gan to
repeat: 'Plate-snatching, gravy-spilling, door-slamming, blue-bottle-
fly-catching, and curtsey-bobbing. 'Blue-bottle-fly-catching,' means
standing with her mouth open, and not attending; and 'curtsey-bobbing'
was curtseying to the centre of the earth.

One night, in the winter, during a tremendous snowstorm, Bunch rushed
in, exclaiming, 'Lord and Lady Mackincrush is com'd in a coach and
four.' The lord and lady proved to be Sir James and his daughter, who
had arrived to stay with his friends in the remote parsonage of
Foston-le-Clay a few days, and had sent a letter, which arrived the day
afterwards to announce their visit. Their stay began with a blunder; and
when Sir James departed, leaving kind feelings behind him--books, his
hat, his gloves, his papers and other articles of apparel were found
also. 'What a man that would be,' said Sydney Smith, 'had he one
particle of gall, or the least knowledge of the value of red tape!' It
was true that the indolent, desultory character of Mackintosh interfered
perpetually with his progress in the world. He loved far better to lie
on the sofa reading a novel than to attend a Privy Council; the
slightest indisposition was made on his part a plea for avoiding the
most important business.

Sydney Smith had said that 'when a clever man takes to cultivating
turnips and retiring, it is generally an imposture;' but in him the
retirement was no imposture. His wisdom shone forth daily in small and
great matters. 'Life,' he justly thought, 'was to be fortified by many
friendships,' and he acted up to his principles, and kept up friendships
by letters. Cheerfulness he thought might be cultivated by making the
rooms one lives in as comfortable as possible. His own drawing-room was
papered on this principle, with a yellow flowering pattern; and filled
with 'irregular regularities;' his fires were blown into brightness by
_Shadrachs_, as he called them--tubes furnished with air opening in the
centre of each fire, His library contained his rheumatic armour: for he
tried heat and compression in rheumatism; put his legs into narrow
buckets, which he called his jack-boots; wore round his throat a tin
collar; over each shoulder he had a large tin thing like a shoulder of
mutton; and on his head he displayed a hollow helmet filled with hot
water. In the middle of a field into which his windows looked, was a
skeleton sort of a machine, his Universal Scratcher; with which every
animal from a