One night, in the winter, during a tremendous snowstorm, Bunch rushed in, exclaiming, ’Lord and Lady Mackincrush is com’d in a coach and four.’  The lord and lady proved to be Sir James and his daughter, who had arrived to stay with his friends in the remote parsonage of Foston-le-Clay a few days, and had sent a letter, which arrived the day afterwards to announce their visit.  Their stay began with a blunder; and when Sir James departed, leaving kind feelings behind him—­books, his hat, his gloves, his papers and other articles of apparel were found also.  ‘What a man that would be,’ said Sydney Smith, ’had he one particle of gall, or the least knowledge of the value of red tape!’ It was true that the indolent, desultory character of Mackintosh interfered perpetually with his progress in the world.  He loved far better to lie on the sofa reading a novel than to attend a Privy Council; the slightest indisposition was made on his part a plea for avoiding the most important business.

Sydney Smith had said that ’when a clever man takes to cultivating turnips and retiring, it is generally an imposture;’ but in him the retirement was no imposture.  His wisdom shone forth daily in small and great matters.  ‘Life,’ he justly thought, ’was to be fortified by many friendships,’ and he acted up to his principles, and kept up friendships by letters.  Cheerfulness he thought might be cultivated by making the rooms one lives in as comfortable as possible.  His own drawing-room was papered on this principle, with a yellow flowering pattern; and filled with ‘irregular regularities;’ his fires were blown into brightness by Shadrachs, as he called them—­tubes furnished with air opening in the centre of each fire, His library contained his rheumatic armour:  for he tried heat and compression in rheumatism; put his legs into narrow buckets, which he called his jack-boots; wore round his throat a tin collar; over each shoulder he had a large tin thing like a shoulder of mutton; and on his head he displayed a hollow helmet filled with hot water.  In the middle of a field into which his windows looked, was a skeleton sort of a machine, his Universal Scratcher; with which every animal from a 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