apprehend--prejudice. The Squire of Heslington--'the last of the
Squires'--regarded Mr. Smith as a Jacobin; and his lady, 'who looked as
if she had walked straight out of the Ark, or had been the wife of
Enoch,' used to turn aside as he passed. When, however, the squire found
'the peace of the village undisturbed, harvests as usual, his dogs
uninjured, he first bowed, then called, and ended by a pitch of
confidence;' actually discovered that Sydney Smith had made a joke;
nearly went into convulsions of laughter, and finished by inviting the
'dangerous fellow,' as he had once thought him, to see his dogs.
In 1813 Sydney Smith removed, as he thought it his duty to do, to
Foston-le-Clay, and, 'not knowing a turnip from a carrot,' began to farm
three hundred acres, and not having any money, to build a
parsonage-house.
It was a model parsonage, he thought, the plan being formed by himself
and 'Kate.' Being advised by his neighbours to purchase oxen, he bought
(and christened) four oxen, 'Tug and Lug,' 'Crawl and Haul.' But Tug and
Lug took to fainting, Haul and Crawl to lie down in the mud, so he was
compelled to sell them, and to purchase a team of horses.
The house plunged him into debt for twenty years; and a man-servant
being too expensive, the 'wise Wit' caught up a country girl, made like
a mile-stone, and christened her 'Bunch,' and Bunch became the best
butler in the county.
He next set up a carriage, which he christened the 'Immortal,' for it
grew, from being only an ancient green chariot, supposed to have been
the earliest invention of the kind, to be known by all the neighbours;
the village dogs barked at it, the village boys cheered it, and 'we had
no false shame.'
One could linger over the annals of Sydney Smith's useful, happy life at
Foston-le-Clay, visited there indeed by Mackintosh, and each day
achieving a higher and higher reputation in literature. We see him as a
magistrate, 'no friend to game,' as a country squire in Suffolk solemnly
said of a neighbour, but a friend to man; with a pitying heart, that
forbade him to commit young delinquents to gaol, though he would lecture
them severely, and call out, in bad cases, 'John, bring me out my
_private gallows_,' which brought the poor boys on their knees. We
behold him making visits, and even tours, in the 'Immortal,' and
receiving Lord and Lady Carlisle in their coach and four, which had
stuck in the middle of a ploughed field, there being scarcely any road,
only a lane up to the house. Behold him receiving his poor friend,
Francis Homer, who came to take his last leave of him, and died at Pisa,
in 1817, after earning honours, paid, as Sir James Mackintosh remarked,
to intrinsic claims alone--'a man of obscure birth, who never filled an
office.' See Sydney Smith, in 1816, from the failure of the harvest (he
who was in London 'a walking patty'), sitting down with his family to
repast without bread, thin, unleavened cakes being the substitute. See
his cheerfulness, his submission to many privations: picture him to
ourselves trying to ride, but falling off incessantly; but obliged to
leave off riding 'for the good of his family, and the peace of his
parish' (he had christened his horse, 'Calamity'). See him suddenly
prostrate from that steed in the midst of the streets of York, 'to the
great joy of Dissenters,' he declares: another time flung as if he had
been a shuttlecock, into a neighbouring parish, very glad that it was
not a neighbouring planet, for somehow or other his horse and he had a
'trick of parting company.' 'I used,' he wrote, 'to think a fall from a
horse dangerous, but much experience has convinced me to the contrary. I
have had six falls in two years, and just behaved like the Three per
Cents., when they fell--I got up again, and am not a bit the worse for
it, any more than the stock in question.'
This country life was varied by many visits. In 1820 he went to visit
Lord Grey, then to Edinburgh, to Jeffrey travelling by the coach, a
gentleman, with whom he had been talking, said, 'There is a very clever
fellow lives near here, Sydney Smith, I believe; a devilish odd
fellow.'--'He may be an odd fellow,' cried Sydney, taking off his hat,
'but here he is, odd as he is, at your service.'
Sydney Smith found great changes in Edinburgh--changes, however, in many
respects for the better. The society of Edinburgh was then in its
greatest perfection. 'Its brilliancy, Lord Cockburn remarks, 'was owing
to a variety of peculiar circumstances, which only operated during this
period. The principal of these were the survivance of several of the
eminent men of the preceding age, and of curious old habits, which the
modern flood had not yet obliterated; the rise of a powerful community
of young men of ability; the exclusion of the British from the
Continent, which made this place, both for education and for residence,
a favourite resort of strangers; the war, which maintained a constant
excitement of military preparation and of military idleness: the blaze
of that popular literature which made this the second city in the empire
for learning and science; and the extent and the ease with which
literature and society embellished each other, without rivalry, and
without pedantry.
