The best proof of the kindliness of Sydney Smith's wit is, that it did not offend the friends upon whom it was played off. It was truthful without bitterness: its playful brightness cleared the atmosphere, but the bolt never scathed. His jests upon Jeffrey, the "maximus minimus," were incessant, but they did not interrupt mutual friendship and esteem. The strongest recognition of the kindliness which underlay the mirth, is in a compliment paid by the Earl of Dudley, whose eccentricities, based on physical infirmity, might have excused sensitiveness. When Smith took leave of him, on going from London to Yorkshire, Dudley said, "You have been laughing at me constantly, Sydney, for the last seven years, and yet, in all that time, you never said a single thing to me that I wished unsaid." The fact is, that the humour of Sydney Smith was a relief from the usual social impertinences, the chief ingredient of which is malevolence, which pass, in society, under the name of wit. Take away the malignity, the spite, the perversions, the irreligion, the indecorum of most witty sayings, and how small a residuum is left. There was nothing of the slow, stealthy approach of the sarcastic, biting sayer of "good things" in Sydney Smith. His jests were in a rollicking vein of extravaganza. The tendency of this humour is to license, but Smith's conversation was innocent. Moore, who had the best opportunity of knowing the range of Smith's social moods, says, “in his gayest flights, though boisterous, he is never vulgar."* Rogers described his style to the life: "Whenever the conversation is getting dull, he throws in some touch which makes it rebound and rise again as light as ever. There is this difference between Luttrell and Smith: after Luttrell, you remember what good things he saidafter Smith, you remember how much you laughed."+ *Diary, March 13, 1833. † Moore's Diary, April 10, 1823. On the same occasion Moore writes: "Smith particularly amusing. Have rather held out against him hitherto; but this day he conquered me; and I am now his victim, in the laughing way, for life. His imagination of a duel between two doctors, with oil of Croton on the tips of their fingers, trying to touch each other's lips, highly ludicrous." WISDOM OF THE WIT. 85 In his own Essay on Wit, Smith fearlessly quoted the multifarious and exhaustive definition of Barrow. He may be tried on each of its counts, and be found honourably guilty of perpetrating every jest enumerated in the indictment. The "pat allusion to a known story," is exemplified in the case of memorable Mrs. Partington; the "forging an apposite tale," in the passage from the Synod of Dort and the story of "the Village ;" while the "dress of humourous expression," the "odd similitude,” the "bold scheme of speech," the "tart irony," the "lusty hyperbole," the acute nonsense," were peculiarly Sydney Smith's own. The reductio ad absurdum was his favourite method. He gave his fish line, and swam it to death. He well knew how "affinity of sound and words and phrases" enriched expression, and practised the art in his style, but the perversion of these things in puns he despised. We have noticed only two instances in all his writings.* If the form of his wit indicated something of levity, its spirit was sound and earnest. There was a grave thought always at the bottom. This has given his writings a permanent value, while brilliant contemporary reputations have fluttered and died. On this point an acute critic, Mrs. Jameson, remarks—and her testimony may be taken for the greater value, since she complains, that "her nature feels the want of the artistic and imaginative in his nature”—that "the wit of Sydney Smith almost always involved a thought worth remembering for its own sake, as well as worth remembering for its brilliant vehicle: the value of ten thousand pounds sterling of sense concentrated into a cut and polished diamond. It is not true, as I have heard it said," she continues, "that after leaving the society of Sydney Smith, you only remembered how much you had laughed, not the good things at which * One of Napoleon, in 1798, "Ireland safe; and Buonaparte embayed in Egypt; that is, surrounded by Beys!" The other, in a note to the Countess Grey: "If any one bearing the name of Grey comes this way (to Combe Florey), send him to us: I am Grey-men-iverous !" you had laughed. Few men-wits by profession-ever said so many memorable things as those recorded of Sydney Smith."