appointment, and appeared in shoestrings instead of buckles.  ‘I found,’ he relates, ’to my surprise, people looking down at my feet:  I could not think what they were at.  At first I thought they had discovered the beauty of my legs; but at last the truth burst on me, by some wag laughing and thinking I had done it as a good joke.  I was, of course, exceedingly annoyed to have been supposed capable of such a vulgar unmeaning piece of disrespect, and kept my feet as coyly under my petticoats as the veriest prude in the country till I should make my escape.’  His circumstances were now improved, and though moralists, he said, thought property an evil, he declared himself happier every guinea he gained.  He thanked God for his animal spirits, which received, unhappily, in 1829, a terrible shock from the death of his eldest son, Douglas, aged twenty-four.  This was the great misfortune of his life; the young man was promising, talented, affectionate.  He exchanged Foston-le-Clay at this time for a living in Somersetshire, of a beautiful and characteristic name—­Combe Florey.

Combe Florey seems to have been an earthly paradise, seated in one of those delicious hollows or in Combes, for which that part of the west of England is celebrated.  His withdrawal from the Edinburgh Review—­Mackintosh’s death—­the marriage of his eldest daughter, Saba, to Dr. Holland (now Sir Henry Holland)—­the termination of Lord Grey’s Administration, which ended Sydney’s hopes of being a bishop, were the leading events of his life for the next few years.

It appears that Sydney Smith felt to the hour of his death pained that those by whose side he had fought for fifty years, in their adversity, the Whig party, should never have offered what he declared he should have rejected, a bishopric, when they were constantly bestowing such promotions on persons of mediocre talent and claims.  Waiving the point, whether it is right or wrong to make men bishops because they have been political partizans, the cause of this alleged injustice may be found in the tone of the times, which was eminently tinctured with cant.  The Clapham sect were in the ascendancy; and Ministers scarcely dared to offend so influential a body.  Even the gentle Sir James Mackintosh refers, in his Journal, with disgust to the phraseology of the day:—­

’They have introduced a new language, in which they never say that A. B. is good, or virtuous, or even religious; but that he is an “advanced Christian.”  Dear Mr. Wilberforce is an “advanced Christian.”  Mrs. C. has lost three children without a pang, and is so “advanced a Christian” that she could see the remaining twenty, “with poor dear Mr. C.,” removed with perfect tranquillity.’

Such was the disgust expressed towards that school by Mackintosh, whose last days were described by his daughter as having been passed in silence and thought, with his Bible before him, breaking that silence—­and portentous silence—­to speak of God, and of his Maker’s disposition towards man.