Cloth binding. Black lettering with gilt title on front cover.

In 1803 Sydney Smith left Edinburgh for London, where he wrote busily in The Edinburgh Review, but remained poor for many years. His wit brought friends, and the marriage of his eldest brother with Lord Holland’s aunt quickened the growth of a strong friendship with Lord Holland. Through the good offices of Lord Holland, Sydney Smith obtained, in 1806, aged thirty-five, the living of Foston-le-Clay, in Yorkshire. In the next year appeared the first letter of Peter Plymley to his brother Abraham on the subject of the Irish Catholics.
These letters fell, we are told, like sparks on a heap of gunpowder. All London, and soon all England, was alive to the sound reason recommended by a lively wit. Sydney Smith lived to be recognised as first among the social wits, and it was always the chief praise of his wit that wisdom was the soul of it. Peter Plymley’s letters, and Sydney Smith’s articles on the same subject in The Edinburgh Review were the most powerful aids furnished by the pen to the solution of the burning question of their time. 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.

Sydney Smith (3 June 1771 – 22 February 1845) was an English wit, writer, and Anglican cleric.

Smith’s reputation among his contemporaries as a humourist and wit grew to such an extent that a number of the observations which are now attributed to him may be of doubtful provenance. Lord Houghton recorded that he never, except once, knew Smith to make a jest of any religious subject, “and then he immediately withdrew his words, and seemed ashamed that he had uttered them”. To be set against that encomium is one of Smith’s best-known lines, to the effect that his friend Henry Luttrell’s idea of heaven was eating pâté de foie gras to the sound of trumpets.

No English writer’s opinions on early American literature had more impact than Smith’s. He referred to himself as a “sincere friend of America,” but this sentiment is both supported and denied by his many publications. For instance, American writer and critic John Neal dubbed his 1820 question in the Edinburgh Review, “In the four-quarters of the globe, who reads an American book?” as “insolent” and said he would “furnish a pretty good answer”^[7] by traveling to England in 1823, where he became the first American published in any British literary journal.

Long after his death, he was often quoted in English literary life and was remembered by homemakers in the United States through his rhyming recipe for salad dressing.

Jane Austen expert Margaret C. Sullivan speculates in an essay that the character Henry Tilney, the romantic interest of the protagonist Catherine Morland in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1803), may have been based on Smith.

The memory and achievements of Smith are perpetuated by the Sydney Smith Association, a registered charity which aims (among other things) to republish online as many of his writings as possible.