Among the 'best young' as his lordship styles them, were Lord Webb
Seymour and Francis Horner; whilst those of the 'interesting old' most
noted were Elizabeth Hamilton and Mrs. Grant of Laggan, who had
'unfolded herself,' to borrow Lord Cockburn's words, in the 'Letters
from the Mountains,' 'an interesting treasury of good solitary
thoughts.' Of these two ladies, Lord Cockburn says, 'They were excellent
women, and not _too_ blue. Their sense covered the colour.' It was to
Mrs. Hamilton that Jeffrey said, 'That there was no objection to the
blue stocking, provided the petticoat came low enough to cover it.'
Neither of these ladies possessed personal attractions. Mrs. Hamilton
had the plain face proper to literary women; Mrs. Grant was a tall dark
woman, with much dignity of manner: in spite of her life of misfortune,
she had a great flow of spirits. Beautifully, indeed, does Lord Cockburn
render justice to her character: 'She was always under the influence of
an affectionate and delightful enthusiasm, which, unquenched by time and
sorrow, survived the wreck of many domestic attachments, and shed a glow
over the close of a very protracted life.'
Both she and Mrs. Hamilton succeeded in drawing to their
_conversazioni_, in small rooms of unpretending style, men of the
highest order, as well as attractive women of intelligence. Society in
Edinburgh took the form of Parisian _soirées_, and although much divided
into parties, was sufficiently general to be varied. It is amusing to
find that Mrs. Grant was at one time one of the supposed 'Authors of
"Waverley,"' until the disclosure of the mystery silenced reports. It
was the popularity of 'Marmion,' that made Scott, as he himself
confesses, nearly lose his footing. Mrs. Grant's observation on him,
after meeting the Great Unknown at some brilliant party, has been
allowed, even by the sarcastic Lockhart, to be 'witty enough.' 'Mr.
Scott always seems to me to be like a glass, through which the rays of
admiration pass without sensibly affecting it; but the bit of paper[13]
that lies beside it will presently be in a blaze--and no wonder.'
[13: Alluding to Lady Scott.]
Scott endeavoured to secure Mrs. Grant a pension; merited as he
observes, by her as an authoress, 'but much more,' in his opinion, 'by
the firmness and elasticity of mind with which she had borne a great
succession of domestic calamities.' 'Unhappily,' he adds, 'there was
only about £100 open on the Pension List, and this the minister assigned
in equal portions to Mrs. G---- and a distressed lady, grand-daughter of
a forfeited Scottish nobleman. Mrs. G---- , proud as a Highlandwoman,
vain as a poetess, and absurd as a blue-stocking, has taken this
partition in _malam partem_, and written to Lord Melville about her
merits, and that her friends do not consider her claims as being fairly
canvassed, with something like a demand that her petition be submitted
to the king. This is not the way to make her _plack_ a _bawbee_, and
Lord M---- , a little _miffed_ in turn, sends the whole correspondence
to me to know whether Mrs. G---- will accept the £50 or not
Now, hating to deal with ladies when they are in an unreasonable humour,
I have got the good-humoured Man of Feeling to find out the lady's mind,
and I take on myself the task of making her peace with Lord M---- .
After all, the poor lady is greatly to be pitied:--her sole remaining
daughter deep and far gone in a decline.'
The Man of Feeling proved successful, and reported soon afterwards that
the 'dirty pudding' was eaten by the almost destitute authoress. Scott's
tone in the letters which refer to this subject does little credit to
his good taste and delicacy of feeling, which were really attributable
to his character.
Very few notices occur of any intercourse between Scott and Sydney Smith
in Lockhart's 'Life,' It was not, indeed, until 1827 that Scott could be
sufficiently cooled down from the ferment of politics which had been
going on to meet Jeffrey and Cockburn. When he dined, however, with
Murray, then Lord Advocate, and met Jeffrey, Cockburn, the late Lord
Rutherford, then Mr. Rutherford, and others of 'that file,' he
pronounced the party to be 'very pleasant, capital good cheer, and
excellent wine, much laugh and fun. I do not know,' he writes, 'how it
is, but when I am out with a party of my Opposition friends, the day is
often merrier than when with our own set. It is because they are
cleverer? Jeffery and Harry Cockburn are, to be sure, very extraordinary
men, yet it is not owing to that entirely. I believe both parties meet
with the feeling of something like novelty. We have not worn out our
jests in daily contact. There is also a disposition on such occasions to
be courteous, and of course to be pleased.'
