Remember me to the Norton: tell her I am glad to be sheltered from her beauty by the insensibility of age; that I shall not live to see its decay, but die with that unfaded image before my eyes; but don't make a mistake, and deliver the message to Lady Davy instead of your sister.

'I remain, dear Lady Dufferin, very sincerely yours, 'SYDNEY SMITH.'

In a letter dated Paris, June 29, 1844, to M. Eugène Robin, who had applied for some particulars of his life with a view to a biographical notice, he writes:

'I am seventy-four years of age, and being Canon of St. Paul's in London and rector of a parish in the country, my time is equally divided between town and country. I am living among the best society of the metropolis, and at ease in my circumstances: in tolerable health, a mild Whig, a tolerating Churchman, and much given to laughing, talking, and noise. I dine with the rich in London, and physic the poor in the country: passing from the sauces of Dives to the sores of Lazarus. I am upon the whole a happy man, have found the world an entertaining world, and am thankful to Providence for the part allotted to me in it.'

We had thoughts of attempting, with the aid of Thackeray's Lectures, to draw a parallel between Sydney Smith and the other leading English humourists; but comparisons are proverbially odious, and in a case like the present they would be both unjust and inconclusive. Sydney Smith stands alone: none but himself can be his parallel; and he is the first in his line, although his line may not be the first. He possessed the faculty of simplifying and popularising reason and argument in a way which must be pronounced inimitable, and during

forty years he uniformly exerted it for noble and useful ends. He weeded out a mass of noxious errors, and he placed a number of valuable truths and principles in new and striking points of view, thereby adding incalculably to their exchangeable value and beneficial influence. The good he has done in this way cannot be measured by what passes current, or is ticketed, as his; for so fertile was his mind that thoughts and images fell from him and were picked up and appropriated by others, like the carelessly set jewels which dropped from Buckingham's dress at the Court of Anne of Austria. He seldom came into society without naturally and easily taking the lead as, beyond all question, the most agreeable, sensible, and instructive guest and companion that the oldest person living could remember.

These are his titles to the celebrity which still attaches to his name, but unluckily they sound transitory, perishable, and inappreciable when contrasted with the claims of the first-class humourists to the undisturbed enjoyment of their immortality. Each of these has produced at least one standard work, which will rank as an English classic so long as the English language endures. Sydney Smith is similarly situated in this respect to what Swift would be if he had never written The Tale of a Tub'or Gulliver's Travels.' But if the Canon of St. Paul's was inferior to the Dean of St. Patrick's as a writer, he was superior as a moralist and a man. The prime of his life was not wasted in the barren and abortive struggles of faction. His temper was not soured by disappointment, nor his heart corroded by misanthropy. He was not like the

scathed elm which had begun to wither at the top. His intellect retained to the last its original brightness; and he died in the fulness of years, with glowing affections and unimpaired faculties, surrounded by all that should accompany old age.

Suffering from languor in the autumn of 1844, he said: I feel so weak both in body and mind that I verily believe, if the knife were put into my hand, I should not have strength or energy enough to slide it into a Dissenter.' Complaining of the low diet to which he was subjected, he said to General Fox: 'Ah, Charles, I wish I were allowed even the wing of a roasted butterfly.'

'And sometimes with the wisest and the best,
Till e'en the scaffold echoes with the jest-' 91

When Murchison was admitted to his bedside shortly before his death, he took off his nightcap and (in allusion to the Moses and Murchison controversy) waved it over his head, exclaiming, Murchison for ever!'

Almost the last act of his life was bestowing a small living (a piece of patronage attached to his stall) on a poor, worthy, and friendless clergyman, who entreated to be allowed to see him. 'Then he must not thank

me; I am too weak to bear it.' The clergyman entered, received a few words of advice, pressed an extended hand, and blessed the death-bed.

Sydney Smith died on the 22nd of February, 1845.

1 The Corsair; referring to Sir Thomas More's joke on his beard, and Anne Boleyn's on the slenderness of her neck.

74

SAMUEL ROGERS.

(FROM THE EDINBURGH REVIEW, JULY, 1856.)

Recollections of the Table Talk of SAMUEL ROGERS; to which is added Porsoniana. London: 1856.

For more than half a century a small house in a quiet nook of London has been the recognised abode of taste, and the envied resort of wit, beauty, learning, and genius. There, surrounded by the choicest treasures of art, and in a light reflected from Guidos and Titians, have sat and mingled in familiar converse the most eminent poets, painters, actors, artists, critics, travellers, historians, warriors, orators, and statesmen of two generations. Under that roof celebrities of all sorts, matured or budding, and however contrasted in genius or pursuit, met as on the table land where (according to D'Alembert) Archimedes and Homer may stand on a perfect footing of equality. The man of mind was introduced to the man of action, and modest merit which had yet its laurels to win, was first brought acquainted with the patron who was to push its fortunes, or with the hero whose name sounded like a trumpet tone. It was in that dining-room that Erskine told the story of his first brief, and Grattan

6

that of his last duel: that the Iron Duke' described Waterloo as a battle of giants:' that Chantrey, placing his hand on a mahogany pedestal, said, ' Mr. Rogers, do you remember a workman at five shillings a day who came in at that door to receive your orders for this work? I was that workman.' It was there, too, that Byron's intimacy with Moore commenced over the famous mess of potatoes and vinegar: that Madame de Staël, after a triumphant argument with Mackintosh, was (as recorded by Byron) well ironed' by Sheridan: that Sydney Smith, at dinner with Walter Scott, Campbell, Moore, Wordsworth, and Washington Irving, declared that he and Irving, if the only prose-writers, were not the only prosers in the company.

It was through that window, opening to the floor and leading through the garden to the Park, that the host started with Sheridan's gifted granddaughter on "The Winter's Walk' which she has so gracefully and feelingly commemorated. It was in the library above that Wordsworth, holding up the original contract for the copyright of 'Paradise Lost' (1600 copies for 5l.), proved to his own entire satisfaction that solid fame was in an inverse ratio to popularity; whilst Coleridge, with his finger upon the parchment deed by which Dryden agreed for the translation of the Æneid, expatiated on the advantages which would have accrued to literature, if glorious John' had selected the Iliad and left Virgil to Pope. Whilst these and similar scenes are passing, we can fancy the host murmuring his wellknown lines: