A happy old age concluded his life, at once brilliant and useful.  To the last he never considered his education as finished.  His wit, a friend said, ’was always fresh, always had the dew on it.  He latterly got into what Lord Jeffrey called the vicious habit of water drinking.  Wine, he said, destroyed his understanding.  He even ’forgot the number of the Muses, and thought it was thirty-nine, of course.’  He agreed with Sir James Mackintosh that he had found the world more good and more foolish than he had thought when young.  He took a cheerful view of all things; he thanked God for small as well as great things, even for tea.  ’I am glad,’ he used to say, ‘I was not born before tea.’  His domestic affections were strong, and were heartily reciprocated.

General society he divided into classes:  ’The noodles—­very numerous and well known.  The affliction woman—­a valuable member of society, generally an ancient spinster in small circumstances, who packs up her bag and sets off in cases of illness or death, “to comfort, flatter, fetch, and carry.”  The up-takers—­people who see, from their fingers’ ends and go through a room touching everything.  The clearers—­who begin at a dish and go on tasting and eating till it is finished.  The sheep-walkers—­who go on for ever on the beaten track.  The lemon-squeezers of society—­who act on you as a wet blanket; see a cloud in sunshine; the nails of the coffin in the ribbons of a bride; extinguish all hope; people, whose very look sets your teeth on an edge.  The let-well-aloners, cousin-german to the noodles—­yet a variety, and who are afraid to act, and think it safer to stand still.  Then the washerwomen—­very numerous! who always say, “Well, if ever I put on my best bonnet, ’tis sure to rain,” &c.

’Besides this there is a very large class of people always treading on your gouty foot, or talking in your deaf ear, or asking you to give them something with your lame hand,’ &c.

During the autumn of the year 1844, Sydney Smith felt the death-stroke approaching.  ‘I am so weak, both in body and mind,’ he said, ’that I believe if the knife were put into my hand, I should not have strength enough to stick it into a Dissenter.’  In October he became seriously ill.  ‘Ah!  Charles,’ he said to General Fox (when he was being kept very low), ‘I wish they would allow me even the wing of a roasted butterfly,’ He dreaded sorrowful faces around him; but confided to his old servant, Annie Kay—­and to her alone—­his sense of his danger.

Almost the last person Sydney Smith saw was his beloved brother Bobus, who followed him to the grave a fortnight after he had been laid in the tomb.

He lingered till the 22nd of February, 1845.  His son closed his eyes.  His last act was, bestowing on a poverty-stricken clergyman a living.

He was buried at Kensal Green, where his eldest son, Douglas, had been interred.

It has been justly and beautifully said of Sydney Smith, that Christianity was not a dogma with him, but a practical and most beneficent rule of life.