"We conquered the whooping-cough here with a pennyworth of salt of tartar, after having filled them with the expensive poisons of Halford.[63] What an odd thing that such a specific should not be more known!"
"I attended two of my children through a good stout fever of the
typhus kind without ever calling in an apothecary, but for one day. I
depended upon blessed antimony, and watched anxiously for the time of
giving bark."
"Douglas[64] alarmed us the other night with the Croup. I darted into him all the mineral and vegetable resources of my shop, cravatted his throat with blisters and fringed it with leeches, and set him in five or six hours to playing marbles, breathing gently and inaudibly."
After an unhealthy winter he writes:—
"Our evils have been want of water, and scarlet-fever in our village; where, in three quarters of a year, we have buried fifteen, instead of one per annum. You will naturally suppose I have killed all these people by doctoring them; but scarlet-fever awes me, and is above my aim. I leave it to the professional and graduated homicides."[65]
In this connexion it is natural to cite the lines on "The Poetical Medicine Chest,"[66] which Mr. Stuart Reid has printed. They contain some excellent advice about the drugs which a mother should provide for the use of a young family, and end, majestically, thus:—
"Spare not in Eastern blasts, when babies die,
The wholesome rigour of the Spanish Fly.
From timely torture seek thy infant's rest,
And spread the poison on his labouring breast.
And so, fair lady, when in evil hour
Less prudent mothers mourn some faded flower,
Six Howards valiant, and six Howards fair
Shall live, and love thee, and reward thy care."
But parochial and domestic concerns could not altogether divert Sydney
Smith's mind from the strife of politics. He watched the turmoil from afar.
On the 1st of January 1813, he wrote to his friend John Allen, who was more
sanguine than himself about the prospects of the Whigs:—
"Everything is fast setting in for arbitrary power. The Court will grow bolder and bolder, a struggle will commence, and, if it ends as I wish, there will be Whigs again…. But when these things come to pass, you will no longer be a Warden,[67] but a brown and impalpable powder in the tombs of Dulwich. In the meantime, enough of liberty will remain to make our old-age tolerably comfortable; and to your last gasp you will remain in the perennial and pleasing delusion that the Whigs are coming in, and will expire mistaking the officiating clergyman for a King's Messenger."
While the new Rectory House at Foston was building, the Rector was wholly engrossed in the work. "I live," he wrote, "trowel in hand. My whole soul is filled up by lath and plaster." He laid the foundation-stone in June 1813, and took possession of the completed edifice in March 1814. "My house was considered the ugliest in the county, but all admitted that it was one of the most comfortable."[68] It remains to the present day pretty much as Sydney Smith left it. A room on the ground-floor, next to the drawing-room, served the threefold purposes of study, dispensary, and justice-room. As a rule, he wrote his sermons and his articles for the Edinburgh in the drawing-room, not heeding the conversation of family and visitors; but in the "study" he dosed his parishioners; and here, having been made a Justice of the Peace, he administered mercy to poachers. He hated the Game-Laws as they stood, and it stirred his honest wrath to reflect that "for every ten pheasants which fluttered in the wood, one English peasant was rotting in gaol." So strong was his belief in the contaminating effects of a prisoner's life that he never, if he could help it, would commit a boy or girl to gaol. He sought permission to accompany Mrs. Fry on one of her visits to Newgate, and spoke of her ministry there as "the most solemn, the most Christian, the most affecting, which any human eye ever witnessed."[69] A pleasing trait of his incumbency at Foston was the creation of allotment-gardens for the poor. He divided several acres of the glebe into sixteenths, and let them, at a low rent, to the villagers. Each allotment was just big enough to supply a cottage with potatoes, and to support a pig. Cheap food for the poor was another of his excellent hobbies. His Common-Place Book contains receipts for nourishing soups made of rice and peas and flavoured with ox-cheek. He notes that more than thirty people were comfortably fed with these concoctions at a penny a head. After a bad harvest he and his family lived, like the labourers round them, on unleavened cakes made from the damaged flour of the sprouted wheat. His daughter writes—"The luxury of returning to bread again can hardly be imagined by those who have never been deprived of it."