into your heart, and I should swallow the leaf of a sermon dipped in hydro-cyanic acid."

In October, after an alarming attack of breathlessness and giddiness, he returned to London. In Green Street he was happy in the proximity and skill of his son-in-law, Dr. Holland, and "a suite of rooms perfectly fitted up for illness and death." This phrase occurs in the last of his published letters, dated the 7th of November 1844. It was now pronounced that his disease was water on the chest, caused by an unsuspected affection of the heart. He was entirely confined to his bed, perfectly aware of his condition, and keenly grateful for the kindness and sympathy of friends. His daughter writes :

"My father died at peace with himself and with all the world; anxious, to the last, to promote the comfort and happiness of others. He sent messages of kindness and forgiveness to the few he thought had injured him. Almost his last act was, bestowing a small living of £120 per annum on a poor, worthy, and friendless clergyman, who had lived a long life of struggle with poverty on £40 per annum. Full of happiness and gratitude, the clergyman entreated he might be allowed to see my father; but the latter so dreaded any agitation that he most unwillingly consented, saying, 'Then he must not thank me; I am too weak to bear it.' He entered, my father gave him a few words of advice, -the clergyman silently pressed his hand, and blessed his death-bed. Surely such blessings are not given in vain!"

Sydney Smith died on the 22nd of February 1845, and was buried by the side of his son Douglas in the Cemetery at Kensal Green.

CHAPTER VII

CHARACTERISTICS-HUMOUR-POLITICS-CULTURETHEORIES OF LIFE-RELIGION

WHAT Sydney Smith was to the outward eye we know from an admirable portrait by Eddis1 belonging to his grand-daughter, Miss Caroline Holland. He had a long and slightly aquiline nose, of the type which gives a peculiar trenchancy to the countenance; a strongly developed chin, thick white hair,2 and black eyebrows. His complexion was fresh, inclining to be florid. In figure he was, to use his own phrase, "of the family of Falstaff." Ticknor described him as "corpulent but not gross." Macaulay spoke of his "rector-like amplitude and rubicundity." He was of middle height, rather above it than below, and sturdily built. He used to quote a saying from one of his contemporaries at Oxford-"Sydney, your sense, wit, and clumsiness, always give me the idea of an Athenian carter." Except on ceremonious occasions, he was careless about his dress. His daughter says:-"His neckcloth always looked like a pudding tied round his throat, and the arrangement of his garments seemed more the result of accident than design."

1 Eden Upton Eddis (1812-1901).

2 Miss Holland writes-"His hair, when I knew him, was beautifully fine, silvery, and abundant; rather taillé en brosse, like a Frenchman's."

N

"" on

His manner in society was cordial, unrestrained, and even boisterous. "I live," he said in an admirable figure, "with open doors and windows." His poor parishioners regarded him with "a curious mixture of reverence and grin." His daughter says that, entering the pulpit, the calm dignity of his eye, mien, and voice, made one feel that he was indeed, and felt himself to be, 'the pastor standing between our God and His people,' to teach His laws, to declare His judgments, and proclaim His mercies."

It was

Enough has been quoted from his writings to give the reader a clear notion of his style. In early life it was not scrupulously correct,2 and to the end it was marked here and there by an archaism such as “I have strove," and "they are rode over." singularly uninvolved and uncomplicated, and was animated, natural, and vigorous in the highest degree. As years went on, it gained both in ease and in accuracy, but never lost either its force or its resonance. It ran up and down the whole gamut of the English tongue, from sesquipedalian classicisms (which he generally used to heighten a comic effect) to onesyllabled words of the homeliest Anglo-Saxon. His punctuation was careless, and the impression produced by his written composition is that of a man who wrote exactly as he spoke, without pause, premeditation, or amendment; who was possessed by the subject on which he was writing, and never laid down the pen till that subject lived and breathed in the written page.s

1 Lord Houghton.

2 A hostile reviewer of his Sermons quotes from them such phrases as- "Lays hid," "Has sprang,' "Has drank," "Rarely 3 See p. 90.

or ever.

Here and there, indeed, it is easy to note an unusual care and elaboration in the structure of the sentences and the cadence of the sound, and then the style rises to a very high level of rhetorical dignity.

Enough too has been quoted, both from his writings and from his conversation, to illustrate the quality and quantity of his humour. It bubbled up in him. by a spontaneous process, and flowed over into whatever he wrote or said. Macaulay described his "rapid, loud, laughing utterance," and adds "Sydney talks from the impulse of the moment, and his fun is quite inexhaustible." He was, I think, the greatest humourist whose jokes have come down to us in an authentic and unmutilated form. Almost alone among professional jokers, he made his merriment-rich, natural, fantastic, unbridled as it was-subserve the serious purposes of his life and writing. Each joke was a link in an argument; each sarcasm was a moral lesson. Peter Plymley, and the Letters to Archdeacon Singleton, the essays on America and on Persecuting Bishops, will probably be read as long as the Tale of a Tub or Macaulay's review of "Satan" Montgomery; while of detached and isolated jokes-pure freaks of fun clad in literary garb-an incredible number, current in daily converse, deduce their birth from this incomparable clergyman.1 "In ability," wrote Macaulay in 1850, "I should say that Jeffrey was higher, but Sydney rarer. I would rather have been Jeffrey; but there will be several Jeffreys before there is a Sydney."

It would of course be absurd to pretend that all

1 I have not attempted to make a catalogue of these jokes. Such catalogues will be found in the previous Memoirs of Sydney Smith, and in Sir Wemyss Reid's Life of Lord Houghton.

his jokes were of an equally high order. In his essays and public letters he is always and supremely good; in his private letters and traditional table-talk he descends to the level of his correspondent or his company. Thus, in spite of his own protests against playing on words, he found his clerk “a man of great amen-ity of disposition." He complimented his friends Mrs. Tighe and Mrs. Cuffe as "the cuff that every one would wear, the tie that no one would loose." His fondness for Lord Grey's family led him to call himself "Grey-men-ivorous." When the Hollands were staying with him, "his house was as full of hollands as a ginshop." He nicknamed Sir George Philips's home near Manchester Philippi. He ascribed his brother's ugly mansion at Cheam to "Chemosh, the abomination of Moab." In 1831 he wrote to his friend Mrs. Meynell that "the French Government was far from stable— like Meynell's1 horses at the end of a long day's chase." When a lady asked him for an epitaph on her pet dog Spot, he proposed "Out, damned Spot!" but, "strange to say, she did not think it sentimental enough." When William Cavendish, who had been Second Wrangler, married Lady Blanche Howard, Sydney wrote "Euclid leads Blanche to the altar-a strange choice for him, as she has not an angle about her." It was with reference to this kind of pleasantry that he said:

2

"A joke goes a great way in the country. I have known one last pretty well for seven years. I remember making a

1 Hugo Charles Meynell-Ingram (1784-1869), of Hoar Cross and Temple Newsam.

2 (1808-1891), became 7th Duke of Devonshire in 1858.