seemed to engross all ——­m’s attention.  A gentleman was present who was good-looking and good-natured, but not overburthened with sense.  Lord Dudley at last, patting his dog’s head, said, ’Fido mio, they say dogs have no souls.  Humph, and still they say ——­’ (naming the gentleman present) ‘has a soul!’ One day Lord Dudley met Mr. Allen, Lord Holland’s librarian, and asked him to dine with him.  Allen went.  When asked to describe his dinner, he said, ’There was no one there.  Lord Dudley talked a little to his servant, and a great deal to his dog, but said not one word to me.’

Innumerable are the witticisms related of Sydney Smith, when seated at a dinner table—­having swallowed in life what he called a ‘Caspian Sea’ of soup.  Talking one day of Sir Charles Lyell’s book, the subject of which was the phenomena which the earth might, at some future period, present to the geologists.  ‘Let us imagine,’ he said, ’an excavation on the site of St. Paul’s; fancy a lecture by the Owen of his future era on the thigh-bone of a minor canon, or the tooth of a dean:  the form, qualities, and tastes he would discover from them.’  ’It is a great proof of shyness,’ he said, ‘to crumble your bread at dinner.  Ah!  I see,’ he said, turning to a young lady, ’you’re afraid of me:  you crumble your bread.  I do it when I sit by the Bishop of London, and with both hands when I sit by the Archbishop.’

Be gave a capital reproof to a lively young M.P. who was accompanying him after dinner to one of the solemn evening receptions at Lambeth Palace during the life of the late Archbishop of Canterbury.  The M.P. had been calling him ‘Smith,’ though they had never met before that day.  As the carriage stopped at the Palace, Smith turned to him and said, ‘Now don’t, my good fellow, don’t call the Archbishop “Howley."’

Talking of fancy-balls—­’Of course,’ he said, ’if I went to one, I should go as a Dissenter.’  Of Macaulay, he said, ’To take him out of literature and science, and to put him in the House of Commons, is like taking the chief physician out of London in a pestilence.’

Nothing amused him so much as the want of perception of a joke.  One hot day a Mrs. Jackson called on him, and spoke of the oppressive state of the weather.  ‘Heat! it was dreadful,’ said Sydney; ’I found I could do nothing for it but take off my flesh and sit in my bones.’  ’Take off your flesh and sit in your bones!  Oh, Mr. Smith! how could you do that?’ the lady cried.  ‘Come and see next time, ma’am—­nothing more easy.’  She went away, however, convinced that such a proceeding was very unorthodox.  No wonder, with all his various acquirements, it should be said of him that no ‘dull dinners were ever remembered in his company.’