These various appointments, coupled with his lectures at the Royal Institution, brought him increasingly into public notice.  His preaching was admired by some important people.  His contributions to the Edinburgh, so entirely unlike anything else in periodical literature, were eagerly anticipated and keenly canvassed.  It was reported that King George III. had read them, and had said, “He is a very clever fellow, but he will never be a bishop.”  His social gifts won him friends wherever he went; and Lord and Lady Holland, though themselves not addicted to the public observances of religion, were anxious to promote his professional advancement; but this was not easy.  “From the beginning of the century,” he wrote, “to the death of Lord Liverpool, was an awful period for those who had the misfortune to entertain Liberal opinions, and were too honest to sell them for the ermine of the judge or the lawn of the prelate—­a long and hopeless career in your profession, the chuckling grin of noodles, the sarcastic leer of the genuine political rogue—­prebendaries, deans, and bishops made over your head—­reverend renegadoes advanced to the highest dignities of the Church, for helping to rivet the fetters of Catholic and Protestant dissenters, and no more chance of a Whig administration than of a thaw in Zembla.”

But this gloomy period of oppression and exclusion was broken by a transient gleam.  Pitt died on the 23rd of January 1806, and Lord Grenville[34] succeeded him, at the head of the ministry of “All the Talents.”  In this place, perhaps, may be not unsuitably inserted the epitaph which Sydney Smith suggested for Pitt’s statue in Hanover Square.

  To the Right Honourable William Pitt
  Whose errors in foreign policy
  And lavish expenditure of our Resources at home
  Have laid the foundation of National Bankruptcy
  And scattered the seeds of Revolution,
  This Monument was erected
  By many weak men, who mistook his eloquence for wisdom
  And his insolence for magnanimity,
  By many unworthy men whom he had ennobled,
  And by many base men, whom he had enriched at the Public
  Expense. 
  But for Englishmen
  This Statue raised from such motives
  Has not been erected in vain. 
  They learn from it those dreadful abuses
  Which exist under the mockery
  Of a free Representation,
  And feel the deep necessity
  Of a great and efficient Reform.

In Lord Grenville’s ministry Lord Erskine became Lord Chancellor, and Lord Holland Lord Privy Seal.  In the autumn of 1806 the living of Foston-le-Clay, eight miles from York, fell vacant.  It was in the Chancellor’s gift; the Lord Privy Seal said a word to his colleague; the Chancellor cordially accepted “the nominee of Lord and Lady Holland”; and that nominee was Sydney Smith.  Foston was worth L500 a year, and Dr. Markham, Archbishop of York, allowed the new Rector to be non-resident, accepting his duties at the Foundling Hospital as a sufficient justification for absence from his parish.  Early in 1807 he preached at the Temple Church, and published by request, a sermon on Toleration, which drew this testimony from a scandalized peer:[35]—­