When he came to dealing publicly with a political opponent, he seems to have thought that, the coarser were his illustrations, the more domestic and personal his allusions, the better for the cause which he served.  The Letters of Peter Plymley abound in medical and obstetrical imagery.  The effect of the Orders in Council on the health of Europe supplies endless jokes.  Peter roars with laughter at the thought of his sister-in-law, Mrs. Abraham Plymley, “led away captive by an amorous Gaul.”  Nothing can be nastier (or more apt) than his comparison between the use of humour in controversy and that of the small-tooth comb in domestic life; nothing less delicate than the imaginary “Suckling Act” in which he burlesques Lord Shaftesbury’s Ten Hours Bill.  He barbs his attacks on an oppressive Government by jokes about the ugliness of Perceval’s face and the poverty of Canning’s relations—­the pensions conferred on “Sophia” and “Caroline,” their “national veal” and “public tea”; and the “clouds of cousins arriving by the waggon.”  When a bishop has insulted him, he replies with an insinuation that the bishop obtained his preferment by fraud and misrepresentation,[153] and jeers at him for having begun life as a nobleman’s Private Tutor, called by the “endearing but unmajestic name of Dick.”  It is only fair to say that these aberrations from good taste and good feeling became less and less frequent as years went on.  That they ever were permitted to deform the splendid advocacy of great causes is due to the fact that, when Sydney Smith began to write, the influence of Smollett and his imitators was still powerful.  Burke’s obscene diatribes against the French Revolution were still quoted and admired.  Nobody had yet made any emphatic protest against the beastliness of Swift or the brutalities of Junius.[154]

When these necessary deductions have been made, we can return to the most admiring eulogy.  In 1835 Sydney wrote:—­

    “Catch me, if you can, in any one illiberal sentiment, or in any
    opinion which I have need to recant; and that, after twenty years’
    scribbling upon all subjects.”

It was no mean boast, and it was absolutely justified by the record.  From first to last he was the convinced, eager, and devoted friend of Freedom, and that without distinction of place or race or colour.  He would make no terms with a man who temporized about the Slave-Trade.—­

    “No man should ever hold parley with it, but speak of it with
    abhorrence, as the greatest of all human abominations.”

The toleration of Slavery was the one and grave exception to his unstinted admiration of the United States, which afforded, in his opinion, “the most magnificent picture of human happiness” which the world had ever seen.  And this because in America, more than in any other country, each citizen was free to live his own life, manage his own affairs, and work out his own destiny, under the protection of just and equal laws.  As regards political institutions in England, he seems to have been converted rather gradually to the belief that Reform was necessary.  In 1819 he wrote to his friend Jeffrey:—­