On his side, Cockburn did ample justice to the 'genius who,' to use his
own words, 'has immortalized Edinburgh and delighted the 'world.' Mrs.
Scott could not, however, recover the smarting inflicted by the
critiques of Jeffrey on her husband's works. Her--'And I hope, Mr.
Jeffrey, Mr. Constable paid you well for your Article' (Jeffrey dining
with her that day), had a depth of simple satire in it that ever, an
Edinburgh Reviewer could hardly exceed. It was, one must add,
impertinent and in bad taste. 'You are very good at cutting up.'
Sydney Smith found Jeffrey and Cockburn rising barristers. Horner, on
leaving Edinburgh, had left to Jeffrey his bar wig, and the bequest had
been lucky. Jeffrey was settled at Craigcrook, a lovely English-looking
spot, with wooded slopes and green glades, near Edinburgh; and Cockburn
had, since 1811, set up his rural gods at Bonally, near Colinton, just
under the Pentland Hills, and he wrote, 'Unless some avenging angel
shall expel me, I shall never leave that paradise.' And a paradise it
was. Beneath those rough, bare hills, broken here and there by a
trickling burn, like a silver thread on the brown sward, stands a Norman
tower, the addition, by Playfair's skill, to what was once a scarcely
habitable farmhouse. That tower contained Lord Cockburn's fine library,
also his ordinary sitting-rooms. There he read and wrote, and received
such society as will never meet again, there or elsewhere--amongst them
Sydney Smith. Beneath--around the tower--stretches a delicious garden,
composed of terraces, and laurel-hedged walks, and beds of flowers, that
bloomed freely in that sheltered spot. A bowling-green, shaded by one of
the few trees near the house, a sycamore, was the care of many an hour;
for to make the turf velvety, the sods were fetched from the hills
above--from 'yon hills,' as Lord Cockburn would have called them. And
this was for many years one of the rallying points of the best Scottish
society, and, as each autumn came round, of what the host called his
Carnival. Friends were summoned from the north and the south--'death no
apology.' High jinks within doors, excursions without. Every Edinburgh
man reveres the spot, hallowed by the remembrance of Lord Cockburn.
'Every thing except the two burns, he wrote, 'the few old trees, and the
mountains, are my own work. Human nature is incapable of enjoying more
happiness than has been my lot here. I have been too happy, and often
tremble in the anticipation that the cloud must come at last.' And come
it did; but found him not unprepared, although the burden that he had to
bear in after-life was heavy. In their enlarged and philosophic minds,
in their rapid transition from sense to nonsense, there was an affinity
in the characters of Sydney Smith and of Lord Cockburn which was not
carried out in any other point. Smith's conversation was wit--Lord
Cockburn's was eloquence.
From the festivities of Edinburgh Sydney Smith returned contentedly to
Foston-le-Clay, and to Bunch. Amongst other gifted visitors was Mrs.
Marcet. 'Come here, Bunch,' cries Sydney Smith one day; 'come and repeat
your crimes to Mrs. Marcet.' Then Bunch, grave as a judge, began to
repeat: 'Plate-snatching, gravy-spilling, door-slamming, blue-bottle-
fly-catching, and curtsey-bobbing. 'Blue-bottle-fly-catching,' means
standing with her mouth open, and not attending; and 'curtsey-bobbing'
was curtseying to the centre of the earth.
One night, in the winter, during a tremendous snowstorm, Bunch rushed
in, exclaiming, 'Lord and Lady Mackincrush is com'd in a coach and
four.' The lord and lady proved to be Sir James and his daughter, who
had arrived to stay with his friends in the remote parsonage of
Foston-le-Clay a few days, and had sent a letter, which arrived the day
afterwards to announce their visit. Their stay began with a blunder; and
when Sir James departed, leaving kind feelings behind him--books, his
hat, his gloves, his papers and other articles of apparel were found
also. 'What a man that would be,' said Sydney Smith, 'had he one
particle of gall, or the least knowledge of the value of red tape!' It
was true that the indolent, desultory character of Mackintosh interfered
perpetually with his progress in the world. He loved far better to lie
on the sofa reading a novel than to attend a Privy Council; the
slightest indisposition was made on his part a plea for avoiding the
most important business.
