On the morning of the day when Lord Holland’s last illness began, these lines were written by him, and found after his death on his dressing-table:—­

  ’Nephew of Fox, and Friend of Grey,
    Sufficient for my fame,
  If those who know me best shall say
    I tarnished neither name.’

Of him his best friend, Sydney Smith, left a short but discriminative character.  ’There was never (amongst other things he says) a better heart, or one more purified from all the bad passions—­more abounding in charity and compassion—­or which seemed to be so created as a refuge to the helpless and oppressed.’

Meantime Sydney Smith’s circumstances were still limited; L50 a year as evening preacher to the Foundling Hospital was esteemed as a great help by him.  The writer of this memoir remembers an amusing anecdote related of him at the table of an eminent literary character by a member of Lord Woodhouselee’s family, who had been desirous to obtain for Sydney the patronage of the godly.  To this end she persuaded Robert Grant and Charles Grant (afterwards Lord Glenelg) to go to the Foundling to hear him, she hoped to advantage; to her consternation he broke forth into so familiar a strain, couched in terms so bordering on the jocose,—­though no one had deeper religious convictions than he had,—­that the two saintly brothers listened in disgust.  They forgot how South let loose the powers of his wit and sarcasm; and how the lofty-minded Jeremy Taylor applied the force of humour to lighten the prolixity of argument.  Sydney Smith became, nevertheless, a most popular preacher; but the man who prevents people from sleeping once a week in their pews is sure to be criticised.

Let us turn to him, however, as a member of society.  His circle of acquaintance was enlarged, not only by his visits to Holland House, but by his lectures on moral philosophy at the Royal Institution.  Sir Robert Peel, not the most impressionable of men, but one whose cold shake of the hand is said—­as Sydney Smith said of Sir James Mackintosh—­’to have come under the genus Mortmain’ was a very young man at the time when Albemarle Street was crowded with carriages from one end of the street to the other, in consequence of Sydney Smith’s lectures; yet he declared that he had never forgotten the effect given to the speech of Logan, the Indian chief, by Sydney’s voice and manner.

His lectures produced a sum sufficient for Sydney to furnish a house in Orchard Street.  Doughty Street—­raised to celebrity as having been the residence, not only of Sydney Smith, but of Charles Dickens—­was too far for the habitue of Holland House and the orator of Albemarle Street long to sojourn there.  In Orchard Street, Sydney enjoyed that domestic comfort which he called ‘the grammar of life;’ delightful suppers, to about twenty or thirty persons, who came and went as they pleased.  A great part of the same amusing and gifted set used to meet once a week also at Sir James Mackintosh’s, at a supper, which, though not exactly Cowper’s ‘radish and an egg,’ was simple, but plentiful—­yet most eagerly sought after.  ‘There are a few living,’ writes Sydney Smith’s daughter, ’who can look back to them, and I have always found them do so with a sigh of regret.’