you up, as you are standing, out of your coat, waistcoat, and breeches.  Such are the tropics.  All this reconciles us to our dews, fogs, vapours, and drizzle—­to our apothecaries rushing about with gargles and tinctures—­to our old, British, constitutional coughs, sore throats, and swelled faces.”

Space should be found, in even the shortest book on Sydney Smith, for two passages in which, perhaps more effectively than anywhere else, he clinched an argument with a masterpiece of fun.  The first is the warning to the United States against the love of military glory.  The second is the wonderful concatenation of fallacies in “Noodle’s Oration."[139] Both these pieces will he found in Appendix B.

In 1840 he wrote to a friend:—­

“I printed my reviews to show, if I could, that I had not passed my life merely in making jokes; but that I had made use of what little powers of pleasantry I might be endowed with, to discountenance bad, and to encourage liberal and wise principles.”

The natural and becoming indolence of age was now beginning to show itself in Sydney Smith.  He had worked harder than most men in his day, and now he wisely cultivated ease.  In his comfortable house in Green Street, he received his friends with what he himself so excellently called “that honest joy which warms more than dinner or wine”; but he went less than of old into general society.  Least of all was he inclined to that most melancholy of all exertions which consists in rushing about to entertainments which do not amuse.  In 1840 he wrote, in answering an invitation to the Opera:—­

    “Thy servant is threescore-and-ten years old; can he hear the sound of
    singing men and singing women?  A Canon at the Opera!  Where have you
    lived?  In what habitations of the heathen?  I thank you, shuddering.”

Although the Canon would not go to the Opera, his general faculty of enjoyment was unimpaired, and, as always, he loved a gibe at the clergy.  On the 30th of November 1841, Samuel Wilberforce wrote to a friend about George Augustus Selwyn,[140] Missionary Bishop of New Zealand:—­

“Selwyn is just setting out.  Sydney Smith says it will make quite a revolution in the dinners of New Zealand. Tete d’Eveque will be the most recherche dish, and the servant will add, ’And there is cold clergyman on the side-table.’”

But this is Sydney’s own version of the joke:—­

“The advice I sent to the Bishop of New Zealand, when he had to receive the cannibal chiefs there, was to say to them, ’I deeply regret, sirs, to have nothing on my own table suited to your tastes, but you will find plenty of cold curate and roasted clergyman on the sideboard’; and if, in spite of this prudent provision, his visitors should end their repast by eating him likewise, why, I could only add, ‘I sincerely hoped he would disagree with them.’”