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SYDNEY SMITH.

SYDNEY SMITH, projector and first editor of the Edinburgh Review, was born in Essex, A. D. 1771, and educated for the church. Though highly successful as a preacher and public lecturer, preferment came but slowly, the liberality of his views, no less than the closeness of his reasoning and the edge of his irony, rendering his productions obnoxious to the party so long in power. On the advent of the Whigs to office he was nominated prebend of St. Paul's, London. Besides his contributions to the Edinburgh Review, he wrote several political tracts, highly effective in their day, some of which have more than an ephemeral value, as, Letters on the Subject of the Catholics, by Peter Plymley, etc.

PLEA FOR CATHOLIC EMANCIPATION.

I CONFESS it mortifies me to the quick to contrast with our matchless stupidity and inimitable folly the conduct of Bonaparte on the subject of religious persecution. At the moment when we are tearing the crucifixes from the necks of the Catholics, and washing pious mud from the foreheads of the Hindoos, this man is assembling the very Jews in Paris, and endeavouring to give them stability and importance. I shall never be reconciled to mending shoes in America; but I see it must be my lot, and I will take a dreadful revenge on Mr. Percival, if I catch him there preaching within ten miles of me!

You cannot imagine, you say, that England will ever be ruined or conquered, and for no other reason but because it seems so very odd it should be ruined and conquered. You might get together an hundred thousand men, individually brave; but without generals capable of commanding such a machine, it would be as useless as a first-rate man-of-war manned by Oxford clergymen. As for the spirit of the peasantry in making a gallant defence behind hedgerows, and through plateracks and hen-coops, highly as I think of their bravery, I do not know any nation in Europe so likely to be struck with panic as the English, and this from their total unacquaintance with the science of war. 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 sorely wounded, Mrs. Plymley in fits—all these scenes of war an Austrian or a Russian has seen three or four times over; but it is three centuries since an English pig has fallen in a fair battle upon English ground, or a farm-house been rifled.

There is a village (no matter where) in which the inhabitants, on one day in the year, sat down to a dinner prepared at the common expense. By an extraordinary piece of tyranny (Lord Hawkesbury would call it the wisdom of our ancestors) the inhabitants of three of the streets seized upon the inhabitants of the fourth street, bound them hand and foot, laid them on their backs, and compelled them to look on while they were stuffing themselves with beef and beer; and the next year the inhabitants of the persecuted street, though they contributed their equal quota of the expense, were treated precisely in the same manner.

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The tyranny grew into a custom; it was considered the most sacred of all duties to keep those poor fellows without their dinner; the village was so tenacious of the practice that nothing could induce them to give it up; every enemy of it was looked upon as a disbeliever in divine providence, and any nefarious churchwarden who wished to succeed in his election had nothing to do but to represent his opponent as an abolitionist, in order to frustrate his ambition, endanger his life, and throw the whole place into a state of frightful commotion.

By degrees, however, the obnoxious street grew to be so well-peopled, and its inhabitants so firmly united, that their oppressors were more disposed to be just. At the next dinner they were unbound; the year after they were allowed to sit upright; then they got a bit of bread and a glass of water, till at last, after a series of concessions, they were emboldened to ask in pretty plain terms that they should be allowed to sit down at the bottom of the table, and fill their bellies as well as the rest. Forthwith a general cry of shame and scandal-"Ten years ago were

ye not laid upon your backs? Don't you remember what a great thing you thought it to get a piece of bread? How thankful you were for the cheese-pairings? Have you forgotten the memorable era when the lord of the manor interfered to obtain for you a slice of the public pudding? And now, with an audacity only equalled by your ingratitude, you have the impudence to ask for knives and forks, and be indulged in beef and beer. There are not more than half a dozen dishes which we have reserved for ourselves; the rest has been thrown open to you in the utmost profusion; you have potatoes and carrots, suet dumplings, sops in the pan, and delicious toast and water; but the beef, mutton, and pork are ours; and if you were not the most restless and dissatisfied of human beings, you would never think of aspiring to enjoy them.”

