Such are the tropics. All this
reconciles us to our dews, fogs, vapours, and drizzle--to our
apothecaries rushing about with gargles and tinctures--to our old,
British, constitutional coughs, sore throats, and swelled faces."
Space should be found, in even the shortest book on Sydney Smith, for two
passages in which, perhaps more effectively than anywhere else, he clinched
an argument with a masterpiece of fun. The first is the warning to the
United States against the love of military glory. The second is the
wonderful concatenation of fallacies in "Noodle's Oration."[139] Both these
pieces will he found in Appendix B.
In 1840 he wrote to a friend:--
"I printed my reviews to show, if I could, that I had not passed my
life merely in making jokes; but that I had made use of what little
powers of pleasantry I might be endowed with, to discountenance bad,
and to encourage liberal and wise principles."
The natural and becoming indolence of age was now beginning to show itself
in Sydney Smith. He had worked harder than most men in his day, and now he
wisely cultivated ease. In his comfortable house in Green Street, he
received his friends with what he himself so excellently called "that
honest joy which warms more than dinner or wine"; but he went less than of
old into general society. Least of all was he inclined to that most
melancholy of all exertions which consists in rushing about to
entertainments which do not amuse.
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