rally, preferred conversation to music; and
at a musical party one evening, as he was stealing on tip-toe from
the concert-room to one more remote from the performance, I held up
my finger at him, when he whispered, "My dear, it's all right. You
keep with the dilettanti; I go with the talkettanti." Afterwards,
upon my expostulating with him, and telling him that by such habits
he was running a risk of being called to order on some future
eternal day with "Angel Sydney Smith, hush!" if he did not learn to
endure music better, he replied, "Oh, no, no! I'm cultivating a
judicious second expressly for those occasions."

Of his lamentations for the "flashes of silence" which, he said, at
one time made Macaulay's intercourse possible, one has heard; but
when he was so ill that all his friends were full of anxiety about
him, M----, having called to see him, and affectionately asking what
sort of night he had passed, Sydney Smith replied, "Oh, horrid,
horrid, my dear fellow! I dreamt I was chained to a rock and being
talked to death by Harriet Martineau and Macaulay."

Rogers's keen-edged wit seemed to cut his lips as he uttered it;
Sydney Smith's was without sting or edge or venomous point of
malice, and his genial humor was really the overflowing of a kindly
heart.

Rogers's helpful benevolence and noble generosity to poor artists,
poor authors, and all distressed whom he could serve or succor, was
unbounded; he certainly had the kindest heart and the unkindest
tongue of any one I ever knew. His benefits remind me of a comical
story my dear friend Harness once told me, of a poor woman at whose
lamentations over her various hardships one of his curates was
remonstrating, "Oh, come, come now, my good woman, you must allow
that Providence has been, upon the whole, very good to you." "So He
'ave, sir; so He 'ave, mostly. I don't deny it; but I sometimes
think He 'ave taken it out in corns." I think Rogers took out his
benevolence, in some directions, in the corns he inflicted, or, at
any rate, trod upon, in others.

Mr. Rogers's inveterate tongue-gall was like an irresistible
impulse, and he certainly bestowed it occasionally, without the
least provocation, upon persons whom he professed to like. He was
habitually kind to me, and declared he was fond of me. One evening
(just after