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in a character more important and personal than that of the wag who was by." The outline of an amiable and consistent life makes itself visible through the hedge of anecdote which clings to it like a laughing bloom of roses to a parsonage wall. We can discern the solid and durable masonry of character through the clusters that half conceal it. There is, we are enabled to conclude, order and regularity and goodness and charity and principle and piety within, notwithstanding the flexile and flaunting luxuriance withont. The affection of a daughter has led us through the rustic porch, and introduced us to the true economy of the paternal mansion. And, in doing so, she has pointed with no unbecoming pride to the marks, everywhere apparent, of strong sense and sound judgment, guided by the truest taste, presiding inside the walls abandoned on their exterior to the tendriled mercies of the least dignified of climb ing plants. We had known Peter Plymley well, and had laughed at Sydney Smith's dinner-sayings and after-dinner-doings: but we have here learned to know, love, and respect the man with whom our intercourse had previously been a joke: we feel that Smith is no longer a modern Joe Miller;-he is a laughing philosopher.

But whom have we here-pacing measuredly after the others? A London exquisite, as we live! "Thomas Raikes, Esquire." A great man? some one will ask. Well, great, in some respects; great according to circumstances; great north, north-west; great if you consult his own self-estimate. Great, if to rub familiarly with the great constitutes greatness. Some men have greatness thrust upon them. Some put it on for themselves with their great-coat. There he is, in his habit as he lived. More carefully got up even than Hamlet's father's ghost. A glossy beaver crowns his respectable trim grey locks. A puffy complacency harmonizes respectable features into the semblance of distinction, while the languid droop of eye and over-swelling of dewlap make disclosures of turtle, trufiles, and tokay. Over the manly chest buttons tight the most unwrinkled of coats; while the length of the somewhat shaky limb conveys itself through immaculate tweeds into the

polish of indubitable Wellingtons. The man has lived and moved and had his dinners in St. James's-street -when he has not lived and moved and had his "diners" in the Faubourg St. Germain,-and we can no more imagine him shouldering through the thoroughfares of life, or breasting its obstacles, than we can by any stretch of fancy divine what might be the aspect of that face released from its stock, or the proportions of that form, denuded of the padding, wadding, screwing, lacing, and strapping which constitute it the faultless model of the George the Fourth era.

He

Now, considering that it was a feather to know him in his day—it is a confession to own that we never laid eyes upon Thomas Raikes, Esquire, in the flesh. Nor shall we now; seeing that his stock has been taken finally down, and his frockcoat unbuttoned for ever. We have only seen him in lithograph. stands, his own frontispiece, in the beginning of a book. Indeed, we do not say that it might not be possible, given the book, to argue up to the lithograph-to reconstruct Thomas Raikes, Esquire, out of his own memoirs. The thing might be done, as far as we see, by any careful Cuvier of literature. But it saves a world of trouble to have him got up and put together for us. It enables us, indeed, to understand much of what he has written; and here and there to correct, modify, reject, or adopt dubious matter by the light of the author's own countenance. refer from Raikes in word, to Raikes in figure, and make our corrections and verifications accordingly. short, Thomas Raikes' book begins with himself. None but himself can be his frontispiece. He stands before what he has said, like a champion, ready to defend his own assertions. "I tell a great many stories, and make a great many wonderful disclosures-if you don't believe me, here I am!"

We

In

Who was Thomas Raikes? and what is the book about? we fancy we hear some one ask. What? Not know Thomas Raikes? "Not to know him"-you know the rest. But seriously, who was Thomas Raikes? Perhaps the safest reply is to say, that he was nobody. An individual-a person-an identity-a "particulier".

-nothing more. He was neither highly born, nor highly educated, nor highly gifted, nor highly fortuned, nor highly distinguished. Nor was he the reverse of all this. Mediocrity was his essence. He glided through an eventless life, without rufiling its current or his own feathers. He swam down his destined canal, leaving not a ripple and scarcely a wake behind him. What, it may well be asked,-then, can his book be about? Simply, about what he saw, heard, and read; and anybody else circumstanced as he was could write a readable book-and we consider his book very readable-on the same subject. Fate threw him into the company of great-occasionally of illustrious personages. want of bristles in his nature, corresponding to the scrupulous beardlessness of his countenance, enabled him to rub against these personages without making himself disagreeably feit. He was submitted to without objection or suspicion, as a domestic tabby, which passes its affectionate velvet across our legs without exciting so much as a soupçon of tooth or claw. With this sleekness were associated a keen perception, a ready memory, and an industrious pen. He was, through life, and in all society, amang them, takin' notes."

