" He
keenly admired the luxury and beauty and prettiness of Paris, and
especially the profusion of glass in French drawing-rooms. "I remember
entering a room with glass all round it, and saw myself reflected on every
side. I took it for a meeting of the clergy, and was delighted of course."
He returned to England in May; on the 2nd of June Parliament was dissolved.
"We have been," he wrote, "in the horror of Elections--each party acting
and thinking as if the salvation of several planets depended upon the
adoption of Mr. Johnson and the rejection of Mr. Jackson." In July, Thomas
Babington Macaulay, a young and unsuccessful barrister, found himself on
circuit at York. He was told that Mr. Smith had come to see him, and, when
the visitor was admitted, he recognized--
"the Smith of Smiths, Sydney Smith, _alias_ Peter Plymley. I had
forgotten his very existence till I discerned the queer contrast
between his black coat and his snow-white head, and the equally
curious contrast between the clerical amplitude of his person, and the
most unclerical wit, whim, and petulance of his eye."
Macaulay spent the following Sunday at Foston Rectory, and thus records his
impressions:--
"I understand that S.S. is a very respectable apothecary, and most
liberal of his skill, his medicine, his soup, and his wine, among the
sick.
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