Recently I’ve spent a lot of time digging through back issues of FT and have been rewarded with gem after gem. Here, for instance, is an excerpt from the May 2001 Public Square :
Sydney Smith, who died in 1845, deserves to be better remembered than he is. Not that it would do him any particular good, but it might lighten the weight of our burdened times. A worldly clergyman, staunch Whig, and canon of St. Paul’s who favored a Church of England on friendly terms with the world as it ridiculously was, Smith was a man of singular wit and good humor. He was also the founding spirit of the Edinburgh Review , a journal of erudition, vivid writing, and striking intelligence launched in March 1802 and unmatched in the history of publishing until, some say, March of 1990.
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