tion speaking in a lighter tone.

An account of a man's personal characteristics must contain some estimate
of his aesthetic sense. This was not very strongly developed in Sydney
Smith. He admired the beauties of a smiling landscape, such as he saw in
the Vale of Taunton, and hated grimness and barrenness such as he
remembered at Harrogate. "I thought it the most heaven-forgotten country
under the sun when I saw it; there were only nine mangy fir-trees there,
and even they all leaned away from it." He enjoyed bright colours and sweet
scents, and had a passion for light. His views of Art were primitive. We
have seen that he preferred gas to Correggio. He admired West,[160] and did
not admire Haydon.[161] He bought pictures for the better decoration of his
drawing-room, and, when they did not please him, had them altered to suit
his taste,--

"Look at that sea-piece, now; what would you desire more? It is true,
the moon in the corner was rather dingy when I first bought it; so I
had a new moon put in for half-a-crown, and now I consider it
perfect."

This perhaps may be regarded as burlesque, and so may his sympathetic
remark to the gushing connoisseur--

"I got into dreadful disgrace with him once, when, standing before a
picture at Bowood, he exclaimed, turning to me, 'Immense breadth of
light and shade!' I innocently said, 'Yes;--about an inch and a half.'
He gave me a look that ought to have killed me."

But his gratitude to his young friend Lady Mary Bennet, who covered the
walls of his Rectory with the sweet products of her pencil, is only too
palpably sincere. It may perhaps be imputed to him for aesthetic virtue that
he considered the national monuments in St. Paul's, with the sole exception
of Dr. Johnson's, "a disgusting heap of trash." It is less satisfactory
that he found the Prince Regent's "suite of golden rooms" at Carlton House
"extremely magnificent."

To music he was more sympathetic, but even here his sympathies had their
limitations. Music in the minor key made him melancholy, and had to be
discontinued when he was in residence at St. Paul's;[162] and this was not
his only musical prejudice.--

"Nothing can be more disgusting than an oratorio. How absurd to see
five hundred people fiddling like madmen about the Israelites in the
Red Sea!"

"Yesterday I heard Rubini and Grisi, Lablache and Tamburini. The
opera, by Bellini, _I Puritani_, was dr