The Southern Journal

Anecdotes of the Late Rev. Sidney Smith.

A writer in the Atlas, giving some personal recollections of this deceased wit and scholar, relates the following anecdotes.
A hundred witty stories are told of him. Edwin Landseer, the celebrated animal painter, sent to ask him to sit for his portrait. Mr. Smith, in reply, quoted the Scripture, and said—

"Is thy servant a dog, that he should do this thing?"

Indeed, he was rather fond of Scriptural witticisms; and on the last occasion of my ever seeing him, at his lodgings in Green street, in London, I remember the conversation turned on the Pennsylvania letters, which had then just appeared in the Morning Chronicle. He was surrounded by a circle of friends, one of whom, a young man, made an observation, which was to the effect, I think, that he envied him his acquirements and lettered ease.
"Young gentleman," said he, taking up a bundle of Pennsylvania scrip, "I would you were altogether as I am, except these bonds."
Of course, there was a general roar.—
Whether such application of Scripture as these were correct or not, in a grave and reverend teacher, is left for others to decide.
Referring to Charles Lamb and his habits of intemperance, Smith one day remarked—
"He draws so much beer, that no wonder he buffoons people—he must have a butt to put it in."
Southey undertook to pay Smith a visit and was conducted into the library, a large room full of old-fashioned furniture, where books, Parliamentary reports, pamphlets, and letters lay all about, in most admired confusion. "This is my work-shop," he observed to Southey, "as black as any smithy in Christendom."
And then the neat and precise Laureate seemed to think so: for he looked cautiously about for a clean chair, folded up his coat tails, and was preparing to sit down, when Smith, with a sly gravity, wiped, with his handkerchief, (none of the cleanest,) the dust from an old folio edition of the works of one of the Fathers of the Church, and requested his friend to sit on it. Southey shrunk from the profanation, and respectfully removing the work, preferred the dusty chair. He was perhaps mentally comparing, or rather contrasting, the appearance of Smith's library, with that of his own exquisitely neat one at Keswick.—
Alas! ere long he would wander into that learned retreat, there gaze for hours, with an idiotic smile on a favorite volume, and then submit himself, like a child, to the guiding hand of an attendant, and be led out—for in the days of his insanity, it was a strange fact, that although fond of finding his way into his beloved library, he never could discover the way out of it.
At this time the question of the authorship of that strange, but clever and learned book, "The Doctor," was a doubtful one, and much mooted in literary circles. Many suspected, and indeed named Southey as the writer; but he never either admitted the fact of his being so. The conversation turned on the subject, and Smith, with a roguish twinkle in his eye, told Southey he knew who was the author. Southey calmly inquired the name, and the reverend gentleman remarked—
"I remember, some years since, enjoying a conversation with one Robert Southey, in which he used the exact words I find here" and he read from a page of the "Doctor" a passage, and then said, "now, Mr. Laureate, it needs no conjuror to convince any one of common sense that the writer of the passage I have read, and the utterer of those very words to me, seven years since, are one and the same person."
Southey bit his lip, but said nothing.