Smith, SYDNEY, wit and reformer, was born at Woodford, Essex, on 3d June 1771, the second in a family of four sons and one daughter. His father, Robert Smith (1739-1827), was a clever eccentric, who 'bought, altered, spoilt, and then sold about nineteen different places in England;' from his mother, Maria Olier (died 1802), the daughter of a French Huguenot, he derived all his finest qualities. After five years at Southampton, in 1782 he was sent to Winchester, where he rose to be captain of the school, and whence, having first spent six months at Mont Villiers in Normandy, in 1789 he proceeded to New College, Oxford. He duly obtained a fellowship, but of only £100 a year, and in 1794 was ordained to the Wiltshire curacy of
Netheravon, near Amesbury. 'Mr Hicks-Beach,' he tells us, 'the squire, took a fancy to me, and requested me to go with his son to reside at Weimar; but Germany became the seat of war, and in stress of politics we put into Edinburgh, where I remained five years' (1798-1803). During this time he officiated in an Episcopal chapel there, and published Six Sermons (1800); married in 1800 a Miss Pybus of Cheam in Surrey; and in 1802, with Jeffrey, Horner, and Brougham, started the Edinburgh Review (q.v.), writing eighteen of the articles in the first four numbers. He next lived six years in London, and soon made his mark as a preacher, a lecturer at the Royal Institution on moral philosophy (1804-6), and a brilliant talker; but in 1809 'was suddenly caught up by the Archbishop of York, and transported to the living of Foston in Yorkshire, where there had not been a resident clergyman for 150 years,' but where he continued for twenty as 'village parson, village doctor, village comforter, village magistrate, and Edinburgh reviewer.' He farmed his glebe and built a parsonage, but was pinched in his means till in 1820 he came into £400 a year. In 1828 Lord Lyndhurst, the Tory chancellor, presented him to a prebend of Bristol, and next year enabled him to exchange Foston for the more desirable rectory of Combe-Florey in Somerset. In 1831 Earl Grey appointed him a canon residentiary of St Paul's, and this completed his round of ecclesiastical preferment. Visions of a mitre had sometimes crossed his waking dreams, but those dreams were never to be realised. However, he managed to 'grow old merrily' at Combe-Florey, which, in his own phrase, 'bound up well with London.' In London he died at his house, 56 Green Street, Grosvenor Square, on 22d February 1845. He is buried at Kensal Green.
Sydney Smith's writings include sixty-five articles, collected in 1839 from the Edinburgh Review, where they had appeared during 1802-27; Peter Plymley's Letters (1807-8), in favour of Catholic emancipation; Three Letters to Archdeacon Singleton on the Ecclesiastical Commission (1837-39); and other letters and pamphlets on the ballot, American repudiation, the game-laws, prison abuses, &c. They deal mainly with dead abuses and forgotten controversies, and their very success has consigned them to oblivion: who nowadays cares to study the cleverest arguments against seven years' transportation for poaching? So that their author is chiefly remembered as the creator of 'Mrs Partington,' the kindly sensible humorist who stands immeasurably above Theodore Hook, if a good way below Charles Lamb.
His Life (1855) was written by his daughter Saba (1802-66), who in 1834 married Dr (Sir) Henry Holland (q.v.); vol. ii. consists of selections from his Letters, edited by Mrs Austin. See also vol. i. of Hayward's Biographical and Critical Essays (1858), and Stuart J. Reid's Life and Times of Sydney Smith (1884; new ed. 1896).