Six days later he wrote to Lady Holland:—
"I hear you laugh at me for being happy in the country, and upon this I have a few words to say. In the first place, whether one lives or dies I hold, and have always held, to be of infinitely less moment than is generally supposed. But, if life is to be, then it is common sense to amuse yourself with the best you can find where you happen to be placed. I am not leading precisely the life I should choose, but that which (all things considered, as well as I could consider them) appeared to me to be the most eligible. I am resolved, therefore, to like it, and to reconcile myself to it; which is more manly than to feign myself above it, and to send up complaints by the post, of being thrown away, and being desolate, and such-like trash. I am prepared, therefore, either way. If the chances of life ever enable me to emerge, I will show you that I have not been wholly occupied by small and sordid pursuits. If (as the greater probability) I am come to the end of my career, I give myself quietly up to horticulture, etc. In short, if it be my lot to crawl, I will crawl contentedly; if to fly, I will fly with alacrity; but, as long as I can possibly avoid it, I will never be unhappy. If, with a pleasant wife, three children, and many friends who wish me well, I cannot be happy, I am a very silly, foolish fellow, and what becomes of me is of very little consequence."
If ample occupation be, as some strenuous moralists assert, the true secret of happiness, Sydney Smith had plenty to make him happy during the early years of his life in Yorkshire. Here is his own account of his translation:—
"A diner-out, a wit, and a popular preacher, I was suddenly caught up by the Archbishop of York, and transported to my living in Yorkshire, where there had not been a resident clergyman for a hundred and fifty years. Fresh from London, and not knowing a turnip from a carrot, I was compelled to farm three hundred acres, and without capital to build a Parsonage House."
He was his own architect, his own builder, and his own clerk of the works. The cost of building a house, with borrowed money, made him a very poor man for several years.
"I turned schoolmaster, to educate my son, as I could not afford to send him to school. Mrs. Sydney turned schoolmistress, to educate my girls, as I could not afford a governess. I turned farmer, as I could not let my land…. Added to all these domestic cares, I was village parson, village doctor, village comforter, village magistrate, and Edinburgh Reviewer; so you see I had not much time on my hands to regret London."
Every one has heard of "Bunch," the "little garden-girl, shaped like a milestone," who "became the best butler in the county"; of the gaunt riding-horse "Calamity," which "flung me over his head into a neighbouring parish, as if I had been a shuttlecock, and I felt grateful that it was not into a neighbouring planet"; and of the ancient carriage called "the Immortal," which was so well known on the road that "the village-boys cheered it and the village-dogs barked at it"—and surely remembrance should be made, amid this goodly caravan, of the four draught-oxen, Tug and Lug, Haul and Crawl, even though "Tug and Lug took to fainting, and required buckets of salvolatile, and Haul and Crawl to lie down in the mud."
When Sydney Smith says that he was "village doctor," he reminds us of his lifelong fancy for dabbling in medicine. When his daughter, not six months old, was attacked by croup, he gave her in twenty-four hours "32 grains of calomel, besides bleeding, blistering, and emetics." When he was called to baptize a sick baby, he seized the opportunity of giving it a dose of castor oil. One day he writes—
"I am performing miracles in my parish with garlic for whooping-cough."
Another:—