ems,
which left out of account the emotional and sentimental side of man, were
incomplete and ineffectual. This higher side of his nature showed itself in
his lively affections, his intense love of home and wife and children, his
lifelong tenacity of friendship, and his overflowing sympathy for the poor,
the abject, and the suffering.

"The haunts of Happiness," he wrote, "are varied, and rather
unaccountable; but I have more often seen her among little children,
and by home firesides, and in country houses, than anywhere else,--at
least, I think so."

When his mother died, he wrote--"Everyone must go to his grave with his
heart scarred like a soldier's body," and, when he lost his infant boy, he
said--"Children are horribly insecure; the life of a parent is the life of
a gambler."

His more material side was well exhibited by the catalogue of "Modern
Changes" which he compiled in old age, heading it with the characteristic
couplet:--

"The good of ancient times let others state,
I think it lucky I was born so late."[171]

It concludes with the words, "Even in the best society one third of the
gentlemen at least were always drunk."

This reminds us that, in the matter of temperance, Sydney Smith was far in
advance of his time. That he was no

"budge doctor of the Stoic fur,
Praising the lean and sallow Abstinence,"

is plain enough from his correspondence. "The wretchedness of human life,"
he wrote in 1817, "is only to be encountered upon the basis of meat and
wine"; but he had a curiously keen sense of the evils induced by "the sweet
poyson."[172] As early as 1814 he urged Lord Holland to "leave off wine
entirely," for, though never guilty of excess, Holland showed a
"respectable and dangerous plenitude." After a visit to London in the same
year, Sydney wrote:--

"I liked London better than ever I liked it before, and simply, I
believe, from water-drinking. Without this, London is stupefaction and
inflammation. It is not the love of wine, but thoughtlessness and
unconscious imitation: other men poke out their hands for the
revolving wine, and one does the same, without thinking of it. All
people above the condition of labourers are ruined by excess of
stimulus and nourishment, clergy included. I never yet saw any
gentleman who ate and drank as little as was reasonable."

In 1828 he wrote to Lady Holland (of Holland House):--

"I not only was nev