lamb to a bullock could scratch itself. Then on the Sunday
the Immortal was called into use, to travel in state to a church like a
barn; about fifty people in it; but the most original idea was farming
through the medium of a tremendous speaking-trumpet from his own door,
with its companion, a telescope, to see what his people are about! On
the 24th of January, 1828, the first notable piece of preferment was
conferred on him by Lord Lyndhurst then Chancellor, and of widely
differing political opinions to Sydney Smith. This was a vacant stall in
the cathedral at Bristol, where on the ensuing 5th of November, the new
canon gave the Mayor and Corporation of that Protestant city such a dose
of 'toleration as should last them many a year.' He went to Court on his
appointment, and appeared in shoestrings instead of buckles. 'I found,'
he relates, 'to my surprise, people looking down at my feet: I could not
think what they were at. At first I thought they had discovered the
beauty of my legs; but at last the truth burst on me, by some wag
laughing and thinking I had done it as a good joke. I was, of course,
exceedingly annoyed to have been supposed capable of such a vulgar
unmeaning piece of disrespect, and kept my feet as coyly under my
petticoats as the veriest prude in the country till I should make my
escape.' His circumstances were now improved, and though moralists, he
said, thought property an evil, he declared himself happier every guinea
he gained. He thanked God for his animal spirits, which received,
unhappily, in 1829, a terrible shock from the death of his eldest son,
Douglas, aged twenty-four. This was the great misfortune of his life;
the young man was promising, talented, affectionate. He exchanged
Foston-le-Clay at this time for a living in Somersetshire, of a
beautiful and characteristic name--Combe Florey.

Combe Florey seems to have been an earthly paradise, seated in one of
those delicious hollows or in Combes, for which that part of the west of
England is celebrated. His withdrawal from the Edinburgh
Review--Mackintosh's death--the marriage of his eldest daughter, Saba,
to Dr. Holland (now Sir Henry Holland)--the termination of Lord Grey's
Administration, which ended Sydney's hopes of being a bishop, were the
leading events of his life for the next few years.

It appears that Sydney Smith felt to the hour of his death pained that
those by whose side he had fought for fifty years, in their adversity,
the