Sydney Smith's eldest brother Robert ("Bobus"[24]) had married Caroline Vernon, Lord Holland's aunt. Sydney's politics were the politics of Holland House. Lord Holland was always recruiting for the Liberal army, and an Edinburgh Reviewer was a recruit worth capturing. So the hospitable doors were soon thrown open to the young clergyman from Doughty Street, who suddenly found himself a member of the most brilliant circle ever gathered under an English roof. In old age he used to declare, to the amusement of his friends, that as a young man he had been shy, but had wrestled with the temptation and overcome it. As regards the master[25] of Holland House, it was not easy to be shy in the presence of "that frank politeness which at once relieved all the embarrassment of the youngest and most timid writer or artist, who found himself for the first time among Ambassadors and Earls."[26] And even the imperious mistress[27] of the house found her match in Sydney Smith, who only made fun of her foibles, and repaid her insolence with raillery. Referring to this period, when he had long outlived it, he said:--
"I well remember, when Mrs. Sydney and I were young, in London, with no other equipage than my umbrella, when we went out to dinner in a hackney coach (a vehicle, by the bye, now become almost matter of history), when the rattling step was let down, and the proud, powdered red-plushes grinned, and her gown was fringed with straw, how the iron entered into my soul."
One of the most useful friends whom the Smiths discovered in London was Mr. Thomas Bernard,[28] afterwards a baronet of good estate in Buckinghamshire, and a zealous worker in all kinds of social and educational reform. Mr. Bernard was Treasurer of the Royal Institution in Albemarle Street, which had been founded in 1799; and, with the laudable desire of putting a few pounds into a friend's pocket, he suggested that Sydney Smith should be invited to lecture before the Institution. The invitation was cordially given and gratefully accepted. The lecturer chose "Moral Philosophy" for his subject, and the Introductory Lecture, in which he defined his terms, was delivered on the 10th of November 1804. The second and third lectures dealt with the History of Moral Philosophy; the fourth, with the Powers of External Perception; the fifth, with Conception; the sixth, with Memory; the seventh, with Imagination; the eighth, with Reason and Judgment; and the ninth, with the Conduct of the Understanding.