*

The

Here

we have in the two volumes before us, the first instalments of these notes, which will probably run, according to the estimate we are able to make, to a length equalling those of our own genial and journal-making countryman, Thomas Moore.

Nevertheless, Thomas Raikes notes well. We can safely say, if we cannot shew it, that he has picked up, at his dinners at Oatlands, and at his suppers in the Rue St. Florentin, crumbs which ought not to have been swept off the table of life into oblivion.

And thus we have no hesitation in admitting the less prominent journalizer as the appropriate complement the tertium quid-in this compound of the choicer elements of society in the beginning of the nineteenth century. Truly, among them they do make the "the complet" of

their time. Tea! Hot, high-flavoured, stinging, gossip-growing, scandalraising, irresistible tea! who is there who does not own thy potent spell? Here is animated tea-written teatea of mighty minds and mighty personages dangerous, explosive, gunpowder tea-thickened with the cream of society-flavoured with the sweets of piquancy-irrigated from the fount of stolen waters-all standing ready, only wanting a stir from our silver spoon to be a beverage fit for those divine objects of our worship-the old maids.

Now, what is to be gathered from this fresh three-fold contribution to our stores of amusing and instructive literature? What is the trefoil to produce? Great truths have been taught from the triune leaves ere now. Can we extract small truths from these? We dare not promise it. Carefully have we scanned the volumes lying before us, and conscientiously have we set to work to extract a remunerative amount of instructive material out of them :-we have painfully applied the severest tests, chemical, mechanical, logical, and moral. Yet we are concerned to state that the quantity of actual value which resulted would have passed through a gold-digger's sieve. Thus disappointed, we felt naturally inclined to abandon the task of noticing them altogether. It would be, we felt, both cruel and ungraceful to animadvert with rigour upon this trifling defect in works so favorably received by the public. Why should we set ourselves up in unpopular opposition to the world? Why must we assert ourselves at the risk of becoming gratuitous martyrs? Better be silent and think the more-rather indulge in the luxury of holding our tongue. Besides, there is a satisfaction in being able to know oneself beforehand with the world, in case it should ever come to make the discovery for itself. There is a pride in being able to say, with the poet—

"Omnia percepi atque animo mecum ante peregi."

Fortified with this logic, we had

made up our minds to place Rogers, Smith, and Raikes on the shelf side by side, amidst the innumerable multitude of volumes which have passed to their silent sepulchres in our library, when it occurred to us that it might be as well, as we could not instruct the world by means of their pages, to try whether we could not make a few of our friends laugh out of them. It struck us that we had possibly expected too much from these departed worthies. Nay, as our thoughts continued to flow in this vein, we began to suspect that we had made a mistake. We had sunk for ore, where we ought to have bored for water. What right had we to dictate to the poet, the divine, or the dandy, the exact quality of the material he chose to supply to the public? If our adust and melancholic habit prompted us to look for the heavy metal suitable to the workshops of the world, ought we to be offended if there burst up at our feet a gush of brilliant, sparkling, living wit, drenching our morality, and escaping through a thousand channels to reach the haunts and hearts of mankind? We discovered our mis

take just in time. The top step of the ladder had been reached, the volumes were on their way to the mausoleum on the highest shelf,when our hand was stayed-a relenting smile passed across our face-we came down the books were restored to the library table-the pen was resumed, and we set to work. By the time this process had been gone through, we had realized to ourselves the fact that while these three works are deficient in most of those qualities which can give sterling value to literature, and an enduring fame to their authors or heroes, wanting in a connected and continuous interest, defective in character if not in tone and taste,-to a great extent destitute of curious, novel, and interesting information, and unennobled by original and comprehensive views of men and society -they possess one merit in common, -they are interspersed with odd, quaint, comical stories-with flashes of humour, in fact; and, at a sacrifice of our loftier sensibilities, draw from us, in numberless places, in spite of ourselves, a hearty laugh.

