officers therefore came to the chief priests and Pharisees." Pharisees being without the article shows that the latter involves some explanation of the former, or involves some predication concerning the chief priests. Plummer (comment on passage) says: "The omission of rouç before papioaíove shows that the chief priests and Pharisees are now regarded as one body."

At this point we may pause, the object of this paper being to set forth an exposition of the Greek Article in the New Testament, not novel, but which has not yet taken its place among the accepted theories on that subject. The recognized view is represented by Winer in his incomparable "Grammar of the Idiom of the New Testament Greek." It is also proper to add, that the majority of interpreters have not explained the force of the omission of the article, especially with vouoc, as here advocated. That so many eminent biblical scholars have employed the more literal mode of rendering it, and that our late revisers have not entirely discarded it, but have shown how often the exact translation gives clearness and force to the argument, may be employed to prove at least that the tendency of modern scholarship is in the direction here indicated. Whatever may be the conclusions reached, the careful investigation of the minutest forms of expression in the Holy Scriptures must be a matter of permanent interest to all lovers of the truth as it is in Jesus, the Saviour.

It has thus been attempted to place before the reader some observations on important passages of Scripture growing out of the laws governing the Greek article. As shown in the beginning, it is a matter which is regarded by some of the best grammarians as beyond the reach of our investigations, and that we must therefore be content with a few general principles. If we must come to that conclusion let it only be after constant application to the study of the word of God. It will be found generally that the nearer we come to literalness in our interpretations, the more we aim to be governed by what the word says, and not by what we think it ought to say, the more consistent will be our interpretations with each other, and the more surely, with the divine guidance, may we attain the "mind of the Spirit."

15-FIFTH SERIES, VOL. I.

ART. IV.-REV. SYDNEY SMITH.

EDWARD EVERETT, writing of his "delightful visit” at CombeFlorey, the rectory of Rev. Sydney Smith, said: "The first remark I made to myself after listening to Mr. Sydney Smith's conversation was, that if he had not been known as the wittiest man of his day he would have been accounted one of the wisest." This epigrammatic observation is equivalent to saying that Mr. Smith's wit was so brilliant that it eclipsed his sagacity. His wise thoughts, of which his speech was by no means barren, were like small jewels incased in settings so large and so curiously wrought as to divert the observer's attention from the gems they were meant to display. Hence it came to pass that, as one of his admirers has recently remarked, his memory is kept green, not so much by his really "great services to rational freedom" as by his humorous sayings, many of which have become current coin in the speech of the reading world.

Perhaps there is a modicum of poetic justice in this. Mr. Smith resembled Democritus, the laughing philosopher of antiquity, of whom Juvenal said, that he laughed at the world whenever he stepped across his threshold. Smith did more, for his jocund laughter at men and things constantly rang out both within and without his threshold. And this sportive laughter was every-where contagious. All men enjoyed it and joined in it. But could they, on reflection, help suspecting that the weed of contempt grew close by the sources of those streams of amusing speech which flowed so constantly from his lips? That shrewd observer, Montaigne, remarks, that "things we laugh at are by that laughter expressed to be of no moment." How natural it was, therefore, that the wisdom of our modern Democritus being so lightly expressed, so apparently lacking in earnestness not to say sincerity, should float unheeded from the memories of men, and that he should be remembered more as a "remarkable buffoon" than as a reformer of many social abuses. Mr. Stuart J. Reid's new biography,* which aims to

*"A Sketch of the Life and Times of the Rev. Sydney Smith, Rector of CombeFlorey, and Canon Residentiary of St. Paul's. Based on Family Documents and the Recollection of Personal Friends." By Stuart J. Reid. Illustrated. 8vo, pp. 20, 409. New York: Harper & Brothers. 1884.

bring the best side of Sydney Smith's character into bolder relief, may be accepted as evidence that the interest of the public in his career is still sufficiently strong to justify the publication of a fresh contribution to his memory. It may therefore be presumed that a brief outline of his history and a glance at his life-work may not be unacceptable to the readers of this Review.

The parents of Sydney Smith were neither rich nor titled. In allusion to his somewhat plebeian origin, he used to say in his jocose way "The Smiths never had any arms,' and have invariably sealed their letters with their thumbs." His father,

Mr. Robert Smith, inherited a small property which he was not sufficiently a man of affairs to increase. A vein of eccentricity ran through his character. He was odd and gloried in his oddity. He was nevertheless possessed of some rare intellectual qualities. He was fortunate in his marriage to a lady of French descent and Huguenot blood, who was endowed with both beauty of form and nobility of mind. From her Sydney Smith inherited his remarkable vivacity, geniality, and energy; and his father's oddity was reproduced, though considerably chastened, in those queerly expressed exaggerations which characterized his wit.

