Incidentally we find him praising Lister's _Granby_, and Hope's _Anastasius_. He early discovered and consistently admired Macaulay, though he drew the line at the _Lays of Ancient Rome_, on the ground that he "abhorred all Grecian and Roman subjects." It is curious to note the number and variety of new books which he more or less commends, and which are now equally and completely forgotten. As we come nearer our own times, however, we find an important conversion. In 1838 he writes:-- "_Nickleby_ is very good. I stood out against Mr. Dickens as long as I could, but he has conquered me." In 1843 he writes to Dickens:-- "Pecksniff and his daughters, and Pinch, are admirable--quite first-rate painting, such as no one but yourself can execute. Chuffey is admirable. I never read a finer piece of writing." And, when Dickens asks him to dinner, he replies:-- "I accept your obliging invitation conditionally. If I am invited by any man of greater genius than yourself, or one by whose works I have been more completely interested, I will repudiate you, and dine with the more splendid phenomenon of the two." His crowning glory in the matter of literary criticism is that, as Ruskin told us, he was the first man in the literary circles of London to assert the value of _Modern Painters_. "He said it was a work of transcendent talent, presented the most original views in the most elegant and powerful language, and would work a complete revolution in the world of taste."[169] With the physical sciences Sydney Smith seems to have had no real acquaintance, unless we include among them the art of the apothecary, which all through life he studied diligently and practised courageously. But he recommended Botany, with some confidence, as "certain to delight little girls"; and his friendship with the amiable and instructive Mrs. Marcet[170] gave him a smattering of scientific terms. In a discussion on the _Inferno_ he invented a new torment especially for that excellent lady's benefit.-- "You should be doomed to listen, for a thousand years, to conversations between Caroline and Emily, where Caroline should always give wrong explanations in chemistry, and Emily in the end be unable to distinguish an acid from an alkali." When we turn, from these smaller matters of taste and accomplishment, to the general view of life, Sydney Smith would seem, at first sight, to have been a Utilitarian: and yet he declared himself in vigorous terms an opponent of the Utilitarian School.-- "That school treat mankind as if they were mere machines; the feelings or affections never enter into their calculations. If everything is to be sacrificed to utility, why do you bury your grandmother? why don't you cut her into small pieces at once, and make portable soup of her?"