“What use of wealth so luxurious and delightful as to light your house with gas?  What folly to have a diamond necklace or a Correggio, and not to light your house with gas!  The splendour and glory of Lambton Hall make all other houses mean.  How pitiful to submit to a farthing-candle existence, when science puts such intense gratification within your reach!  Dear lady, spend all your fortune in a gas-apparatus.  Better to eat dry bread by the splendour of gas, than to dine on wild beef with wax candles!”

Another friend whom the Smiths visited regularly was Mr., afterwards Sir George, Philips, an opulent cotton-spinner of Manchester.  Once, when staying with Philips, Sydney undertook to preach a Charity Sermon in Prestwich Church, and with reference to this he wrote in the previous week; “I desire to make three or four hundred weavers cry, which it is impossible to do since the late rise in cottons.”

Writing from Philips’s house in 1820 he says:—­

“Philips doubles his capital twice a week.  We talk much of cotton, more of the fine arts, as he has lately returned from Italy, and purchased some pictures which were sent out from Piccadilly on purpose to intercept him.”

His daughter tells us that, during these years of small income and large expenses, her father never bought any books.  He had brought a small but serviceable library with him from London, and his friends made additions to it from time to time.  He wrote to a friend in 1810:—­

“I have read, since I saw you, Burke’s works, some books of Homer, Suetonius, a great deal of agricultural reading, Godwin’s Enquirer, and a great deal of Adam Smith.  As I have scarcely looked at a book for five years, I am rather hungry.”

Here are some of the plans which, year by year, he laid down for the regulation of his studies:—­

“Translate every day ten lines of the De Officiis, and re-translate into Latin.  Five chapters of Greek Testament.  Theological studies.  Plato’s Apology for Socrates; Horace’s Epodes, Epistles, Satires, and Ars Poetica.”

“Write sermons and reviews, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.  Read, Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday.  Write ten lines of Latin on writing days.  Read five chapters of Greek Testament on reading days.  For morning reading, either Polybius, or Diodorus Siculus, or some tracts of Xenophon or Plato; and for Latin, Catullus, Tibullus, and Propertius.

“Monday:  write, morning; read Tasso, evening.  Tuesday:  Latin or Greek, morning; evening, theology.  Wednesday, same as Monday.  Friday, ditto.  Thursday and Saturday, same as Tuesday.  Read every day a chapter in Greek Testament, and translate ten lines of Latin.  Good books to read:—­Terrasson’s History of Roman Jurisprudence; Bishop of Chester’s Records of the Creation.”

His daughter says that he read with great rapidity.  “He galloped through the pages so rapidly that we often laughed at him when he shut up a thick quarto as his morning’s work.  ‘Cross-examine me, then,’ he said; and we generally found that he knew all that was worth knowing in it.”  Here, obviously, is the stuff out of which reviewers are made, and this was the very zenith of Sydney Smith’s power and usefulness in the Edinburgh Review.