we fear, for ever. Our world presents nothing like it: we must look
back, not around us, for strong minds, cultivated up to the nicest
point. Our age is too diffused, too practical for us to hope to witness
again so grand a spectacle.

From his progenitors Sydney Smith inherited one of his best gifts, great
animal spirits--the only spirits one wants in this racking life of ours;
and his were transmitted to him by his father. That father, Mr. Robert
Smith, was odd as well as clever. His oddities seem to have been coupled
with folly but that of Sydney was soberized by thought, and swayed by
intense common sense. The father had a mania for buying and altering
places: one need hardly say that he spoiled them. Having done so, he
generally sold them; and _nineteen_ various places were thus the source
of expense to him, and of injury to the pecuniary interests of his
family.

This strange spendthrift married a Miss Olier, a daughter of a French
emigrant, from Languedoc. Every one may remember the charming attributes
given by Miss Kavanagh, in her delicious tale, 'Nathalie,' to the French
women of the South. This Miss Olier seems to have realized all one's
ideas of the handsome, sweet-tempered, high-minded Southrons of _la
belle France_. To her Sydney Smith traced his native gaiety; her beauty
did not, certainly, pass to him as well as to some of her other
descendants. When Talleyrand was living in England as an emigrant, on
intimate terms with Robert Smith, Sydney's brother, or Bobus, as he was
called by his intimates, the conversation turned one day on hereditary
beauty. Bobus spoke of his mother's personal perfections: _'Ah, mon
ami,'_ cried Talleyrand, _c'était apparemment, monsieur: volre père qui
n'était pas bien.'_