"
Saba, Lady Holland, who had a discreet but provoking trick of omitting the
proper name wherever we specially thirst to know it, thus reports her
father's conversation:--
"Now, I mean not to drink one drop of wine to-day, and I shall be mad
with spirits. I always am when I drink no wine. It is curious the
effect a thimbleful of wine has upon me; I feel as flat as----'s
jokes; it destroys my understanding: I forget the number of the Muses,
and think them xxxix, of course; and only get myself right again by
repeating the lines, and finding 'Descend, ye Thirty-Nine!' two feet
too long."
All this profound interest in the matter of food and drink was closely
connected in Sydney Smith with a clear sense of the influence exercised by
the body over the soul.--
"I am convinced digestion is the great secret of life; and that
character, talents, virtues, and qualities are powerfully affected by
beef, mutton, pie-crust, and rich soups. I have often thought I could
feed or starve men into many virtues and vices, and affect them more
powerfully with my instruments of cookery than Timotheus could do
formerly with his lyre."[173]
According to his own accounts of himself he seems, like most people who are
boisterously cheerful, to have had occasional tendencies to melancholy. "An
extreme depression of spirits," he writes in 1826, "is an evil of which I
have a full comprehension.
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