iece
of animal life that nobody has over seen before, except Swammerdam and
Meriam. An insect with eleven legs is swimming in your teacup, a
nondescript with nine wings is struggling in the small beer, or a
caterpillar with several dozen eyes in his belly is hastening over the
bread and butter! All nature is alive, and seems to be gathering all
her entomological hosts to eat you up, as you are standing, out of
your coat, waistcoat, and breeches. Such are the tropics. All this
reconciles us to our dews, fogs, vapours, and drizzle--to our
apothecaries rushing about with gargles and tinctures--to our old,
British, constitutional coughs, sore throats, and swelled faces."

Space should be found, in even the shortest book on Sydney Smith, for two
passages in which, perhaps more effectively than anywhere else, he clinched
an argument with a masterpiece of fun. The first is the warning to the
United States against the love of military glory. The second is the
wonderful concatenation of fallacies in "Noodle's Oration."[139] Both these
pieces will he found in Appendix B.

In 1840 he wrote to a friend:--

"I printed my reviews to show, if I could, that I had not passed my
life merely in making jokes; but that I had made use of what little
powers of pleasantry I might be endowed with, to discountenance bad,
and to encourage liberal and wise principles."

The natural and becoming indolence of age was now beginning to show itself
in Sydney Smith. He had worked harder than most men in his day, and now he
wisely cultivated ease. In his comfortable house in Green Street, he
received his friends with what he himself so excellently called "that
honest joy which warms more than dinner or wine"; but he went less than of
old into general society. Least of all was he inclined to that most
melancholy of all exertions which consists in rushing about to
entertainments which do not amuse. In 1840 he wrote, in answering an
invitation to the Opera:--

"Thy servant is threescore-and-ten years old; can he hear the sound of
singing men and singing women? A Canon at the Opera! Where have you
lived? In what habitations of the heathen? I thank you, shuddering."

Although the Canon would not go to the Opera, his general faculty of
enjoyment was unimpaired, and, as always, he loved a gibe at the clergy. On
the 30th of November 1841, Samuel Wilberforce wrote to a friend about
George A