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 nineteen various places were thus the source of expense to him, and of injury to the pecuniary interests of his family.

This strange spendthrift married a Miss Olier, a daughter of a French emigrant, from Languedoc.  Every one may remember the charming attributes given by Miss Kavanagh, in her delicious tale, ‘Nathalie,’ to the French women of the South.  This Miss Olier seems to have realized all one’s ideas of the handsome, sweet-tempered, high-minded Southrons of la belle France.  To her Sydney Smith traced his native gaiety; her beauty did not, certainly, pass to him as well as to some of her other descendants.  When Talleyrand was living in England as an emigrant, on intimate terms with Robert Smith, Sydney’s brother, or Bobus, as he was called by his intimates, the conversation turned one day on hereditary beauty.  Bobus spoke of his mother’s personal perfections:  ’Ah, mon ami,’ cried Talleyrand, c’etait apparemment, monsieur:  volre pere qui n’etait pas bien.’