And, after all, what a capital, kindly, honest, jolly, glorious good

If

thing a laugh is! What a tonic ! What a digester! What a febrifuge! What an exorciser of evil spirits! Better than a walk before breakfast, or a nap after dinner. How it shuts the mouth of malice, and opens the brow of kindness! Whether it discovers the gums of infancy or age, the grinders of folly or the pearls of beauty; whether it racks the sides and deforms the countenance of vulgarity, or dimples the visage and moistens the eye of refinement,-in all its phases, and on all faces, contorting, relaxing, overwhelming, convulsing, throwing the human form into the happy shaking and quaking of idiotcy, and turning the human countenance into something appropriate to Bully Bottom's tranformation,-under every circumstance, and everywhere, a laugh is a glorious thing. Like "a thing of beauty," it is "a joy for ever." There is no remorse in it. It leaves no sting-except in the sides,-and that goes off. Even a single unparticipated laugh is a great affair to witness. But it is seldom single. It is more infectious than scarlet fever. You cannot gravely contemplate a laugh. there is one laugher, and one witness, there are forthwith two laughers. And so on. The convulsion is propagated like sound. What a thing it is when it becomes epidemic! Half a dozen laughers round a table is a sight to see. But visit a popular assembly-a great multitude at a hustings, say, or in a theatre. Go to see Buckstone. Observe, if you can keep yourself clear of the infection, the first approach of the throng towards laughing. The irregular, interrupted, confused disturbance, not quite fully participated in, or thoroughly welcome, but spreading, gathering, growing. See an uneasy commotion, as if people were making room amongst each other for an approaching riot, which demands play of elbow. Behold the colour mount, the universal visage widen, the general eye glisten as the wizard weaves his spell-be he clad in that irresistible Noah's Ark, or whatever other garb his supreme potency may please to assume. Watch the agitation increasing, the witchery becoming more and more ecstatically dominant, till to each movement, gesture, word, look, the whole mass responds in obe

dient and simultaneous thunder, and rocks and roars and raves with awful regularity of pulsation, as the billows of mirth burst and surge upon the shore of reason, threatening to tear it into the abyss of madness. And then, as it dies off from sheer exhaustion, ever and anon, as some incontrollable sob relieves one overlaboured breast, the paroxysm gains fresh strength, and bursts into wild and wondrous abandonment once more.

In the limited societies amid which he moved, no man who ever lived had the power of exciting this short madness which is not anger, more thoroughly than the reverend divine of Combe Florey, Sydney Smith, unless indeed we except a certain William Bankes, who is fabled to have overpowered even him. "When in good spirits," says one who knew him well, the exuberance of his fancy showed itself in the most fantastic images and most ingenious absurdities, till his hearers and himself were at times fatigued with the merriment they excited." His biographer relates that on some occasions the servants, forgetting all decorum, were obliged to escape to conceal their mirth. After a story,"Oh, Mr. Sydney!' said a young lady, recovering from the general convulsion, 'did you make all that yourself? Yes, Lucy,' throwing himself back in his chair and shaking with laughter, all myself, child; all my own thunder. Do you think, when I am about to make a joke, I send for my neighbours C. and G., or consult the clerk and churchwardens upon it? But let us go into the garden ;' and, all laughing till we cried, without hats or bonnets, we sallied forth out of his glorified window into the garden." This glimpse shows as much as any elaborate detail the power of the reverend Canon of St. Paul's over the risible muscles of his auditory. Although refinement was a frequent attribute of that wit, and strong pungent philosophy and common sense occasionally dignified it, broad joke was its characteristic. Broad, blustering, boisterous fun. The roars he excited were partaken of by himself. Nay, he was chorægus of the cachinnation. He intoned the laugh of which the multiplied response was involuntary and from the heart. There can be little doubt in the mind

6

of any one who has read much of the literature of modern conversation, that of all the brilliant group of talkers of that day, our countryman Luttrell was the one whose observations were most pointed and whose wit was most sparkling. Rogers himself admits this. But in humour Sydney Smith stood alone. The humour was fresh, too,-you found the dew on it, as his friend Mr. Howard remarked. Out of so little, too! Take the following absurdity for instance

"Talking of absence: The oddest instance of absence of mind happened to me once in forgetting my own name. I knocked at a door in London; asked, 'Is Mrs. Bat home?'

'Yes, Sir, pray what name shall I say?' I looked in the man's face astonished-what name? what name? ay, that is the question; what is my name? I believe the man thought me mad; but it is literally true, that during the space of two or three minutes I had no more idea who I was than if I had never existed. I did not know whether I was a Dissenter or a layI felt as dull as Sternhold and Hopkins. At last, to my great relief, it flashed across me that I was Sydney Smith."

man.

Or a still more utterly absurd anecdote

"I heard of a clergyman who went jogging along the road till he came to a tumpike. "What is to pay?" "Pay, Sir? for what?" asked the turnpike-man. "Why, for my horse, to be sure." "Your horse, Sir? what horse? Here is no horse, Sir." "No horse? God bless me !" said he suddenly, looking down between his legs, "I thought I was on horseback.'"

