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mattered little who the other “literary characters” might have been, for Sydney’s verdict was at this time, justly, final, both in general society and among the reviewers; and it was especially fortunate for me that he had been trained in his own youth, first by Dugald Stewart, and then by the same Dr. Thomas Brown who had formed my father’s mind and directed his subsequent reading.¹ And, indeed, all the main principles of metaphysics asserted in the opening of Modern Painters had been, with conclusive decision and simplicity, laid down by Sydney himself in the lectures he gave on Moral Philosophy at the Royal Institution in the years 1804-5-6, of which he had never enough himself recognized the importance. He amplified and embodied some portions of them afterwards in the Edinburgh Review; but “considering that what remained could be of no farther use, he destroyed several, and was proceeding to destroy the whole, when, entreaty being made by friends that the portions not yet torn up might be spared, their request was granted;”* and these despised fragments, published in 1850 under the title of Elementary Sketches of Moral Philosophy, contain, in the simplest and securest terms, every final truth which any rational mortal needs to learn on that subject.

Had those lectures been printed five years sooner, and then fallen in my way, the second volume of Modern Painters would either never have been written at all, or written with thankful deference to the exulting wit and gracious eloquence with which Sydney had discerned and adorned all that I wished to establish, twenty years before.

167. To the modern student, who has heard of Sydney Smith only as a jester, I commend the two following passages,² as examples of the most wise, because most

* See note to Introduction, in the edition of 1850.

¹ [See above, i. § 144 (p. 124).]

² [The first (§ 167) is the concluding passage of Lecture ix. (“On the Conduct of the Understanding”), pp. 111-113; the second (§ 168) is the concluding passage of the book (Lecture xxvii., “On Habit”), pp. 423-424).]

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