y? how
short a time since Francis Jeffery, the smallest of great men, a beau in
his old age, a wit to the last, stood hat in hand to bandy words with
Sydney ere he rushed off to some still gayer scene, some more
fashionable circle: yet they are all gone--gone from sight, living in
memory alone.

Perhaps it was time: they might have lived, indeed, a few short years
longer; we might have heard their names amongst us; listened to their
voices; gazed upon the deep hazel, ever-sparkling eyes, that constituted
the charm of Cockburn's handsome face, and made all other faces seem
tame and dead: we might have marvelled at the ingenuity, the happy turns
of expression, the polite sarcasm of Jeffrey; we might have revelled in
Sydney Smith's immense natural gift of fun, and listened to the 'wise
wit,' regretting with Lord Cockburn, that so much worldly wisdom seemed
almost inappropriate in one who should have been in some freer sphere
than within the pale of holy orders: we might have done this, but the
picture might have been otherwise. Cockburn, whose intellect rose, and
became almost sublime, as his spirit neared death, might have sunk into
the depression of conscious weakness; Jeffery might have repeated
himself, or turned hypochondriacal; Sydney Smith have grown garrulous:
let us not grieve; they went in their prime of intellect, before one
quality of mind had been touched by the frostbite of age.

Sydney Smith's life is a chronicle of literary society. He was born in
1771, and he died in 1845. What a succession of great men does that
period comprise! Scott, Jeffrey, Mackintosh, Dugald Stewart, Homer,
Brougham and Cockburn were his familiars--a constellation which has set,
we fear, for ever. Our world presents nothing like it: we must look
back, not around us, for strong minds, cultivated up to the nicest
point. Our age is too diffused, too practical for us to hope to witness
again so grand a spectacle.

From his progenitors Sydney Smith inherited one of his best gifts, great
animal spirits--the only spirits one wants in this racking life of ours;
and his were transmitted to him by his father. That father, Mr. Robert
Smith, was odd as well as clever. His oddities seem to have been coupled
with folly but that of Sydney was soberized by thought, and swayed by
intense common sense. The father had a mania for buying and altering
places: one need hardly say that he spoiled them. Having done so, he
generally sold them; and _ninete