his sentiments upon the great questions of his time,-Catholic Emancipation, the Ballot, and Reform, we have them perfect in Peter Plymley's Letters, in the Speeches at Taunton, and in the papers of The Edinburgh Review. Do we require to know him, as he was amongst the first men of his time in genius, so he was amongst the first of that time's philanthropists,-we learn all in his essays entitled Prisons, Cruel Treatment of Untried Prisoners, Man Traps and Spring Guns, Mad Quakers, Botany Bay, Counsel for Prisoners, Poor Laws, Chimney Sweepers. Do we desire a knowledge of his opinions upon the great events in our national history,-his papers on Charles Fox, on Fox's Historical Work, on Captain Rock, and on America, place these before us. Do we wish to know his detestation of cant or fanaticism, we have but to read his papers on Methodism, and on the Society for the Suppression of Vice; and if any require to know how truly and unchangeably he was the defender of every just right and privilege of that church to which he was an honor, his letters to Archdeacon Singleton, to Lord John Russell, and his paper Persecuting Bishops, evince it all, in every page, most nobly. Had Sydney Smith been a renegade, a time-server, a hanger-on at great men's levees; and had he, after desecrating his genius, hid his head in a mitre, his daughter and his friend might now be bound to write the history of, that is to extenuate, the unworthy deeds of his public life; but having done none of these things; knowing that his whole public life was in his public writings, they tell his friends, that is, they tell all the world who love him, and goodness of heart, when gracing high qualities of mind, what

See Preface to Works, page 5.—Ed. 1851.

kind of child, boy, husband, father, friend and priest, Sydney Smith was in the minds of those who knew him best.

And when one looks now through the pages of the book before us; when one recalls all the traits of Sydney Smith recorded in Jeffrey's Life; in Moore's Diary; in the late Lord Dudley and Ward's Letters; in Leonard Horner's Life of his brother Francis, we all feel, that in describing the character of Francis Horner, Sydney Smith but described his own.

This Memoir is of very great importance in correcting an error into which many persons have fallen, in estimating the character of Sydney. He has been generally looked upon as one who existed only to enjoy himself in society, and as a churchman who cared nothing for his duties, save to discharge them with a regularity just sufficient to enable him, with decency, to receive the emoluments of his appointments. This latter error the Memoir fully corrects; but the former opinion is most curiously dissipated, by a letter to Sir George Philips, and corroborates an assertion in Moore's Diary, that Sydney Smith's natural disposition was grave and thoughtful. Moore writes, under date May 27th, 1926: "Breakfasted at Rogers's: Sydney Smith, Lord Cawdor, G. Fortescue, and Warburton. Smith, full of comicality and fancy, kept us all in roars of laughter. In talking of the stories about drinkers catching fire, pursued the idea in every possible shape. The inconvenience of a man coming too near the candle when he was speaking, Sir, your observation has caught fire.' Then imagined a parson breaking into a blaze in the pulpit; the engines called to put him out; no water to be had, the man at the waterworks being a Unitarian or an Atheist. Said of some one, He has no command over his understanding; it is always getting between his legs and tripping him up. Left Rogers's with Smith, to go and assist him in choosing a grand piano-forte found him (as I have often done before) change at once from the gay, uproarious wag into as solemn, grave, and austere a person as any bench of judges or bishops could supply this, I rather think, is his natural character.

Writing, on the 28th February, 1836, to Sir George Philips, Smith himself thus observes upon his own character::

"My dear Philips,-You say I have many comic ideas.

See "Memoirs, Journal and Correspondence of Thomas Moore." Vol. V. p. 75.