* The Letters of Sydney Smith have little pretension in their form as epistolary compositions; but they are rare specimens of a rare class; ranking, for their terseness and witty flavour, with the notes and "notelets" of Charles Lamb. They are generally brief, never attempt any regular or didactic exposition of a subject, but contain, in virtue of their epigrammatic truthfulness-to say nothing of the constant entertainment—profitable matter of general wisdom and information of the men and affairs of his day, to take their place with the published correspondence of the greatest of his contemporaries. In a few lines he settles a moral question, draws the portrait of a public man, pleasantly corrects a defect, or rallies the spirits of a friend. He wrote often to Jeffrey, and to John Murray; less frequently to Allen, Lord Holland, Earl Grey, and in the latter part of his life exchanged a gouty correspondence with Sir George Philips, and wrote warm complimentary notes to Dickens. But most of his letters are addressed to ladies; to Lady Holland, to Mrs, Meynell, to Miss Georgiana Harcourt, daughter of the Archbishop of York, the Countess Grey, Lady Mary Bennett, and others. Playful and sincerely affectionate, they are the perfection of ingenious flattery, the sweetness of the adulation being taken off by the humourous extravagance. A paragraph is due to Holland House, a seat sacred in the history of Letters, the centre of the important social, literary, and political circle with which Sydney Smith revolved during the greater part of his life. Its traditions go back to the early years of the seventeenth century, when it was built by Sir Walter Cope. The grounds had belonged to the noble family of the De *Common-Place Book of Thoughts, Memories and Fancies, p. 49. There is a pleasant account of the historical incidents connected with Holland House, in two papers by Leigh Hunt, in Nos. 204 and 205 of Household Words. Vere's since the Conquest. The house was bequeathed by Cope to his son-in-law, Henry Rich, first Earl of Holland, a son of the first Earl of Warwick. Rich was a gallant man, a favourite at the court of Charles I. In the beginning of the civil war he sided with the Parliament, then took up arms for the King-was taken prisoner and executed in 1648. Fairfax, the Parliamentary general, next occupied the mansion; when, as tradition goes, it was privy to the deliberations of Cromwell. After the Restoration it had various occupants, Pope's "downright Shippen" among them. Before establishing himself at Kensington, King William, as we learn, from Macaulay's History, thought of the House as a residence, and occupied it a few weeks.* The second Earl of Holland, the elder branch of his family failing, united the titles of Warwick and Holland. Marriage with the widow of his son, the Countess of Warwick, in 1716, made Addison an inmate of Holland House. The poet passed there the last three years of his life, not very happily, as Johnson would have us infer, who represents him as a slave to the rank of the Countess. He gained new titles of his own to honour, however, at the time, for it was in the second year of his marriage that he was made Secretary of State. There is a doubtful story of his meditating Spectators in the library, refreshed by a bottle of wine at either end of the room. This, if it occurred at all, must have been before his marriage, since the Spectator closed with the year 1714. It was in a chamber of Holland House that the death scene occurred, when Addison called to him his step-son, the young Earl of Warwick, to "see how a Christian can die." The family of the Earls of Holland becoming extinct, in 1759, the house became, soon after, by purchase, the property of Henry Fox, the crafty politician of the Walpole era, who was created Lord Holland, the first of the present line. His father was Sir Stephen Fox, who, from being a chorister boy at Salisbury Cathedral, was called to an inferior situation at court, attended Charles II. in exile, and on his return * Chapter xi., vol. iii. secured an honourable fortune by his financial skill and integrity. "In a word," says Evelyn, in his Diary, "never was man more fortunate than Sir Stephen; he is a handsome person, virtuous, and very religious."* He was seventy-six years old when he married a second time, and became the father of Henry Fox. A son of the latter, Stephen Fox, was the second Lord Holland, elder brother of Charles James Fox. Stephen Fox died young, and left the title to the late Lord Holland, who restored the literary prestige of the house, not only by his own writings, but by his patronage of merit. His liberal parliamentary career is matter of recent history. His chief writings are, Lives of Lope de Vega and Guillem de Castro, a translation of three Spanish comedies, and of a Canto of the Orlando Furioso, the Preface to Fox's History of James II., for the copyright of which Murray paid the magnificent sum of four thousand pounds, the Prefaces to his editions, from the original MSS., of Earl Waldegrave's Memoirs, and Horace Walpole's Last Ten Years of the Reign of George II., and posthumous Recollections of Foreign Courts, and Memoirs of the Whig party. He was a clever writer of occasional verses. His couplet to the poet Rogers, affixed to a garden-seat in the grounds of Holland House, is very neat: "Here Rogers sat; and here for ever dwell To me, those Pleasures that he sang so well." The lines which were found on his dressing-table at his death, are as finely conceived: "Nephew of Fox and friend of Grey — Enough my meed of fame, If those who deigned to observe me say The amiable character of Lord Holland, no less than his intellectual characteristics, endeared him to Sydney Smith. Lady Holland celebrates their conversation:-"short, varied, interspersed with wit, illustration and anecdote on both sides; the perfection of so* Diary, September, 6, 1680. |