This was his last public act in connexion with Parliamentary Reform; but the keenness of his interest remained unabated till the day was won.  On the 12th of December 1831, the Reform Bill was brought in a third time.  It again passed the House of Commons, and was again threatened with destruction in the Lords.  Sydney Smith wrote thus to Lord Grey:—­

“I take it for granted you are prepared to make Peers, to force the measure if it fail again, and I would have this intention half-officially communicated in all the great towns before the Bill was brought in.  If this is not done—­I mean, if Peers are not made—­there will be a general convulsion, ending in a complete revolution....  If you wish to be happy three months hence, create Peers.  If you wish to avoid an old age of sorrow and reproach, create Peers.”

Acting on this counsel, Lord Grey obtained the King’s written consent to the creation of as many peers as were required to carry the Bill.  “I am for forty,” wrote Sydney, “to make things safe in Committee.”  But this extreme remedy was not required.  When it became known that the King had given his consent, the opposition collapsed, and the Bill received the Royal Assent on the 7th of June 1832.  It was, as the Duke of Wellington said, a revolution by due course of law.

Henceforward Sydney Smith appears rather as a supporter of things as they are, than as a promoter of political or ecclesiastical change.  Indeed there are signs which seem to show that his stock of reforming zeal had already run low.  “The New Beer Bill[108] has begun its operations.  Everybody is drunk.  Those who are not singing are sprawling.  The Sovereign People are in a beastly state.”  He was now past sixty, and a spirit of amiable self-indulgence was creeping over him.—­

“I love liberty, but hope it can be so managed that I shall have soft beds, good dinners, fine linen, etc., for the rest of my life.  I am too old to fight or to suffer.”  “I am tired of liberty and revolution!  Where is it to end?  Are all political agglutinations to be unglued?  Are we prepared for a second Heptarchy, and to see the King of Sussex fighting with the Emperor of Essex, or marrying the Dowager Queen of Hampshire?”

Just before the first elections under the Reform Act, he wrote to a Scotch friend:—­

    “What oceans of absurdity and nonsense will the new liberties of
    Scotland disclose!  Yet this is better than the old infamous jobbing,
    and the foolocracy under which you have so long laboured.”

Sydney Smith’s first term of official duty at St. Paul’s began on the 1st of February 1832.  On the eve of the new year he wrote to his married daughter:—­