“Now, I mean not to drink one drop of wine to-day, and I shall be mad with spirits.  I always am when I drink no wine.  It is curious the effect a thimbleful of wine has upon me; I feel as flat as——­’s jokes; it destroys my understanding:  I forget the number of the Muses, and think them xxxix, of course; and only get myself right again by repeating the lines, and finding ‘Descend, ye Thirty-Nine!’ two feet too long.”

All this profound interest in the matter of food and drink was closely connected in Sydney Smith with a clear sense of the influence exercised by the body over the soul.—­

“I am convinced digestion is the great secret of life; and that character, talents, virtues, and qualities are powerfully affected by beef, mutton, pie-crust, and rich soups.  I have often thought I could feed or starve men into many virtues and vices, and affect them more powerfully with my instruments of cookery than Timotheus could do formerly with his lyre."[173]

According to his own accounts of himself he seems, like most people who are boisterously cheerful, to have had occasional tendencies to melancholy.  “An extreme depression of spirits,” he writes in 1826, “is an evil of which I have a full comprehension.”  But, on the other hand, he writes:—­

    “I thank God, who has made me poor, that He has made me merry.  I think
    it a better gift than much wheat and bean-land, with a doleful heart.”

“My constitutional gaiety comes to my aid in all the difficulties of life; and the recollection that, having embraced the character of an honest man and a friend to rational liberty, I have no business to repine at that mediocrity of fortune which I knew to be its consequence.”

The truth would seem to be that, finding, in his temperament and circumstances, some predisposing causes of melancholy, he refused to sit down under the curse and let it poison his life, but took vigorous measures with himself and his surroundings; cultivated cheerfulness as a duty, and repelled gloom as a disease.  He “tried always to live in the Present and the Future, and to look upon the Past as so much dirty linen.”  After reading Burke, and praising his “beautiful and fruitful imagination,” he says—­“With the politics of so remote a period I do not concern myself.”  He had a robust confidence in the cheering virtues of air and exercise, early hours and cold water, light and warmth, temperance in tea and coffee as well as wine—­“Apothegms of old women,” as he truly said, but tested by universal experience and found efficacious.  He recommended constant occupation, combined with variety of interests, and taught that nothing made one feel so happy as the act of doing good.  He thus describes his own experience, when, as Canon of St. Paul’s, he had presented a valuable living to the friendless son of the deceased incumbent.  He announced the presentation to the stricken family.—­