Rogers has continued to pick up, in his talk at table (as Boswellized by the Reverend Alexander Dyce,) some crumbs of the Canon of St. Paul's, dropped from the board. "At one

time," he says, "when I gave a dinner, I used to have candles placed all round the dining-room, and high up in order to show off the pictures. I asked Smith how he liked that plan. 'Not at all,' he replied; 'above, there is a blaze of light, and below, nothing but darkness and gnashing of teeth.'"

This is quaint. The next is of doubtful merit. His physicians advised him to "take a walk upon an empty stomach." He asked, " upon

whose?"

Poor, dear old Lady Cork! Well do we remember thee as thou satest

amongst the young and light-hearted, using, at a hundred, the efforts of a school-girl to be young and lighthearted as they! Not easily shall we forget the little white bundle of satin and muslin out of which a merry little eye peeped and a cheerful little voice piped, surmounted by a whiteplumed turban, suggesting to a wag the resemblance to a shuttle-cock""all cork and feathers." Nor will it quickly pass from our memory the start we gave when the little muffle of gauze sprung up, as the move of the ladies for the dining-room took place, and, leaning upon the arm of the loveliest of hostesses, actually gambolled, with infantine and (apparently) irrepressible abandon, to the door! Her heart, all the time, was not quite as young as her ways. Lady Cork,' says Smith, once so moved by a charity sermon, that she begged me to lend her a guinea for her contribution. I did so. She never repaid me, and spent it on herself.'

666

was

But Smith's professional jokes were, after all, his happiest. We dare to add, in passing, that, as a rule, the church admits of a better class of conventional and technical wit than the bar. We feel a pang as we say this; for the vengeance of the long robe is before us; and they have a thousand ways of wreaking it at this side of the grave, too; which makes a difference. But nevertheless, we must be candid. Whether it is that all men are and must necessarily be familiar with a portion of the technicalities which form the staple of clerical wit; or that the very sense of the impropriety, according to the Duchess de Longueville's theory, enhances the charm, we will not decide the fact is, in our estimation, incontrovertible. Church wit is universally relished and universally understood. Bar wit is only partially understood, and chiefly appreciated by barristers and those attorneys whom they entertain at dinner.

Let Sydney Smith speak for himself. "I had a very odd dream last night," said he; I dreamed that there were thirty-nine muses and nine articles and my head is still quite confused about them." We can imagine its being a little perplexing to

the waking divine to have got the idea, in an after-supper nap, that good old Burnet was the God of the Sun, and Apollo bishop of Sarum.

The few scraps we have been able to give, the reader will see, are chiefly gathered at second hand from Rogers. We have chosen them as the newest. It is only fair to the Canon Residentiary and laughter-loving Rector of Combe Florey, before turning from him, to relate one among the many traits of generosity of heart which so creditably distinguished him, and secured to him the affectionate regard of the great and good wherever he was known. A wag was he; and as a wag will he descend to posterity; but he was also a philosopher. He wrote, and he preached, and he spoke, and he joked, to the purpose. He was, however, better than all this. He was a man of kind, quick, and tender sensibility. And of this, our parting anecdote, characteristic as it is, shall satisfy the reader. We give it in his own words, as it is contained in a letter to his wife.

"I went over yesterday to the Tates at Edmonton. The family consists of three delicate daughters, an aunt, the old lady, and her son, then curate of Edmonton; the old lady was in bed. I found there a physician, an old friend of Tate's, attending them from friendship, who had come from London for that purpose. They were in daily expectation of being turned out from house and curacy. I began by inquiring the character of their servant; then turned the conversation upon their affairs, and expressed a hope the Chapter might ultimately do something for them. I then said, It is my duty to state to you (they were all assembled) that I have given away the living at Edmonton; and have written to our Chapter clerk this morning, to mention the person to whom I have given it; and I must also tell you, that I am sure he will appoint his curate. (A general silence and dejection.) It is a very odd coincidence,' I added, that the gentleman I have selected is a namesake of this family; his name is Tate. Have you any relations of that name?' 'No, we have not. And, by a more singular coincidence, his name is Thomas Tate; in short,' I added, 'there is no use in mincing the matter, you are vicar of Edmonton.' They all burst into tears. It flung me also into a great agitation of tears, and I wept and groaned for a long time. Then I rose, and said I thought it was very likely to end in their keeping a buggy, at which we all laughed as violently."

There never was a story told which