“The worst political news is that Canning is not well, and that the Duke of Wellington has dined with the King.  Canning dead, Peel is the only man remaining alive in the House of Commons, I mean, the only man in his senses.”

On the 8th of August Canning died, and was succeeded by Lord Goderich, who in turn made way for the Duke of Wellington in January 1828, Lord Lyndhurst again becoming Chancellor.

On the 1st of January 1828, Sydney Smith’s Second daughter, Emily, was married to Nathaniel Hibbert, afterwards of Munden House, near Watford, Her father wrote:—­

    “We were married on New Year’s Day, and are gone!  I feel as if I had
    lost a limb, and were walking about with one leg—­and nobody pities
    this description of invalids.”

Three weeks later, Lord Chancellor Lyndhurst, yielding to private friendship what the Whigs had refused to political loyalty, appointed the Rector of Foston to a Prebendal Stall in Bristol Cathedral.  This brought him at length official station in the Church, and a permanent instead of a terminable income.  He wrote from Bristol on the 17th of February:—­

“An extremely comfortable Prebendal house; seven-stall stables and room for four carriages, so that I can hold all your cortege when you come; looks to the south, and is perfectly snug and parsonic; masts of West-Indiamen seen from the windows...  I have lived in perfect solitude ever since I have been here, but am perfectly happy.  The novelty of this place amuses me.”

From the time of his appointment to Bristol, Sydney Smith severed his connexion with the Edinburgh Review, holding that anonymous journalism was inconsistent with the position of an ecclesiastical dignitary.  He had contributed to the Review for a quarter of a century; and, by a happy accident, his last utterance, in the organ through which he had so long and so strenuously fought for freedom, was yet one more plea for Roman Catholic emancipation.  Yet once again he urged, with all his force, the baseness of deserting the good cause, and the danger and cruelty of delaying justice.—­

“There is little new to be said; but we must not be silent, or, in these days of baseness and tergiversation, we shall be supposed to have deserted our friend the Pope, and they will say of us, Prostant venales apud Lambeth et Whitehall.  God forbid it should ever be said of us with justice.  It is pleasant to loll and roll and to accumulate—­to be a purple-and-fine-linen man, and to be called by some of those nicknames which frail and ephemeral beings are so fond of accumulating upon each other;—–­but the best thing of all is to live like honest men, and to add something to the cause of liberality, justice, and truth.

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