table, prints and pictures on his walls. He was no connoisseur in the latter, and if he had been, could not have afforded the gratification of the taste, but he made poor and cheap pictures do the work of good ones by filling up the gap between with his sport and imagination.

There is a highly characteristic anecdote of the man, illustrating his habitual regard to human happiness, and his frequent solicitude for the natural welfare of children. The story is thus told by his daughter, Lady Holland: "One of his little children, then in delicate health, had for some time been in the habit of waking suddenly every evening; sobbing, anticipating the death of parents, and all the sorrows of life, almost before life had begun. He could not bear this unnatural union of childhood and sorrow, and for a long period, I have heard my mother say, each evening found him, at the waking of his child, with a toy, a picture-book, a bunch of grapes, or a joyous tale, mixed with a little strengthening advice and the tenderest caresses, till the habit was broken, and the child woke to joy and not to sorrow."

The intellectual habits of Sydney Smith were those of a quick, keen, sensitive nature, prompt to receive impressions, apt to decide upon them, cautious of its convictions, never driven at random. Impatient of restraint, ardent and vivacious, he was remarkable for his self-knowledge, and the discriminating use of his powers. He did not over-estimate them or under-estimate them; he knew precisely what he could do; the weight of the projectile, the momentum, the effect.

His habits of reading were somewhat peculiar. He read many books, and was content, on principle, to secure the best use of his faculties, to remain ignorant of many others. He was constantly looking into his stock of knowledge and strengthening his defences on the weak points. In this way he laid up a large store of practical, working information. His directness and vivacity of mind led him at once to the essential points of a subject. He plucked out the heart of a series of volumes, in a morning. The happy

result may be seen in his reviews, in the Edinburgh, of books of travels-his favourite reading.

He wrote rapidly, making few corrections, a proof of his exact discipline of mind, for his writings have that conciseness which may be supposed to have required frequent revision. His handwriting, a sign of his impatience, was villainously bad. He described it, in a letter to a gentleman who wished to borrow one of his sermons: 66 I would send it to you with pleasure, but my writing is as if a swarm of ants, escaping from an ink-bottle, had walked over a sheet of paper without wiping their legs."* It is amusing to notice his lectures to Jeffrey, on his cacography, which may be attributed to a similar restlessness of mind.

The clearness and purity of his style are noticeable. It is direct, forcible, manly English; brief without obscurity; rich without any extravagance of ornament; the unaffected language of a gentleman and a scholar. It has a constant tendency to the aphorism-the ripe fruit hanging on the tree of knowledge-noticeable in the writings of the higher order of men of genius; the great dramatists, the poets generally, Bacon, Burke, Franklin, Landor, and indeed most of the classic authors who pass current in the world in quotation. Wit, indeed, of all the faculties, is the most rapid and powerful condenser; it puts volumes into apophthegms; has a patent for proverbs; contracts an essay to an aphorism; bottles an argument in a jest.

Unless where peculiar Latinized expressions or technical terms are intentionally introduced for their witty effect, Smith's language is of the purest Saxon. His method is very direct. His meaning reaches us pure of all superfluities and pruned of all tediousness. It is a style, too, which is essentially his own, a reflex of his keen, impulsive, straight-forward character. In his first published sermons he has been charged with imitating the efforts of Jeremy Taylor and others of the old divines; but this transfusion, which pears very slightly, is rather a beauty. When he advanced into

*Memoirs, i. 174.

the conflict of life he borrowed no weapons from others, but relied on his own manly vigour. His style, consequently, is inimitable. It is capable of no transpositions or changes. The same meaning can be conveyed only in the same words. They are those picturesque, truthful words; ready, inevitable to a man of genius; coy of their presence to the dullard.

The most pervading characteristic of Sydney Smith's writings is his wit; wit blended with the genial humour of the man. It breathes from him as the very atmosphere of his nature.

Lord John Russell, in the preface to one of the volumes of his Memoirs of the poet Moore, has happily discriminated the peculiarities of this omnipresent faculty, as it was developed in society. "There are," he says, "two kinds of colloquial wit, which equally contribute to fame, though not equally to agreeable conversation. The one is like a rocket in a dark air, which shoots at once into the sky, and is the more surprising from the previous silence and gloom; the other is like that kind of firework which blazes and bursts out in every direction, exploding at one moment, and shining brilliantly at another, eccentric in its course, and changing its shape and colour to many forms and many hues. Or, as a dinner is set out with two kinds of champagne, so these two kinds of wit, the still and the sparkling, are to be found in good company. Sheridan and Talleyrand were among the best examples of the first. Hare* (as I have heard) and Sydney Smith were brilliant instances of the second. Hare I knew only by tradition, but with Sydney Smith I long lived intimately. His great delight was to produce a succession of ludicrous images: these followed each other with a rapidity that scarcely left time to laugh; he himself

