eclares: another time flung as if he had
been a shuttlecock, into a neighbouring parish, very glad that it was
not a neighbouring planet, for somehow or other his horse and he had a
'trick of parting company.' 'I used,' he wrote, 'to think a fall from a
horse dangerous, but much experience has convinced me to the contrary. I
have had six falls in two years, and just behaved like the Three per
Cents., when they fell--I got up again, and am not a bit the worse for
it, any more than the stock in question.'

This country life was varied by many visits. In 1820 he went to visit
Lord Grey, then to Edinburgh, to Jeffrey travelling by the coach, a
gentleman, with whom he had been talking, said, 'There is a very clever
fellow lives near here, Sydney Smith, I believe; a devilish odd
fellow.'--'He may be an odd fellow,' cried Sydney, taking off his hat,
'but here he is, odd as he is, at your service.'

Sydney Smith found great changes in Edinburgh--changes, however, in many
respects for the better. The society of Edinburgh was then in its
greatest perfection. 'Its brilliancy, Lord Cockburn remarks, 'was owing
to a variety of peculiar circumstances, which only operated during this
period. The principal of these were the survivance of several of the
eminent men of the preceding age, and of curious old habits, which the
modern flood had not yet obliterated; the rise of a powerful community
of young men of ability; the exclusion of the British from the
Continent, which made this place, both for education and for residence,
a favourite resort of strangers; the war, which maintained a constant
excitement of military preparation and of military idleness: the blaze
of that popular literature which made this the second city in the empire
for learning and science; and the extent and the ease with which
literature and society embellished each other, without rivalry, and
without pedantry.

Among the 'best young' as his lordship styles them, were Lord Webb
Seymour and Francis Horner; whilst those of the 'interesting old' most
noted were Elizabeth Hamilton and Mrs. Grant of Laggan, who had
'unfolded herself,' to borrow Lord Cockburn's words, in the 'Letters
from the Mountains,' 'an interesting treasury of good solitary
thoughts.' Of these two ladies, Lord Cockburn says, 'They were excellent
women, and not _too_ blue. Their sense covered the colour.' It was to
Mrs. Hamilton that Jeffrey said, 'That there was no objection to the
blue stocking,