ate
some excellent but expensive dinners, mastered the Louvre in a quarter of
an hour, and saw Talma in tragedy and Mademoiselle Mars in "genteel
comedy." At the Opera he noticed that "the house was full of English, who
talk loud, and seem to care little for other people. This is their
characteristic, and a very brutal and barbarous distinction it is." He
keenly admired the luxury and beauty and prettiness of Paris, and
especially the profusion of glass in French drawing-rooms. "I remember
entering a room with glass all round it, and saw myself reflected on every
side. I took it for a meeting of the clergy, and was delighted of course."
He returned to England in May; on the 2nd of June Parliament was dissolved.
"We have been," he wrote, "in the horror of Elections--each party acting
and thinking as if the salvation of several planets depended upon the
adoption of Mr. Johnson and the rejection of Mr. Jackson." In July, Thomas
Babington Macaulay, a young and unsuccessful barrister, found himself on
circuit at York. He was told that Mr. Smith had come to see him, and, when
the visitor was admitted, he recognized--

"the Smith of Smiths, Sydney Smith, _alias_ Peter Plymley. I had
forgotten his very existence till I discerned the queer contrast
between his black coat and his snow-white head, and the equally
curious contrast between the clerical amplitude of his person, and the
most unclerical wit, whim, and petulance of his eye."

Macaulay spent the following Sunday at Foston Rectory, and thus records his
impressions:--

"I understand that S.S. is a very respectable apothecary, and most
liberal of his skill, his medicine, his soup, and his wine, among the
sick. He preached a very queer sermon--the former half too familiar,
and the latter half too florid, but not without some ingenuity of
thought and expression....

"His misfortune is to have chosen a profession at once above him and
below him. Zeal would have made him a prodigy; formality and bigotry
would have made him a bishop; but he could neither rise to the duties
of his order, nor stoop to its degradation."

In December Sydney wrote to a newly-elected Member of Parliament:--

"I see you have broken ice in the House of Commons. I shall be curious
to hear your account of your feelings, of what colour the human
creatures looked who surrounded you, and how the candles and Speaker
appeared.... For