a

We are told, again, of an over literal gentleman whom Sydney met and mystified at dinner by declaring, that although he himself was not generally considered an illiberal man, yet he must confess he had one little weakness, one secret wish,-"he should like to roast a Quaker." "Good heavens, Mr. Smith!" interrupts his neighbour, "roast Quaker?" Yes, sir," repeats Sydney, of course with redoubled emphasis, "roast a Quaker." "But, Mr. Smith, do you consider the torture ?" "Yes, sir, I have considered everything; it may be wrong, as you say; the Quaker would undoubtedly suffer acutely, but every one has his tastes, mine would be to roast a Quaker: one would satisfy me, only one; but it is one of those peculiarities I have striven against in vain, and I hope you will pardon my weakness." The objector's "honest simplicity," it is added, could stand this no longer, and he seemed hardly able to sit at table with the monster whose monomania was to spit one of the people called Friends, and do him brown-neither the roars of the company, nor the twinkle in the monster's eye, availing aught to dispel the illusion: so that at last, in the words of Lady Holland, "my father, seeing that he was giving real pain, said, 'Come, come, Mr. since , think this so very illiberal, I must be wrong; you and will give up my roasted Quaker rather than your esteem; let us drink wine together. Peace was made, but I believe neither time nor explanation would have ever made him comprehend that it was a joke."

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We have Sydney's own word for it, that nothing amused him more than to observe the utter want of perception of a joke in some minds. "Mrs. Jackson," he says, par exemple, "called the other day, and spoke of the oppressive heat of last week. Heat, ma'am !' I said, 'it was so dreadful here, that I found there was nothing left for it but to take off my flesh and sit in my bones.' 'Take off your flesh and sit in your bones, sir! Oh! Mr. Smith! how could you do that?' she exclaimed, with the utmost gravity. Nothing more easy, ma'am; come and see next time.' But she ordered her carriage, and evidently thought it a very unorthodox

frequently confounded.) "Yes, yes," said Sir James, much amused, and making signs to the host to act a part accordingly. He, nothing loth, thereupon assumed the military character, "performed the part of the hero of Acre to perfection, fought all his battles over again, and showed how he had charged the Turks, to the infinite delight of the young Scotchman, who was quite enchanted with the kindness and condescension of the great Sir Sudney,' as he called him, and to the absolute torture of the other guests, who were bursting with suppressed laughter at the scene before them. At last, after an evening of inimitable acting," adds Lady Holland, "on the part both of my father and Sir James, nothing would serve the young Highlander but setting off, at twelve o'clock at night, to fetch the piper of his regiment to pipe to 'the great Sir Sudney,' who said he had never heard the bagpipes; upon which the whole party broke up and dispersed instantly, for Sir James said his Scotch cousin would infallibly cut his throat if he discovered his mistake. A few days afterwards, when Sir James Mackintosh and his Scotch cousin were walking in the streets, they met my father with my mother on his arm. He introduced her as his wife, upon which the Scotch cousin said in a low voice to Sir James, and looking at my mother, 'I did na ken the great Sir Sudney was married.' 'Why, no,' said Sir James, a little embarrassed, and winking at him, 'not ex-act-ly married,-only an Egyptian slave he brought over with him; Fatima-you know-you understand.' My mother was long known in the little circle as Fatima." This story of Sir James's country cousin, very far north, more than matches that of Sydney's country cousin : neither, perhaps, is too good to be true.

proceeding." Another example :-" Miss, too, the other day, walking round the grounds at Combe Florey, exclaimed, 'Oh, why do you chain up that fine Newfoundland dog, Mr. Smith?' 'Because it has a passion for breakfasting on parish boys.' Parish boys!' she exclaimed, 'does he really eat boys, Mr. Smith? Yes, he devours them, buttons and all.' Her face of horror made me die of laughing." One almost overhears a gentle reader of the Miss genus, staggered by the last

sentence, exclaiming, Did you die of it, Mr. Smith?

The Canon of St. Paul's would often allude to his vergers, and his friend, Lady B, it seems, innocently perverted the word into virgins. "She asked me the other day," he says, "Pray, Mr. Smith, is it true that you walk down St. Paul's with three virgins holding silver pokers before you u?' I shook my head, and looked very grave, and bid her come

and see."

His glory as a diner-out is, of course, recorded in these pages. Lady Holland says it signified not what the materials were. "I never remember a dull dinner in his company.* He extracted amusement from every subject, however hopeless. He led without seeking to lead; he never sought to shine the light appeared because he could not help it. Nobody felt excluded." "I talk a little sometimes," said he, "and it used to be an amusement amongst the servants at the Archbishop of York's, to snatch away my plate when I began talking; so I got a habit of holding it with one hand when so engaged, and dining at single anchor." By his own account he was always most lively and spirituel when he took no wine, a kind of abstinence which he often urges upon his friends, as he does also greater moderation in the use of solids, about which he speaks feelingly and with an emphasis that ought to tell, and to which there is hardly one of us but would do well to give heed.