Sydney Smith's early life was not on the whole very enjoyable. He was born in 1771 at Woodford, Essex, the second of four brothers and one sister. In their childhood these precocious brothers preferred books and bookish discussions to the sports of the play-ground. When only six years old, Sydney was sent from home, first to a private school and then, with his younger brother Courtenay, to the Winchester Grammar School. In this latter institution he suffered extremely, as John Wesley did at the Charter-House, through lack of sufficient food and the rough semi-brutal conduct of his senior school-mates. To the day of his death the recollection of this abusive treatment roused him to sharp resentment. His progress in learning, however, was so rapid that he became captain of the school. He and his brother were so successful in winning prizes that the boys of their form wrote to the head master, saying, "We will not try for the college prizes if the Smiths are allowed to contend for them any more, because they always get them."

Sydney's scholarship was rated so high that he left Winchester captain of the school, and, as such, entitled to a scholarship and to a subsequent fellowship in New College, Oxford. Little is known of his career in that institution beyond the fact that in due time he gained his fellowship, and that, owing to his pecuniary disability to live after their expensive fashion, and to his pride of character, he associated very little with his fellow-students. Singularly enough, this young man, so uncommonly gifted with social qualities, formed no intimate college friendships. His wit, up to the time of his graduation, was an "unknown quantity," and respecting any special influences which may have contributed to the formation of his character during his college life no light is gathered.

Sydney Smith felt no call to the ministry of the Gospel. His inclination was for the bar, for which the character of his mind eminently fitted him. But his impecunious father, unable to furnish the means necessary to his study of the law, insisted that he should enter the Church, saying, with blunt sternness, "You may be a college tutor or a parson." Not choosing to be a tutor, and seeing no other opening, Sydney, after much hesitation, consented to enter the Church, was ordained, and, having no wealthy patron to present him to a desirable Church living, was forced either to half starve on the five hundred dollars per annum derived from his fellowship, or to accept the curacy of an insignificant parish at Nether Avon, a mean hamlet situated in the midst of the solitude of Salisbury Plain.

Alas, that such a man should be forced into such an uncongenial situation! A lover of natural beauty, yet placed in a spot naked of every thing that gives charm to a landscape; a tolerably ripe scholar compelled to live among peasants whose mental stolidity was only exceeded by the sterility of the surrounding plains. A man made for society immured in a "spot of dull stagnation," and shut out from association with intelligent and cultivated minds; an ambitious man driven by stress of circumstances to minister to one of the starvation parishes of a rich National Church; a man of the world, professing no conviction of ministerial duty, reluctantly undertaking the care of souls! Such was the unpromising situation of this brilliant man at his first entrance into public life. He was somewhat in the position of Swift's Gulliver among the pygmies of

Lilliput, bound with the rigid cords of circumstances, which, notwithstanding his inborn strength, he was unable to burst asunder. No wonder he wrote, after being fairly settled there, "Nothing can equal the profound, the immeasurable, the awful dullness of this place, in which I lie dead and buried, in hopes of a joyful resurrection in the year 1796."

But as every desert has its oasis, so did this dreary parish afford one alleviation to the situation of our wrongly placed curate. Mr. Hicks Beach, the squire of Nether Avon, was a gentleman and a man of culture, who enjoyed his pastor's spicy after-dinner talks in his drawing-room on Sunday afternoons. The sparks from the curate's wit soon warmed his generous heart into friendship for the poor Oxford scholar; and after enjoying his pleasant company during his occasional residence in the parish, and assisting him in his earnest endeavors to instruct the semi-barbarous rustics of the hamlet, he persuaded him to resign the curacy at the end of two years and to proceed with his eldest son, as his friend and tutor, to the University of Weimar in Saxony. Gladly bidding adieu to his unprofitable parish, the young parson prepared to start with his pupil-friend for that seat of learning; but hearing that Germany was disturbed by Napoleon's wars, he conducted the young man to Edinburgh. In that city Mr. Smith soon found congenial society, with an entrance to the path along which lay his way to literary celebrity, social distinction, and, finally, to Church preferment.

To Smith, now twenty-six years of age, this transition from the doleful dullness and rustic stupidity of Nether Avon to the literary circle composed of such brilliant talkers as Jeffrey, Horner, Brougham, Walter Scott, Archibald Murray, etc., must have been like the flight of a soul from Dante's purgatory into paradise. These men, destined soon to stand among the first of the age in their respective departments, were as yet far from being rich or arrogantly aristocratic. Hence the poverty of Smith was no bar to his acquaintance with gentlemen who were quick to take the measure of his mind and to enjoy the raciness of his witty conversation, which seems to have been developed for the first time by his contact with those great men. They received him cordially, and were soon bound to him by the tie of a friendship which proved lasting as their lives.