Sydney Smith had said that 'when a clever man takes to cultivating
turnips and retiring, it is generally an imposture;' but in him the
retirement was no imposture. His wisdom shone forth daily in small and
great matters. 'Life,' he justly thought, 'was to be fortified by many
friendships,' and he acted up to his principles, and kept up friendships
by letters. Cheerfulness he thought might be cultivated by making the
rooms one lives in as comfortable as possible. His own drawing-room was
papered on this principle, with a yellow flowering pattern; and filled
with 'irregular regularities;' his fires were blown into brightness by
_Shadrachs_, as he called them--tubes furnished with air opening in the
centre of each fire, His library contained his rheumatic armour: for he
tried heat and compression in rheumatism; put his legs into narrow
buckets, which he called his jack-boots; wore round his throat a tin
collar; over each shoulder he had a large tin thing like a shoulder of
mutton; and on his head he displayed a hollow helmet filled with hot
water. In the middle of a field into which his windows looked, was a
skeleton sort of a machine, his Universal Scratcher; with which every
animal from a lamb to a bullock could scratch itself. Then on the Sunday
the Immortal was called into use, to travel in state to a church like a
barn; about fifty people in it; but the most original idea was farming
through the medium of a tremendous speaking-trumpet from his own door,
with its companion, a telescope, to see what his people are about! On
the 24th of January, 1828, the first notable piece of preferment was
conferred on him by Lord Lyndhurst then Chancellor, and of widely
differing political opinions to Sydney Smith. This was a vacant stall in
the cathedral at Bristol, where on the ensuing 5th of November, the new
canon gave the Mayor and Corporation of that Protestant city such a dose
of 'toleration as should last them many a year.' He went to Court on his
appointment, and appeared in shoestrings instead of buckles. 'I found,'
he relates, 'to my surprise, people looking down at my feet: I could not
think what they were at. At first I thought they had discovered the
beauty of my legs; but at last the truth burst on me, by some wag
laughing and thinking I had done it as a good joke. I was, of course,
exceedingly annoyed to have been supposed capable of such a vulgar
unmeaning piece of disrespect, and kept my feet as coyly under my
petticoats as the veriest prude in the country till I should make my
escape.' His circumstances were now improved, and though moralists, he
said, thought property an evil, he declared himself happier every guinea
he gained. He thanked God for his animal spirits, which received,
unhappily, in 1829, a terrible shock from the death of his eldest son,
Douglas, aged twenty-four. This was the great misfortune of his life;
the young man was promising, talented, affectionate. He exchanged
Foston-le-Clay at this time for a living in Somersetshire, of a
beautiful and characteristic name--Combe Florey.
Combe Florey seems to have been an earthly paradise, seated in one of
those delicious hollows or in Combes, for which that part of the west of
England is celebrated. His withdrawal from the Edinburgh
Review--Mackintosh's death--the marriage of his eldest daughter, Saba,
to Dr. Holland (now Sir Henry Holland)--the termination of Lord Grey's
Administration, which ended Sydney's hopes of being a bishop, were the
leading events of his life for the next few years.
It appears that Sydney Smith felt to the hour of his death pained that
those by whose side he had fought for fifty years, in their adversity,
the Whig party, should never have offered what he declared he should
have rejected, a bishopric, when they were constantly bestowing such
promotions on persons of mediocre talent and claims. Waiving the point,
whether it is right or wrong to make men bishops because they have been
political partizans, the cause of this alleged injustice may be found in
the tone of the times, which was eminently tinctured with cant. The
Clapham sect were in the ascendancy; and Ministers scarcely dared to
offend so influential a body. Even the gentle Sir James Mackintosh
refers, in his Journal, with disgust to the phraseology of the day:--
'They have introduced a new language, in which they never say that A. B.
is good, or virtuous, or even religious; but that he is an "advanced
Christian." Dear Mr. Wilberforce is an "advanced Christian." Mrs. C. has
lost three children without a pang, and is so "advanced a Christian"
that she could see the remaining twenty, "with poor dear Mr. C.,"
removed with perfect tranquillity.'
Such was the disgust expressed towards that school by Mackintosh, whose
last days were described by his daughter as having been passed in
silence and thought, with his Bible before him, breaking that
silence--and portentous silence--to speak of God, and of his Maker's
disposition towards man.
