Part 27

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.'

Nothing amused him so much as the want of perception of a joke. One hot day a Mrs. Jackson called on him, and spoke of the oppressive state of the weather. 'Heat! it was dreadful,' said Sydney; 'I found I could do nothing for it but take off my flesh and sit in my bones.' 'Take off your flesh and sit in your bones! Oh, Mr. Smith! how could you do that?' the lady cried. 'Come and see next time, ma'am--nothing more easy.' She went away, however, convinced that such a proceeding was very unorthodox. No wonder, with all his various acquirements, it should be said of him that no 'dull dinners were ever remembered in his company.'

A happy old age concluded his life, at once brilliant and useful. To the last he never considered his education as finished. His wit, a friend said, 'was always fresh, always had the dew on it. He latterly got into what Lord Jeffrey called the vicious habit of water drinking. Wine, he said, destroyed his understanding. He even 'forgot the number of the Muses, and thought it was thirty-nine, of course.' He agreed with Sir James Mackintosh that he had found the world more good and more foolish than he had thought when young. He took a cheerful view of all things; he thanked God for small as well as great things, even for tea. 'I am glad,' he used to say, 'I was not born before tea.' His domestic affections were strong, and were heartily reciprocated.

General society he divided into classes: 'The noodles--very numerous and well known. The affliction woman--a valuable member of society, generally an ancient spinster in small circumstances, who packs up her bag and sets off in cases of illness or death, "to comfort, flatter, fetch, and carry." The up-takers--people who see, from their fingers' ends and go through a room touching everything. The clearers--who begin at a dish and go on tasting and eating till it is finished. The sheep-walkers--who go on for ever on the beaten track. The lemon-squeezers of society--who act on you as a wet blanket; see a cloud in sunshine; the nails of the coffin in the ribbons of a bride; extinguish all hope; people, whose very look sets your teeth on an edge. The let-well-aloners, cousin-german to the noodles--yet a variety, and who are afraid to act, and think it safer to stand still. Then the washerwomen--very numerous! who always say, "Well, if ever I put on my best bonnet, 'tis sure to rain," &c.

'Besides this there is a very large class of people always treading on your gouty foot, or talking in your deaf ear, or asking you to give them something with your lame hand,' &c.

During the autumn of the year 1844, Sydney Smith felt the death-stroke approaching. 'I am so weak, both in body and mind,' he said, 'that I believe if the knife were put into my hand, I should not have strength enough to stick it into a Dissenter.' In October he became seriously ill. 'Ah! Charles,' he said to General Fox (when he was being kept very low), 'I wish they would allow me even the wing of a roasted butterfly,' He dreaded sorrowful faces around him; but confided to his old servant, Annie Kay--and to her alone--his sense of his danger.

Almost the last person Sydney Smith saw was his beloved brother Bobus, who followed him to the grave a fortnight after he had been laid in the tomb.

He lingered till the 22nd of February, 1845. His son closed his eyes. His last act was, bestowing on a poverty-stricken clergyman a living.

He was buried at Kensal Green, where his eldest son, Douglas, had been interred.

It has been justly and beautifully said of Sydney Smith, that Christianity was not a dogma with him, but a practical and most beneficent rule of life.

As a clergyman, he was liberal, practical, staunch; free from the latitudinarian principles of Hoadley, as from the bigotry of Laud. His wit was the wit of a virtuous, a decorous man; it had pungency without venom; humour without indelicacy; and was copious without being tiresome.

GEORGE BUBB DODINGTON, LORD MELCOMBE.