LORD  BYRON  and  his  TIMES
Byron
Documents Biography Criticism
A Memoir of the Reverend Sydney Smith
Letters 1829
Sydney Smith to Lady Grey, 13 July 1829
INTRODUCTION & INDEXES
DOCUMENT INFORMATION
GO TO PAGE NUMBER:
Author's Preface
Contents
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Index
Editor’s Preface
Letters 1801
Letters 1802
Letters 1803
Letters 1804
Letters 1805
Letters 1806
Letters 1807
Letters 1808
Letters 1809
Letters 1810
Letters 1811
Letters 1812
Letters 1813
Letters 1814
Letters 1815
Letters 1816
Letters 1817
Letters 1818
Letters 1819
Letters 1820
Letters 1821
Letters 1822
Letters 1823
Letters 1824
Letters 1825
Letters 1826
Letters 1827
Letters 1828
Letters 1829
Letters 1830
Letters 1831
Letters 1832
Letters 1833
Letters 1834
Letters 1835
Letters 1836
Letters 1837
Letters 1838
Letters 1839
Letters 1840
Letters 1841
Letters 1842
Letters 1843
Letters 1844
Creative Commons License

Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
Produced by CATH
 
Combe Florey, July 13th, 1829.
My dear Lady Grey,

I should be very glad to hear that Lord Howick is recovered, and that you passed through your London campaign, if not with glory, at least without defeat and doctor’s bills. I am extremely pleased with Combe Florey, and pronounce it to be a very pretty place in a very beautiful country. The house I shall make decently convenient. I have sixty acres of good land round it. The habit of the country is to give dinners and not to sleep out, so this I shall avoid. I am reading Hall’s book, but will read it through before I say a word about it, for I find my opinion changes so much between the first and third volume of a book.

I was glad to see my Lord presiding at the democratical College: he would do it in the very best manner the thing could be done.

My spirits are very much improved, but I have now and then sharp pangs of grief.* I did not know I had cared so much for anybody; but the habit of providing for human beings, and watching over them for so many years, generates a fund of affection, of the magnitude of which I was not aware.

Though living in a very improved climate, we have had fires in every room in the house. It is a bad and an unhappy year! It grieves me to think, when you go to the North, that I shall be five hundred miles from Howick. It is now near thirty years since I made acquaintance, and then friends, with its inhabi-

* Mr. Sydney Smith’s eldest son, Douglas, died in the previous April, at the age of twenty-four.

296MEMOIR OF THE REV. SYDNEY SMITH.
tants. You must all come and see this Valley of Flowers when you visit Lady Elizabeth in the West. It is a most parsonic parsonage, like those described in novels.

I cannot congratulate you, dear Lady Grey, upon the marriage of your daughter. Happen it must; but it is a dreadful calamity when it does happen.

You must read Basil Hall’s Travels, at all events; that is inevitable. It is not a book which will (to use Lord Dudley’s phrase) blow over.

God bless you, dear Lady Grey! Write me a line when you have any time to spare, to tell me of the welfare of all your family. Your affectionate friend,

Sydney Smith.