his talents),
no one could say that he ever shirked either a difficulty or a duty.
When his first three years' leave expired, he went down in 1809 with his
family to York, and established himself at Heslington, a village near
the city and not far from his parish. And when a second term of
dispensation from actual residence was over, he set to work and built
the snuggest if the ugliest parsonage in England, with farm-buildings
and all complete, at the cost of some four thousand pounds. Of the
details of that building his own inimitable account exists, and is or
ought to be well known. The brick-pit and kiln on the property, which
were going to save fortunes and resulted in nothing but the production
of exactly a hundred and fifty thousand unusable bricks: the four oxen,
Tug, Lug, Haul and Crawl, who were to be the instruments of another
economy and proved to be, at least in Sydneian language, equal to
nothing but the consumption of "buckets of sal volatile:" the entry of
the distracted mother of the household on her new domains with a baby
clutched in her arms and one shoe left in the circumambient mud: the
great folks of the neighbourhood (Lord and Lady Carlisle) coming to call
graciously on the strangers, and being whelmed, coach and four,
outriders and all, in a ploughed field of despond: the "universal
scratcher" in the meadows, inclined so as to let the brute creation of
all heights enjoy that luxury: Bunch the butler, a female child of
tender years but stout proportions: Annie Kay the factotum: the
"Immortal," a chariot which was picked up at York in the last stage of
decay, and carried the family for many years half over England--all
these things and persons are told in divers delightful scraps of
autobiography and in innumerable letters, after a fashion impossible to
better and at a length too long to quote.

Sydney Smith was for more than twenty years rector of Foston, and for
fully fifteen actually resided there. During this time he made the
acquaintance of Lord and Lady Grey, next to Lord and Lady Holland his
most constant friends, visited a little, entertained in his own
unostentatious but hearty fashion a great deal, wrote many articles for
the _Edinburgh Review_, found himself in a minority of one or two among
the clergy of Yorkshire on the subject of Emancipation and similar
matters, but was on the most friendly terms possible with his diocesan,
Archbishop Vernon Harcourt. Nor was he even without further p