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* "My poor mother," she adds, "felt the change so strongly after his death, that, on dining out for the first time alone, she said, 'Everybody seemed to her so unusually flat, that she thought they must all have suffered some severe loss.'" †"All people above the condition of labourers," he writes to Lady Holland, "are ruined by excess of stimulus and nourishment, clergy included. I never yet saw any gentleman who ate and drank as little as was reasonable.”—Letters, p. 120.

To Sir G. Philips he writes in 1836: "I have had no gout, nor any symptom of it by eating little, and drinking only water, I keep body and mind in a serene state, and spare the great toe. Looking back at my past life, I find that all my miseries of body and mind have proceeded from indigestion. Young people in early life should be thoroughly taught the moral, intellectual, and physical evils of indigestion."-Ibid. p. 396.

Writing to Murray, in 1841, about the health of Jeffrey, he observes: "Whoever, at his period of life, means to go on, and to be well, must institute the most rigid and Spartan-like discipline as to food."-Ibid. p. 455.

And again to the same, in 1843: "You are, I hear, attending more to diet than heretofore. If you wish for anything like happiness in the fifth act of life, eat and drink about one-half what you could eat and drink. Did I ever tell you my calculation about eating and drinking?" This was, that between ten and seventy years of age he had eaten and drunk forty-four horse-waggon loads more than would have kept him alive and well-a mass of nourishment which he rates at the value of 70007. sterling. "It occurred to me that I must, by my voracity, have starved to death fully 100 persons. This is a frightful calculation, but irresistibly true; and I think, dear Murray, your waggons would require an additional horse each!"-Ibid. p. 501-2.

Specimens of his table-talk are given, though not so liberally as might have been expected. With some extracts from them, and from the most characteristic passages of his correspondence, as illustrative of his "own peculiar" wit and humour, his proper individuality of thought and phrase, we must close this desultory notice.

Some one asking if the Bishop of was going to marry, "Perhaps he may," said the Canon; "yet how can a bishop marry? How can he flirt? The most he can say is, 'I will see you in the vestry after

service.'

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"It is a great proof of shyness to crumble bread at dinner,” in his opinion. Oh, I see you are afraid of me," said he to a young lady who sat by him," you crumble your bread. I do it when I sit by the Bishop of London, and with both hands when I sit by the Archbishop."

Of the Utilitarians in general, and one in particular, he says: "That man is so hard you might drive a broad-wheeled waggon over him, and it would produce no impression; if you were to bore holes in him with a gimlet, I am convinced sawdust would come out of him. That school treat mankind as if they were mere machines; the feelings or affections never enter into their calculations. If everything is to be sacrificed to utility, why do you bury your grandmother at all? why don't you cut her into small pieces at once, and make portable soup of her?"

"Dear Bobus," he writes to his brother in 1813, "pray take care of yourself. We shall both be a brown infragrant powder in thirty or forty years. Let us contrive to last out for the same, or nearly the same time."*

Writing from Yorkshire to Lady Holland, respecting a young friend of hers whose arrival he expected, he remarks: "Nothing can exceed the dulness of this place: but he has been accustomed to live alone with his grandmother, which, though a highly moral life, is not an amusing one. -There are two Scotch ladies staying here, with whom he will get acquainted, and to whom he may safely make love the ensuing winter; for love, though a very acute disorder in Andalusia, puts on a very chronic shape in these northern latitudes; for, first, the lover must prove metapheezically that he ought to succeed; and then, in the fifth or sixth year of courtship (or rather of argument), if the summer is tolerably warm, and oatmeal plenty, the fair one is won.

To the same noble lady he writes in 1810: "We liked Mrs. It was wrong, at her time of life, to be circumvented by -'s diagrams; but there is some excuse in the novelty of the attack, as I believe she is the first lady that ever fell a victim to algebra, or that was geometrically led from the paths of discretion."

To Lord Murray, in 1821: "How little you understand young Wedgewood! If he appears to love waltzing, it is only to catch fresh figures for cream-jugs. Depend upon it, he will have Jeffrey and you upon some of his vessels, and you will enjoy an argillaceous immortality."

Arrived at Dover, soon after the construction of the "shaft," he mentions it as "a staircase, by which the top of the cliff is reached with great ease—or at least what they call great ease, which means the loss of

* Robert died a fortnight only after Sydney.

about a pound of liquid flesh, and as much puffing and blowing as would grind a bushel of wheat."

"Mr. Jeffrey," he writes to the Countess Grey, "wanted to persuade me that myrtles grew out-of-doors in Scotland, as here. Upon crossexamination, it turned out they were prickly, and that many had been destroyed by the family donkey."

"Luttrell," he writes in 1829, from the Combe Florey parsonage, came over for a day, from whence I know not, but I thought not from good pastures; at least, he had not his usual soup-and-pattie look. There was a forced smile upon his countenance, which seemed to indicate plain roast and boiled; and a sort of apple-pudding depression, as if he had been staying with a clergyman."

Alluding to the tumult at Jeffrey's election, in 1830, he inquires of Murray: "Is Jeffrey much damaged? They say he fought like a lion, and would have been killed had he been more visible; but that several people struck at him who could see nothing, and so battered infinite space instead of the Advocate."