Is not this the very nonsense and the very insult which is talked to and practised upon the Catholics? You are surprised that men who have tasted of partial justice should ask for perfect justice; that he who has been robbed of coat and cloak will not be contented with the restitution of one of his garments. He would be a very lazy blockhead if he were content; and I, who though an inhabitant of the village, have preserved, thank God, some sense of justice, most earnestly counsel these claimants to persevere in their just demands till they are admitted to a more complete share of the dinner for which they pay as much as others; and if they see a little attenuated lawyer squabbling at the head of their opponents, let them desire him to empty his pockets, and pull out the pieces of duck, fowl, and pudding, which he has filched from the public feast to carry home to his wife and children.

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FRANCIS JEFFREY.

FRANCIS JEFFREY, an able and acute judge in the Court of Session, Edinburgh, was for more than a quarter of a century responsible editor of the Edinburgh Review, as well as a large and almost constant contributor to its criticisms, chiefly on poetry and the belles lettres. He was born A.D. 1773, and died 1850.

JAMES WATT,

THIS name needs no commendation of ours. He that bore it survived to see it crowned with undisputed and unenvied honours, and many generations will probably pass away before it shall have gathered all its fame. Mr. Watt is called the improver of the steam engine; but in truth, as to all that is really admirable in its structure, or vast in its utility, he should rather be described as its inventor. It was by his inventions that its actions were so regulated as to make it capable of being applied to the finest and most delicate manufactures, and its power so increased as to set weight and solidity at defiance. By his admirable contrivance it has become a thing stupendous alike for its force and its flexibility, for the prodigious power which it can exert, and the ease and precision and ductility with which that power can be varied, distributed, and applied. The trunk of an elephant, that can pick up a pin or rend an oak, is as nothing to it. It can engrave a seal and crush masses of obdurate metal; draw out, without breaking, a thread as fine as gossamer, and lift a ship of war like a bubble in the air. It can embroider muslin and forge anchors; cut steel into ribbons and impel loaded vessels against the fury of wind and waves.

It would be difficult to estimate the value of the benefits which these inventions have conferred on this country. There is no branch of industry that has not been indebted to them; and in all the most material, they have not only widened most magnificently the field of its exertions, but multiplied a thousand-fold the amount of its productions. It was our improved steam engine that fought the battles of Europe, and exalted and sustained

through the tremendous contest the political greatness of our land. It is the same great power which enables us to pay the interest of our debt, and to maintain the struggle with the skill and capital of countries less oppressed with taxation. It has increased the mass of human comforts and enjoyments, and rendered cheap and accessible all over the world the materials of wealth and prosperity. It has armed the feeble hand of man with a power to which no limits can be assigned, completed the dominion of mind over the most refractory qualities of matter, and laid a sure foundation for all those future miracles of mechanical powers which are to aid and reward the labours of future generations. And it is to the genius of one man that all this is mainly owing. And certainly no man ever bestowed such a gift on his kind. The blessing is not only universal but unbounded; and the fabled inventors of the plough and the loom, who were deified by the gratitude of their rude contemporaries, conferred less important benefits on mankind than the inventor of our present steam engine.

Independently of his great attainments in mechanics, Mr. Watt was an extraordinary, in many respects a wonderful, man. Perhaps no one in his age possessed so much and so varied and exact information, had read so much, or remembered so accurately and well what he had read. He had infinite quickness of apprehension, a prodigious memory, and a certain rectifying and methodizing power which extracted something precious out of all that was presented to it. His stores of miscellaneous knowledge were immense, and yet less astonishing than the command he had at all times over them. It seemed as if every subject that was casually started in conversation with him had been that on which he had been last occupied in studying and exhausting, such was the copiousness, the precision, and the clearness of the information which he poured upon it, without effort or hesitation.

It is needless to say that, with these resources, his conversation was at all times rich and instructive in no ordinary degree; but it was, if possible, more pleasing

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