Sydney Smith
historical figure · 1 work · 7 mentions · 15 anchored passages
in the texts
Lectures on the Relation between Law and Public Opinion in England
Sydney Smith, wit credited with exposing the cruelty of denying counsel to prisoners on trial for felony.
The wit of Sydney Smith, one would have fancied, was hardly needed, though it was freely used, to expose the cruelty of depriving a prisoner, whose life may be at stake, of help just at the moment when he most needed it.
“All gradation and caution,” murmured Sydney Smith, “have been banished since the Reform Bill—rapid high-pressure wisdom is the only agent in public affairs.
This was in literature the age of Coleridge (1772-1834), of Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832), of Wordsworth (1770-1850), of Charles Lamb (1775-1834), of Hazlitt (1778-1830), of Miss Austen (1775-1817), of Miss Edgeworth (1767-1849), of Byron (1788-1824), of Shelley (1792-1822), of Sydney Smith (1771-1845), of Jeffrey (1773-1850), and of the whole body of Edinburgh Reviewers.