"We are going through our usual course of jokes and dinners. One
advantage of the country is that a joke once established is good for
ever; it is like the stuff which is denominated _everlasting_, and
used as pantaloons by careful parents for their children."

In the following autumn the Smiths paid a flying visit to France, The
crossing from Dover was terrific; but Sydney comforted himself with the
reflection that, "as I had so little life to lose, it was of little
consequence whether I was drowned, or died, like a resident clergyman, from
indigestion."

France gave him the same pleasure as it had always given him.--

"Paris is very full. I look at it with some attention, as I am not
sure I may not end my days in it. I suspect the fifth act of life
should be in great cities: it is there, in the long death of old age,
that a man most forgets himself and his infirmities."

"I care very little about dinners, but I shall not easily forget a
_matelote_ at the Rochers de Cancale, an almond tart at Montreuil, or
a _poulet a la Tartare_ at Grignon's, These are impressions which no
changes in future life can obliterate."

Before the year ended, he was established in London. The remaining ten
years of his life saw him, in spite of some bodily infirmities, at the
summit of his social fame. An immense proportion of the anecdotes relating
to his conversation belong to this period. "It was," wrote Mr. Gladstone in
1879, "in the year 1835 that I met Mr. Sydney Smith for the first time at
the table of Mr. Hallam. After dinner Mr. Smith was good enough to converse
with me, and he spoke, not of any general changes in the prevailing tone of
doctrine, but of the improvement which had then begun to be remarkable in
the conduct and character of the clergy. He went back upon what they had
been, and said, in his vivid and pointed way of illustration, 'Whenever you
meet a clergyman of my age, you may be quite sure he is a bad
clergyman.'"[118]

In 1836 the Ecclesiastical Commission was established by Act of Parliament
as a permanent institution for the management of business relating to the
Church. Its constitution and recommendations were very distasteful to
Sydney Smith; and, as time went on, he found it impossible to restrain
himself from public criticism. At the beginning of the Session of 1837, he
published his "First Letter to Archdeacon Singleton."[119] The Letter
begins with an atta