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Old wheat and beans blazing for twenty miles round cart-mares shot sows of Lord Somerville's breed running wild over the country the minister of the parish wounded sorely in his hinder parts Mrs. Plymley in fits all these scenes of war an Austrian or a Russian has seen three or four times over.
Johnson and the rejection of Mr. Jackson." In July, Thomas Babington Macaulay, a young and unsuccessful barrister, found himself on circuit at York. He was told that Mr. Smith had come to see him, and, when the visitor was admitted, he recognized "the Smith of Smiths, Sydney Smith, alias Peter Plymley.
Plymley was an English physician travelling with an invalid wife and consumptive son, and having been consulted by Mrs. Orme on several occasions in Milan, had at length been prevailed upon by General Laurance to arrange an apparently casual introduction. It was a cloudless spring day, and leaving Mr. and Mrs. Waul to read a package of American papers, Mrs.
Lord Murray called the Plymley letters "after Pascal's letters the most instructive piece of wisdom in the form of irony ever written." Worldly wealth came later; but in wit, wisdom, and kindly helpful cheerfulness, from youth to age, Sydney Smith's life was rich.
His brilliant wit and general ability made him a favourite in society, while by his power of clear and cogent argument he exercised a strong influence on the course of politics. His Plymley Letters did much to advance the cause of Catholic emancipation. He received various preferments, and became a canon of St. Paul's.
In 1802 a daughter was born, and in the same year Sydney Smith joined Francis Jeffrey and other friends, who then maintained credit for Edinburgh as the Modern Athens, in the founding of The Edinburgh Review, to which the papers in this volume, added to the Peter Plymley Letters, were contributed. The Rev.
Parnell and Grattan had brought the subject before the Imperial Parliament in 1810, and it was again and again insisted on by the Whig writers, and nowhere more strongly than in Sydney Smith's admirable letters to Peter Plymley and in some of the pages of the 'Edinburgh Review. But nothing was done till the evil had become intolerable, and had brought the country to a state of anarchy and demoralisation that can scarcely be exaggerated.
The writings of Sydney Smith rarely attain the perfect grace which uniformly distinguishes Elia; yet he never attempts magnificence, and he so unites brilliancy and plainness as to make his statements seem equally felicitous to the rude and the scholarly ear. His Peter Plymley letters are remarkable examples of the way in which one yeoman speaks to another.
Even supposing, for the sake of argument, that the Orangemen carry their disaffection to the point of resistance, and brave the discipline of the law, the prospect has no terrors for Peter Plymley.
He was not prepared to uphold privileges which involved a palpable danger to his order. This position is illustrated by Sydney Smith, the ideal divine of Holland House. The Plymley Letters give his views most pithily.
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