it was very likely to end in their keeping a buggy, at which
we all laughed as violently. The poor old lady, who was sleeping in a
garret because she could not bear to enter into the room lately
inhabited by her husband, sent for me and kissed me, sobbing with a
thousand emotions. The charitable physician wept too.... I never
passed so remarkable a morning, nor was more deeply impressed with the
sufferings of human life, and never felt more thoroughly the happiness
of doing good."

Of all his various remedies against melancholy, the one on which he most
constantly and most earnestly insisted, was the wisdom of "taking short
views,"--

"Dispel," he said, "that prophetic gloom which dives into futurity, to
extract sorrow from days and years to come, and which considers its
own unhappy visions as the decrees of Providence. We know nothing of
to-morrow: our business is to be good and happy to-day."

_Our business is to be good and happy_. This dogma inevitably suggests the
question--What was Sydney Smith's religion? First and foremost, he was a
staunch and consistent Theist.--

"I hate the insolence, persecution, and intolerance, which so often
pass under the name of religion, and have fought against them; but I
have an unaffected horror of irreligion and impiety, and every
principle of suspicion and fear would be excited in me by a man who
professed himself an infidel."[174]

In a lighter vein, he talked with dread of travelling in a stage-coach with
"an Atheist who told me what he had said in his heart."[175] And in 1808 he
wrote to his friend Jeffrey with reference to the tone of the _Edinburgh
Review_:--

"I must beg the favour of you to be explicit on one point. Do you mean
to take care that the _Review_ shall not profess or encourage infidel
principles? Unless this is the case, I must absolutely give up all
thoughts of connecting myself with it."

The grounds on which his theism rested seem, as Sir Leslie Stephen points
out, to have been exactly those which satisfied Paley. Lord Murray, who,
though he was a judge, does not seem to have been exacting about the
quality of argument, admiringly relates this anecdote of his friend:--

"A foreigner, on one occasion, indulging in sceptical doubts of the
existence of an overruling Providence in his presence, Sydney, who had
observed him evidently well satisfied with his repast,