Health to Mrs. ——, and happiness, and agreeable society, carelessness for the future, and enjoyment of the present!
Who can think of your offer now, and before, but with kindness and gratitude? My brother, who loves paradoxes, says, if he saw a man walking into a pit, he would not advise him to turn the other way. My plan is, on the contrary, to advise, to interfere, to remonstrate, at all hazards. I hate cold-blooded people, a tribe to which you have no relation; and the brother who talks this nonsense would not only stop the wanderer, but jump halfway down the pit to save him. We will go by the Lower Road. The consequence of all this beautiful weather will be, our liquefaction in our French expedition.
I send you a list of all the papers written by me in the Edinburgh Review. Catch me, if you can, in any one illiberal sentiment, or in any opinion which I have need to recant; and that, after twenty years’ scribbling upon all subjects.
Lord John Russell comes here next week with
Lady John. He has behaved
prudently, but the thing is not yet over. I am heartily glad at the prospect of
agreement. Who, but the idiots of the earth, would fling a country like this
into confusion, because a Bill (in its mutilated state a great improvement) is
not carried as far, and does not embrace as much, as the best men could wish?
Is political happiness so cheap, and political improvement so easy, that the
one can be sported with, and the other demanded, in this
| MEMOIR OF THE REV. SYDNEY SMITH. | 371 |
