is brother
Courtenay's Indian fortune. The latter, after rebuilding it,--for he had
either a fate or a passion for bricks and mortar,--he made on a small
scale one of the most beautiful and hospitable houses in the West of
England.

To Combe Florey, as to Foston, a sheaf of fantastic legends attaches
itself; indeed, as Lady Holland was not very fond of dates, it is
sometimes not clear to which of the two residences some of them apply.
At both Sydney had a huge store-room, or rather grocer's and chemist's
shop, from which he supplied the wants, not merely of his household, but
of half the neighbourhood. It appears to have been at Combe Florey (for
though no longer poor he still had a frugal mind), that he hit upon the
device of "putting the cheapest soaps in the dearest papers," confident
of the result upon the female temper. It was certainly there that he
fitted up two favourite donkeys with a kind of holiday-dress of antlers,
to meet the objection of one of his lady-visitors that he had no deer;
and converted certain large bay-trees in boxes into the semblance of an
orangery, by fastening some dozens of fine fruit to the branches. I like
to think of the mixed astonishment and disgust of a great Russian, and a
not very small Frenchman, both not long deceased, M. Tourguenieff and M.
Paul de Saint-Victor, if they had heard of these pleasing tomfooleries.
But tomfoolery, though, when properly and not inordinately indulged, one
of the best things in life, must, like the other good things of life,
come to an end. After an illness of some months Sydney Smith died at his
house in Green Street, of heart disease, on 22nd February 1845, in the
seventy-fourth year of his age.

The memorials and evidences of his peculiar if not unique genius consist
of three different kinds; reported or remembered conversations and
jokes, letters, and formal literary work. He was once most famous as a
talker; but conversation is necessarily the most perishable of all
things, and its recorded fragments bear keeping less than any other
relics. Some of the verbal jests assigned to him (notably the famous
one about the tortoise, which, after being long known by the initiated
not to be his, has at last been formally claimed by its rightful owner),
are certainly or probably borrowed or falsely attributed, as rich
conversationalists always borrow or receive. And always the things have
something of the mangled air which sayings detached from their context