Sydney Smith’s love for life lives on

Why should anyone care about Sydney Smith, who died on this day in 1845? 180 years have diminished the stature of his worldly achievements. He was an Anglican cleric who campaigned for an end to slavery, against the oppression of Catholics, for moral reform in the church and democratic reform in parliament. His political arguments have lost most of their interest in a world where those questions feel settled. 

Smith helped found the Edinburgh Review. He suggested the motto ‘tenui musam meditamur avena’ – ‘we cultivate literature on a little oatmeal’ – but this was ‘too near the truth to be admitted, and so we took our present grave motto from Publius Syrus, of whom none of us had, I am sure, ever read a single line’, he said.

People who knew Smith loved him, and many more have done so by reputation. Smith was another Dr.