Before the year ended, he was established in London. The remaining ten years of his life saw him, in spite of some bodily infirmities, at the summit of his social fame. An immense proportion of the anecdotes relating to his conversation belong to this period. "It was," wrote Mr. Gladstone in 1879, "in the year 1835 that I met Mr. Sydney Smith for the first time at the table of Mr. Hallam. After dinner Mr. Smith was good enough to converse with me, and he spoke, not of any general changes in the prevailing tone of doctrine, but of the improvement which had then begun to be remarkable in the conduct and character of the clergy. He went back upon what they had been, and said, in his vivid and pointed way of illustration, 'Whenever you meet a clergyman of my age, you may be quite sure he is a bad clergyman.'"[118]
In 1836 the Ecclesiastical Commission was established by Act of Parliament as a permanent institution for the management of business relating to the Church. Its constitution and recommendations were very distasteful to Sydney Smith; and, as time went on, he found it impossible to restrain himself from public criticism. At the beginning of the Session of 1837, he published his "First Letter to Archdeacon Singleton."[119] The Letter begins with an attack on the constitution of the Commission. It was stuffed with Bishops. Deans and Canons and Rectors and Vicars and Curates had no place upon it. The result was that all interests, not episcopal, had been completely overlooked, and that the reforms, though perhaps theoretically sound, were practically unworkable. Further, the reforms had been far too extensive. The plan of making a Central Fund from the proceeds of confiscated Prebends,[120] and enriching the smaller livings with it, was chimerical. The whole income of the Church, equally divided among all its clergy, would only give each man the wages of a nobleman's butler. The true method in all professions was the method of Blanks and Prizes. But for the chance of those Prizes, men of good birth and education would not "go into the Church"; and an uneducated clergy would inevitably become fanatical.--
"You will have a set of ranting, raving Pastors, who will wage-war against all the innocent pleasures of life; vie with each other in extravagance of zeal; and plague your heart out with their nonsense and absurdity. Cribbage must be played in caverns, and sixpenny whist take refuge in the howling wilderness. In this way low men, doomed to hopeless poverty and galled by contempt, will endeavour to force themselves into station and significance."