In the same letter: "I think Lord Grey will give me some preferment if he stays in long enough; but the upper parsons live vindictively, and evince their aversion to a Whig Ministry by an improved health. The 'Bishop of has the rancour to recover, after three paralytic strokes, and the Dean of to be vigorous at eighty-two. And yet these are men who are called Christians!"

To Lady Holland, during the Reform Bill excitement: "I met John Russell at Exeter. The people along the road were very much disappointed by his smallness. I told them he was much larger before the bill was thrown out, but was reduced by excessive anxiety about the people. This brought tears in their eyes !"

To the same, and from Combe Florey: "Philosopher Malthus came here last week. I got an agreeable party for him of unmarried people. There was only one lady who had had a child; but he is a good-natured man, and, if there are no appearances of approaching fertility, is civil to every lady."

To Dr. Holland, in 1835: "I am suffering from my old complaint, the hay fever (as it is called). My fear is, perishing by deliquescence; I melt away in nasal and lachrymal profluvia. My remedies are warm pediluvium, cathartics, &c., &c. The membrane is so irritable, that light, dust, contradiction, an absurd remark, the sight of a dissenter,-any

* Jeffrey's size appears to have been an inexhaustible source of amusement to the "round, fat, oily" Priest of St. Paul's. Sydney tells Francis of Brougham having just returned from Portugal, where the Inquisition, according to rumour, seized and singed him with wax-tapers, as an Edinburgh Reviewer: "They were at first about to use flambeaux, conceiving him to be you; but, upon recurring to the notes they have made of your height, an error was discovered of two feet, and the lesser fires only administered." (1806.) Again: "Magnitude to you, my dear Jeffrey, must be such an intoxicating idea, that I have no doubt you would rather be gigantic in your errors, than immense in no respect whatever," &c. (1808.) Elsewhere: "My dear Jeffrey, are we to see you?-(a difficult thing at all times tc do)," &c. (1809.) In 1829 he writes to Murray: "I cannot say the pleasure it gives me that my old and dear friend Jeffrey is in the road to preferment. I shall not be easy till he is fairly on the Bench. His robes, God knows, will cost him little: one buck rabbit will clothe him to the heels." Maximus minimus was one of the appellatives wherewith Sydney loved to magnify and minify the great little man.

thing, sets me sneezing; and if I begin sneezing at twelve, I don't leave. off till two o'clock, and am heard distinctly in Taunton when the wind sets that way,- -a distance of six miles."

"Mr." he tells Lady Davy, "is going gently down-hill, trusting that the cookery in another planet may be at least as good as in this; but not without apprehensions that for misconduct here he may be sentenced to a thousand years of tough mutton, or condemned to a little eternity of family dinners."

So much for one man's anticipations of a future state. In a letter to Lady Holland of the same year (1842), we have a glimpse of the reverend jester's own previsions: "It is a bore, I admit, to be past seventy, for you are left for execution, and are daily expecting the death warrant; but, as you say, it is not anything very capital we quit. We are, at the close of life, only hurried away from stomach-aches, pains in joints, from sleepless nights and unamusing days, from weakness, ugliness, and nervous tremors; but we shall all meet again in another planet, cured of all our defects. will be less irritable; more silent; will assent; Jeffrey will speak slower; Bobus will be just as he is; I shall be more respectful to the upper clergy," &c. Not very clerical, this; but Sydney Smith all over.

Here is yet another heaven after another man's ideal. To Sir Roderick Murchison he writes: "May there not be some one among the infinite worlds where men and women are all made of stone? Perhaps of Parian marble? How infinitely superior to flesh and blood! What a Paradise for you, to pass eternity with a greywacke woman!"

In his last illness he writes to the Countess of Carlisle: "I am in a regular train of promotion; from gruel, vermicelli, and sago, I was promoted to panada, from thence to minced meat, and (such is the effect of good conduct) I was elevated to a mutton-chop." My breathlessness and giddiness are gone-chased away by the gout. If you hear of sixteen or eighteen pounds of human flesh, they belong to me. I look as if a

curate had been taken out of me."

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Two or three

So he wrote in the last letter but one in these volumes. months, and all was over; this jocular Canon had fired his last shot; this (Oxford) Fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy, had gone to the tomb of all the-Yoricks. He died on the 22nd of February, 1845, of water on the chest, and was buried, without show of any kind, in the cemetery of Kensal Green.

Let us take leave of him in the words of his loving biographer. " And if true greatness consists, as my dear and valued old friend Mr. Rogers once quoted here from an ancient Greek writer, 'in doing what deserves to be written, and writing what deserves to be read, and in making mankind happier and better for your life,' my father was a truly great and good man." If we cannot subscribe, verbatim et literatim, to this éloge, may we not, ex animo, to its spirit and scope?

* This joke about mutton-chop promotion was evidently a favourite with the joke-maker. It occurs more than once and again in his correspondence, at intervals of long years, unwithered by age, unstaled by custom.