Sydney Smith was one of the most droll of English clergymen. As a founder of the Edinburgh Review he became well known as a prominent campaigning Whig journalist in the early years of the nineteenth century. In early Victorian London he was famed as a fashionable diner-out, invited to grand tables for his conversational wit. But for much of his life he was a country rector in a distant Yorkshire parish. This collection draws on his lectures and essays, his sparkling letters and his well-attested conversation, to show the wisdom as well as the wit of the parson Macaulay called 'The Smith of Smiths'.