*James Hare, the intimate of Charles James Fox and his circle, the friend and correspondent of Selwyn. Few passages of his wit survive his personal memory. Jesse (Selwyn and his contemporaries, iii. 285) gives the following neat specimen: "He was one day conversing with General Fitzpatrick, when the latter affected to discredit the report of General Burgoyne having been defeated at Saratoga. "Perhaps you may be right in your opinion," said Hare, "but take it from me as a flying rumour."

laughing loudest and with more enjoyment than any one. This electric contact of mirth came and went with the occasion; it cannot be repeated or reproduced. Anything would give occasion to it. For instance, having seen in the newspapers that Sir Æneas Mackintosh was come to town, he drew such a ludicrous caricature of Sir Æneas and Lady Dido, for the amusement of their namesake, that Sir James Mackintosh rolled on the floor in fits of laughter, and Sydney Smith, striding across him, exclaimed, 'Ruat Justitia!' His powers of fun were at the same time united with the strongest and most practical common sense. So that while he laughed away seriousness at one minute, he destroyed in the next some rooted prejudice which had braved for a thousand years the battle of reason and the breeze of ridicule. The letters of Peter Plymley bear the greatest likeness to his conversation; the description of Mr. Isaac Hawkins Brown dining at the Court of Naples in a volcano coat with lava buttons, and the comparison of Mr. Canning to a large blue-bottle fly with its parasites, most resemble the pictures he raised up in social conversation. It may be averred for certain that in this style he has never been equalled, and I do not suppose he will ever be surpassed."†

In the occasional passages of Moore's Diary in which Sydney Smith is mentioned, always under agreeable circumstances, there are numerous instances of this peculiar vein of humour, "huddling jest upon jest with impossible conveyance," the sagacity apparently not inspiring the wit, but the extravagance giving birth to the wisdom. At a breakfast at Rogers's, "Smith, full of comicality and fancy, kept us all in roars of laughter. In talking of the stories about dram-drinkers catching fire, pursued the idea in every possible shape. The inconvenience of a man coming too near the candle when he was speaking, 'Sir, your observation has caught

*Twenty-third laird of the Mackintoshes of that ilk, was created a Baronet in 1812. He died in the sixty-ninth year of his age, in 1820, when the Baronetcy became extinct. "He was a gentleman of the greatest worth," says his obituary in the Gentleman's Magazine.

↑ Preface to the Sixth Volume of Memoirs of Thomas Moore, pp. xii-xiv.

WITTY EXTRAVAGANCE.

83

fire.' Then imagined a person breaking into a blaze in the pulpit; the engines called to put him out; no water to be had, the man at the waterworks being a Unitarian or an Atheist." This was mostly pure fun. On the same occasion, one of his apparently ludicrous sayings displayed a keen wit, with matter for profound thought, when he said of some one-"He has no command over his understanding; it is always getting between his legs and tripping him up."* Another instance of this humourous amplification in his table talk, which is happily related in Lady Holland's Memoir, brings the very man before us, "in his habit as he lived :”— "Some one mentioned that a young Scotchman, who had been lately in the neighbourhood, was about to marry an Irish widow, double his age and of considerable dimensions. "Going to marry her!' he exclaimed, bursting out laughing; 'going to marry her! impossible! you mean a part of her; he could not marry her all himself. It would be a case, not of bigamy, but trigamy; the neighbourhood or the magistrates should interfere. There is enough of her to furnish wives for a whole parish. One man marry her! it is monstrous. You might people a colony with her; or give an assembly with her; or perhaps take your morning's walk round her, always provided there were frequent resting-places, and you were in rude health. I once was rash enough to try walking round her before breakfast, but only got half-way and gave it up exhausted. Or you might read the Riot Act and disperse her; in short, you might do anything with her but marry her.' 'Oh, Mr. Sydney!' said a young lady, recovering from the general laugh, 'did you make all that yourself? Yes, Lucy,' throwing himself back in his chair and shaking with laughter, 'all myself, child; all my own thunder. Do you think, when I am about to make a joke, I send for my neighbours C. and G., or consult the clerk and church-wardens upon it? But let us go into the garden;' and, all laughing till we cried, without hats or bonnets, we sallied forth out of his glorified window into the garden."†

* Moore's Diary, May 27, 1826.

† Memoir, i. 304-5.