can hardly escape. It is otherwise with the letters. The best letters
are always most like the actual conversation of their writers, and
probably no one ever wrote more as he talked than Sydney Smith. The
specially literary qualities of his writing for print are here too in
great measure; and on the whole, though of course the importance of
subject is nearly always less, and the interest of sustained work is
wholly absent, nowhere can the entire Sydney be better seen. Of the
three satirists of modern times with whom he may not unfairly claim to
rank--Pascal, Swift, and Voltaire--he is most like Voltaire in his
faculty of presenting a good thing with a preface which does not in the
least prepare you for it, and then leaving it without the slightest
attempt to go back on it, and elaborate it, and make sure that his
hearer has duly appreciated it and laughed at it. And of the two, though
the palm of concentration must be given to Voltaire, the palm of
absolute simplicity must be given to Sydney. Hardly any of his letters
are without these unforced flashes of wit, from almost his first
epistle to Jeffrey (where, after rallying that great little man on being
the "only male despondent he has met," he adds the postscript, "I beg to
except the Tuxford waiter, who desponds exactly as you do") to his very
last to Miss Harcourt, in which he mildly dismisses one of his brethren
as "anything but a _polished_ corner of the Temple." There is the "usual
establishment for an eldest landed baby:" the proposition, advanced in
the grave and chaste manner, that "the information of very plain women
is so inconsiderable, that I agree with you in setting no store by it:"
the plaintive expostulation with Lady Holland (who had asked him to
dinner on the ninth of the month, after previously asking him to stay
from the fifth to the twelfth), "it is like giving a gentleman an
assignation for Wednesday when you are going to marry him on the
previous Sunday--an attempt to combine the stimulus of gallantry with
the security of connubial relations:" the simple and touching
information that "Lord Tankerville has sent me a whole buck. This
necessarily takes up a good deal of my time;" that "geranium-fed bacon
is of a beautiful colour, but it takes so many plants to fatten one pig
that such a system can never answer;" that "it is a mistake to think
that Dr. Bond could be influenced by partridges. He is a man of very
independent mind, with whom pheasants a