acher to the Foundling Hospital was esteemed as a great help
by him. The writer of this memoir remembers an amusing anecdote related
of him at the table of an eminent literary character by a member of Lord
Woodhouselee's family, who had been desirous to obtain for Sydney the
patronage of the godly. To this end she persuaded Robert Grant and
Charles Grant (afterwards Lord Glenelg) to go to the Foundling to hear
him, she hoped to advantage; to her consternation he broke forth into so
familiar a strain, couched in terms so bordering on the jocose,--though
no one had deeper religious convictions than he had,--that the two
saintly brothers listened in disgust. They forgot how South let loose
the powers of his wit and sarcasm; and how the lofty-minded Jeremy
Taylor applied the force of humour to lighten the prolixity of argument.
Sydney Smith became, nevertheless, a most popular preacher; but the man
who prevents people from sleeping once a week in their pews is sure to
be criticised.

Let us turn to him, however, as a member of society. His circle of
acquaintance was enlarged, not only by his visits to Holland House, but
by his lectures on moral philosophy at the Royal Institution. Sir Robert
Peel, not the most impressionable of men, but one whose cold shake of
the hand is said--as Sydney Smith said of Sir James Mackintosh--'to have
come under the genus _Mortmain_' was a very young man at the time when
Albemarle Street was crowded with carriages from one end of the street
to the other, in consequence of Sydney Smith's lectures; yet he declared
that he had never forgotten the effect given to the speech of Logan, the
Indian chief, by Sydney's voice and manner.

His lectures produced a sum sufficient for Sydney to furnish a house in
Orchard Street. Doughty Street--raised to celebrity as having been the
residence, not only of Sydney Smith, but of Charles Dickens--was too far
for the _habitue_ of Holland House and the orator of Albemarle Street
long to sojourn there. In Orchard Street, Sydney enjoyed that domestic
comfort which he called 'the grammar of life;' delightful suppers, to
about twenty or thirty persons, who came and went as they pleased. A
great part of the same amusing and gifted set used to meet once a week
also at Sir James Mackintosh's, at a supper, which, though not exactly
Cowper's 'radish and an egg,' was simple, but plentiful--yet most
eagerly sought after. 'There are a few living,' writes Sydney Smith's
daugh