That sign of old age, extolling the past at the expense of the present.

Sydney Smith (1771–1845), Anglican clergyman and celebrated wit, was a leading voice of the early nineteenth-century Whig intelligentsia and a co-founder of the Edinburgh Review. Much of his writing targets social pretension and political cant, often through brisk moral observation. This remark fits his recurring satirical theme: the tendency of people—especially as they age—to idealize “the good old days” while disparaging contemporary life. Smith wrote in an era of rapid change (industrialization, post-French-Revolution politics, reform agitation), when nostalgia could serve as a rhetorical refuge from unsettling modern realities.

Smith identifies a common psychological and rhetorical habit: praising the past not because it was truly better, but because it is safely fixed, selectively remembered, and flattering to one’s own earlier self. Calling it a “sign of old age” is less a biological claim than a moral diagnosis—an accusation of narrowing sympathy and curiosity. The line implies that disparaging the present can become a form of self-importance (one’s own youth becomes the standard of excellence) and a refusal to engage with current complexities. As social criticism, it warns against nostalgia as a substitute for judgment and against using memory to dismiss living experience.