e, by inconveniencing ourselves, and occasionally
risking our lives, we can, however imperfectly, accomplish by steam
what is now done by horses, we get rid of the whole race of
oat-sowers, oat-sellers, oat-eaters, and oat-stealers, vulgarly
called ostlers."

Sydney Smith especially aimed at pleasantry in his humour, there was no
animosity in it, and generally no instruction. Mirth, pure and simple,
was his object. Rogers observes "After Luttrell, you remembered what
good things he said--after Smith how much you laughed."

In Moore's Diary we read "at a breakfast at Roger's, Smith, full of
comicality and fancy, kept us all in roars of laughter." His wit was so
turned, that it never wounded. When he took leave of Lord Dudley, the
latter said, "You have been laughing at me constantly, Sydney, for the
last seven years, and yet in all that time, you never said a thing to me
that I wished unsaid."

It would be superfluous to give a collection of Smith's good sayings,
but the following is characteristic of his style. When he heard of a
small Scotchman going to marry a lady of large dimensions, he exclaimed,

"Going to marry her? you mean a part of her, he could not marry her
all. It would be not bigamy but trigamy. There is enough of her to
furnish wives for a whole parish. You might people a colony with
her, or give an assembly with her, or perhaps take your morning's
walk round her, always providing there were frequent resting-places
and you were in rude health. I was once rash enough to try walking
round her before breakfast, but only got halfway, and gave up
exhausted."

Smith's humour was nearly always of this continuous kind, "changing its
shape and colour to many forms and hues." He wished to continue the
merriment to the last, but such repetition weakened its force. His
humour is better when he has some definite aim in view, as in his
letters about America, where he lost his money. But we have not many
specimens of it in his writings, the following is from "The Dun Cow:"--

"The immense importance of a pint of ale to a common man should
never be overlooked, nor should a good-natured Justice forget that
he is acting for Lilliputians, whose pains and pleasures lie in
very narrow compass, and are but too apt to be treated with neglect
and contempt by their superiors. About ten or eleven o'clock in the
morning, perhaps, the fir