Their delivery is associated with the first outbreak of a fashion ridiculed by Lord Byron in his _Beppo_ and his _Blues_. The poet's satirical touches notwithstanding, we think that those lectures at the Royal Institution were even more wanted by their fashionable auditors at the time, than the similar prelections at Mechanics' Institutes which came in vogue for less fashionable auditors some few years later. Had it only been possible to insure the services of a series of Sydney Smiths, the Institution might have gone on lecturing to the present day to the unspeakable advantage of all parties concerned. What innumerable fopperies in literature, in politics, in religion, we might thus have escaped, it is not easy to conjecture! The "Elementary Sketches" were delivered soon after the commencement of Sydney's metropolitan career, and bear strong marks of his recent residence in Edinburgh. In their general outline they closely approximate to the course delivered from the moral philosophy chairs of Scotch Universities. The division of the subject is the same; the authorities most frequently and panegyrically cited are the same; the principles and opinions set forth are in the main the same. Sydney Smith's moral philosophy belongs undeniably to the Scotch school--to the school of Reid, Stewart, and Adam Smith. But his "sketches" do not the less indicate an original thinker, a master in the science taught, and one who can suggest to the great men we have named almost as much as he receives from them. The book is an excellent illustration of what could be gained by engrafting the Edinburgh philosophy on a full-grown healthy English intellect. The habits of English society, and the classical tastes imbibed at an English University, preserved Sydney Smith from that touch of pedantry which characterized the thinkers of the Scotch universities, trained in a provincial sphere, and trammeled by the Calvinistic logic even after they had freed themselves from the Calvinistic theology. Without disparaging the Edinburgh school of literature, the fact must be admitted that its most prominent ornaments have generally had the advantage of a "foreign" education. Hume and Black studied in France; Adam Smith was the member of an English university; Jeffrey had become familiar with Oxford, though he did not stay there; Homer was caught young, and civilized at Hackney; and Mackintosh and Brougham, thoroughly Scotch-bred, expanded amazingly when transplanted to the south. It may be a national weakness, but it occurs to us that Sydney Smith, who was southern born as well as bred, is still more free from narrownesses and angularities than any of them.