“I need not say how my climate is improved.  The neighbourhood much the same as all other neighbourhoods.  Red wine and white, soup and fish, commonplace dulness and prejudice, bad wit and good-nature.  I am, after my manner, making my place perfect, and have twenty-eight people constantly at work.”

“I am going on fighting with bricklayers and carpenters, and shall ultimately make a very pretty place and a very good house.”  “I continue to be delighted with the country.  My parsonage will be perfection.  The harvest is got in without any rain.  The Cider is such an enormous crop, that it is sold at ten shillings a hogshead; so that a human creature may lose his reason for a penny.”

“Luttrell came over for a day, from whence I know not, but I thought not from good pastures; at least, he had not his usual soup-and-pattie look.  There was a forced smile upon his countenance, which seemed to indicate plain roast and boiled; and a sort of apple-pudding depression, as if he had been staying with a clergyman....  He was very agreeable, but spoke too lightly, I thought, of veal soup, I took him aside, and reasoned the matter with him, but in vain; to speak the truth, Luttrell is not steady in his judgments on dishes.  Individual failures with him soon degenerate into generic objections, till, by some fortunate accident, he eats himself into better opinions.  A person of more calm reflection thinks not only of what he is consuming at that moment, but of the soups of the same kind he has met with in a long course of dining, and which have gradually and justly elevated the species.  I am perhaps making too much of this; but the failures of a man of sense are always painful”

One of the chief features in the restored Rectory of Combe Florey was a library, twenty-eight feet long and eight high, ending in a bay-window supported by pillars, and looking into a brilliant garden.  This room had been made by “throwing a pantry, a passage, and a shoe-hole together.”  Three sides of it were covered with books.  “No furniture so charming as books,” said Sydney, “even if you never open them, or read a single word.”  He passionately loved light and colour, sunshine and flowers; and all his books were bound in the most vivid blues and reds.  “What makes a fire so pleasant is that it is a live thing in a dead room,” A visitor thus describes him at his literary work:—­

“At a large table in the bay-window, with his desk before him—­on one end of this table a case, something like a small deal music-stand, filled with manuscript books—­on the other a large deal tray, filled with a leaden ink-stand, containing ink enough for a county; a magnifying glass; a carpenter’s rule; several large steel pens, which it was high treason to touch; a glass bowl full of shot and water, to clean these precious pens; and some red tape, which he called ’one of the grammars of life’; a measuring line,