They lived in different spheres, corresponding to the difference in their genius. Sydney Smith had the more versatile and fruitful mind. With restless energy he supported various characters, being equally famous as a wit, Whig, Edinburgh reviewer, eloquent preacher, brilliant man of society, and canon of Saint Paul's. His biographer well describes him as a rough rider of subjects, and with surpassing good sense he overran every problem with which the public mind was occupied. He was a reformer, but it was after the English and not the French fashion. He had unbounded respect for existing human blessings, believed in things substantially as they were, and couldn't have been persuaded to try an experiment that had much of hazard in it. A Frenchman is always at home amid earthquakes and volcanoes and hurricanes, and the immediate prospect of an end to everything that is and a beginning of something the like of which never has been. The spirit of the great French Revolution was to exterminate all the results of time up to that point, and, having made a clear field, to begin over again. Hence heads went off, religion was proscribed, thrones were burned, the calendar was changed; even the heavenly bodies should no longer bear down their freight of old associations, and Orion received the name of Napoleon. Could the earth have in any way been transformed, could grass possibly have been made blue and the heavens green, or could man have been done over into any other sort of animal, there is not the slightest doubt that those Frenchmen would have undertaken it. In comparison with such men, Sydney Smith sank into insignificance as a reformer. He lived under a religion, government, and system of manners, all of which he was desirous to retain. He did not wish for his children any institutions very much more comfortable than England offered at the moment. He regarded the advantages of life with great complacency, thinking, doubtless, that men had better opportunities than they availed themselves of; and the chief intensity of his purpose was not to make better opportunities, but to improve them better. He probably did not approve of all the men and customs that he saw, was decidedly opposed both to wickedness and stupidity; but he did not propose, like a Frenchman, at the first fault, to blot out the heavens and the earth. He demonstrated in his life how genial, under existing institutions, a clergyman could be, how discreet a young enthusiast could be, how widely active a curate could be, how acceptable in society an honest man could be, how brilliant a plain Englishman could be. A great reformer he was, --but the spirit of his reform consisted chiefly, not in changing, but in making better use of the blessings which we already possess. Compared with this prevailing spirit of personal reform, the reformatory public measures which he was prominent in advocating were of slight consequence. Merry on the surface, with an iron core of stubborn