#revd sydney smith

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A dreadful controversy has broken out in Bath, whether tea is most effectually sweetened by lump or pounded sugar; and the worst passions of the human mind are called into action by the pulverists and the lumpists.

- Revd Sydney Smith, 1807

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Two quotations on square pegs in round holes

The Reverend Sydney Smith is usually said to have originated this metaphor, in a lecture delivered at the Royal Institution in 1804-6: 

We shall generally find that the triangular persons has got into the square hole, the oblong into the triangular, and a square person has squeezed himself into the round hole. The officer and the office, the doer and the thing done, seldom fit so exactly that we can say they were almost made for each other.

The Revd Sydney Smith, Elementary Sketches of Moral Philosophy (1849),  Lecture ix, p. 128

I found the following in my mum’s commonplace book when she died:  

She went out from school with the uncomfortable sense of being a square peg, which fitted into none of the round holes of her world; the wisdom she had got, the experience she was richer by, had, in the process of equipping her for life, merely seemed to disclose her unfitness. She could not then know that, even for the squarest peg, the right hole may ultimately be found; seeming unfitness prove to be only another aspect of a peculiar and special fitness ... many a day came and went before she grasped that, oftentimes, just those mortals who feel cramped and unsure in the conduct of everyday life, will find themselves to rights, with astounding ease, in that freer, more spacious world where no practical considerations hamper, and where the creatures that inhabit dance to their tune: the world where are stored up men’s best thoughts, the hopes, and fancies; where the shadow is the substance and the multitude of business pales before the dream.

Henry Handel Richardson, from The Getting of Wisdom (1910)

Mum was always a dreamer: I like to picture her sitting in a class and looking out the window. But she said the same of me, once labelling a photograph of me with the caption ‘in Lyonesse’ (the vanished kingdom between the Scilly Islands and Cornwall), i.e. far away.

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I always fear that creation will expire before tea-time

Revd Sydney Smith