on the

"Sydney Smith preached yesterday a sermon Catholic question. It would have made an admirable party speech in Parliament, but as a sermon, the author deserved the Star Chamber, if it still existed."

During the summer of 1807, the Smiths lived in a hired house at Sonning on the Thames; and one of their neighbours was the great civilian Sir William Scott, afterwards Lord Stowell (who deserves to be honoured for having coined the phrase "The elegant simplicity of the Three per cents"). The old judge took a fancy to the young clergyman, and pointed out, in a friendly spirit, how much he had lost by his devotion to Whiggism. In later life, Sydney Smith wrote to Lord John Russell 2-"I remember with pleasure, thirty years ago, old Lord Stowell saying to me, 'Mr. Smith, you would have been a much richer man if you had joined us.'

But the Tory table-talk of Earley 3 was powerless to seduce this staunch partisan from his political allegiance; and, just at this period, he was meditating the most skilful and the most resounding blow which he ever struck for freedom and justice.

It was a critical time. The besotted resistance of the King to the slightest concession in favour of his Roman Catholic subjects had driven the ministry of "All the Talents" out of office in the spring. The High Tories succeeded them, and the General Election which ensued on the change of government gave a strong majority for "No Popery " and reaction. Mean

1 (1745-1836), created Lord Stowell in 1821.

2 (1792-1878).

3 A house which Lord Stowell acquired by his marriage with an heiress, Anna Maria Bagnall.

while the greatest genius that the world has ever seen was wading through slaughter to a universal throne, and no effective resistance had as yet been offered to a progress which menaced the freedom of Europe and the existence of its states. At such a juncture it seemed to Sydney Smith that England could not spare a single soldier or sailor, nor afford to alienate the loyalty of a single citizen. "Buonaparte," he wrote, "is as rapid and as terrible as the lightning of God; would he were as transient." It was nothing short of national suicide to reject men desirous of serving in the army and navy on account of their beliefs, to madden English Romanists by defrauding them of their civil rights, and to outrage the whole people of Ireland by affixing a legal stigma to their religion.

His musings on this pregnant theme took shape in—

A LETTER

ON

THE SUBJECT

OF

THE CATHOLICS

ΤΟ

MY BROTHER ABRAHAM

WHO

LIVES IN THE COUNTRY

BY PETER PLYMLEY.

This Letter was published in the summer of 1807, and "its effect was like a spark on a heap of gunpowder." It was followed by nine more, bearing the same title, four of which appeared in the same year and five in

the next. A little later Sydney Smith wrote to Lord Grey-"I wish I could write as well as Plymley: but, if I could, where is such a case to be found? When had any lawyer such a brief ?"

In 1808 Peter Plymley's Letters were collected and published in a pamphlet, and the pamphlet ran through sixteen editions. "The government of that day," wrote Sydney Smith in 1839, "took great pains to find out the author; all that they could find out was that they were brought to Mr. Budd, the publisher, by the Earl of Lauderdale.1 Somehow or another it came to be conjectured that I was the author.2. . . They had an immense circulation at the time, and I think above twenty thousand copies were sold." Some little space must be bestowed upon these masterpieces of humour and wisdom.

James, 8th Earl of Lauderdale (1759-1839).

2 Byron, in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, attributes the authorship of Peter Plymley to "Smug Sydney." See also his allusion to "Peter Pith" in Don Juan, canto xvi.

CHAPTER III

PETER PLYMLEY

Peter Plymley's Letters are supposed to be written by a Londoner, who is in favour of removing the secular disabilities of Roman Catholics, to his brother Abraham, the parson of a rural parish. They proceed throughout on the assumption that the parson is a kind-hearted, honest, and conscientious man; but rather stupid, grossly ignorant of public affairs, and frightened to death by a bogy of his own imagining. That bogy is the idea of a Popish conspiracy against the crown, church, and commonwealth. Abraham

communicates his alarms to his brother Peter in London, and Peter's Letters are replies to these outpourings.

Letter I. begins by assuring Abraham that there is no truth in the rumour that the Pope has landed on English soil, and has been housed by the Spencers or the Hollands or the Grenvilles. "The best-informed clergy in the neighbourhood of the metropolis are convinced that the rumour is without foundation." Having set this fear at rest, Peter deals with Abraham's argument.

"You say that the Roman Catholics interpret the Scriptures in an unorthodox manner. Very likely. . . . But I want soldiers and sailors for the state; I want to make a greater

use than I now can do of a poor country full of men; I want to render the military service popular among the Irish; to check the power of France; to make every possible exertion for the safety of Europe, which in twenty years' time will be nothing but a mass of French slaves: and then you, and ten thousand other such boobies as you, call out 'For God's sake, do not think of raising cavalry and infantry in Ireland! They interpret the Epistle to Timothy in a different manner from what we do. 'What! when Turk, Jew, Heretic, Infidel, Catholic, Protestant, are all combined against this country; when men of every religious persuasion, and no religious persuasion, when the population of half the globe, is up in arms against us ; are we to stand examining our generals and armies as a bishop examines candidates for holy orders? and to suffer no one to bleed for England who does not agree with you about the Second of Timothy ?"

And then Peter disclaims the reproach of unfriendliness to the Established Church.—

"I love the Church as well as you do; but you totally mistake the nature of an Establishment, when you contend that it ought to be connected with the military and civil careers of every individual in the state. It is quite right that there should be one clergyman in every parish interpreting the Scriptures after a particular manner, ruled by a regular hierarchy, and paid with a rich proportion of haycocks and wheat sheaves. When I have laid this foundation for a national religion in the state-when I have placed ten thousand well-educated men in different parts of the kingdom to preach it up, and compelled every one to pay them, whether they hear them or not-I have taken such measures as I know must always procure an immense majority in favour of the Established Church; but I can go no farther. I cannot set up a civil inquisition, and say to one-'You shall not be a butcher, because you are not orthodox'; and prohibit another from brewing, and a third from administering the law, and a fourth from defending the country. If common justice did not prohibit me from such a conduct, common sense would."