His mind ceased to be occupied with speculations; politics interested
him no more. His own 'personal relationship to his Creator' was the
subject of his thoughts. Yet Mackintosh was not by any means considered
as an advanced Christian, or even as a Christian at all by the zealots
of his time.
Sydney Smith's notions of a bishop were certainly by no means carried
out in his own person and character. 'I never remember in my time,' he
said, 'a real bishop: a grave, elderly man, full of Greek, with sound
views of the middle voice and preterpluperfect tense; gentle and kind to
his poor clergy, of powerful and commanding eloquence in Parliament,
never to be put down when the great interests of mankind were concerned,
leaning to the Government when it was right, leaning to the people when
they were right; feeling that if the Spirit of God had called him to
that high office, he was called for no mean purpose, but rather that
seeing clearly, acting boldly, and intending purely, he might confer
lasting benefit upon mankind.'
In 1831 Lord Grey appointed Sydney Smith a Canon Resilentiary of St.
Paul's; but still the mitre was withheld, although it has since appeared
that Lord Grey had destined him for one of the first vacancies in
England.
Henceforth his residence at St. Paul's brought him still more
continually into the world, which he delighted by his 'wise wit.' Most
London dinners, he declared, evaporated in whispers to one's next
neighbours. He never, however, spoke to his neighbour, but 'fired'
across the table. One day, however, he broke his rule, on hearing a
lady, who sat next him, say in a sweet low voice, 'No gravy,
sir.'--'Madam!' he cried, 'I have all my life been looking for a person
who disliked gravy, let us swear immortal friendship.' She looked
astonished, but took the oath, and kept it. 'What better foundation for
friendship,' he asks, 'than similarity of tastes?'
He gave an evening party once a week; when a profusion of wax-lights was
his passion. He loved to see young people decked with natural flowers;
he was, in fact, a blameless and benevolent Epicurean in everything;
great indeed was the change from his former residence at Foston, which
he used to say was twelve miles from a lemon. Charming as his parties at
home must have been, they wanted the _bon-hommie_ and simplicity of
former days, and Of the homely suppers in Orchard Street. Lord Dudley,
Rogers, Moore, 'Young Macaulay,' as he was called for many years, formed
now his society. Lord Dudley was then in the state which afterwards
became insanity, and darkened completely a mind sad and peculiar from
childhood. Bankes, in his 'Journal,' relates an anecdote of him about
this time, when, as he says, 'Dudley's mind was on the wane; but still
his caustic humour would find vent through the cloud which was gradually
over-shadowing his masterly intellect.' He was one day sitting in his
room soliloquizing aloud; his favourite Newfoundland-dog was at his
side, and seemed to engross all ----m's attention. A gentleman was
present who was good-looking and good-natured, but not overburthened
with sense. Lord Dudley at last, patting his dog's head, said, 'Fido
mio, they say dogs have no souls. Humph, and still they say ----'
(naming the gentleman present) 'has a soul!' One day Lord Dudley met Mr.
Allen, Lord Holland's librarian, and asked him to dine with him. Allen
went. When asked to describe his dinner, he said, 'There was no one
there. Lord Dudley talked a little to his servant, and a great deal to
his dog, but said not one word to me.'
Innumerable are the witticisms related of Sydney Smith, when seated at a
dinner table--having swallowed in life what he called a 'Caspian Sea' of
soup. Talking one day of Sir Charles Lyell's book, the subject of which
was the phenomena which the earth might, at some future period, present
to the geologists. 'Let us imagine,' he said, 'an excavation on the site
of St. Paul's; fancy a lecture by the Owen of his future era on the
thigh-bone of a minor canon, or the tooth of a dean: the form,
qualities, and tastes he would discover from them.' 'It is a great proof
of shyness,' he said, 'to crumble your bread at dinner. Ah! I see,' he
said, turning to a young lady, 'you're afraid of me: 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.'
Be gave a capital reproof to a lively young M.P. who was accompanying
him after dinner to one of the solemn evening receptions at Lambeth
Palace during the life of the late Archbishop of Canterbury. The M.P.
had been calling him 'Smith,' though they had never met before that day.
As the carriage stopped at the Palace, Smith turned to him and said,
'Now don't, my good fellow, don't call the Archbishop "Howley."'
Talking of fancy-balls--'Of course,' he said, 'if I went to one, I
should go as a Dissenter.' Of Macaulay, he said, 'To take him out of
literature and science, and to put him in the House of Commons, is like
taking the chief physician out of London in a pestilence.'