"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_. He wrote as quickly as he read. When once he had amassed the necessary facts, he sate down amid all the distracting sights and sounds of a drawing-room crowded with femininity, and wrote at full speed, without deliberations, embellishments, or erasures; only betraying by the movements of his expressive face his amusement and interest "as fresh images came clustering round his pen." As soon as the essay was finished, he would throw it on the table, saying to his wife, "There, Kate, just look it over--dot the _i_'s and cross the _t_'s;" and went out for his walk. It should be added that his writing was singularly difficult to read, that he was very infirm about spelling proper names, and that he was exceptionally careless in correcting his proofs.