In 1830 he wrote to his friend Lady Holland about her son,[159] afterwards
General Fox:—
"I am very glad to see Charles in the Guards. He will now remain at home; for I trust that there will be no more embarkation of the Guards while I live, and that a captain of the Guards will be as ignorant of the colour of blood as the rector of a parish. We have had important events enough within the last twenty years. May all remaining events be culinary, amorous, literary, or any thing but political!"
And so again, according to Lord Houghton, he said in later life:—
"I have spent enough and fought enough for other nations. I must think a little of myself. I want to sit under my own bramble and sloe-tree with my own great-coat and umbrella."
This is no fatty degeneration of the chivalrous spirit. It is merely the old doctrine of Non-intervention speaking in a lighter tone.
An account of a man's personal characteristics must contain some estimate of his æsthetic sense. This was not very strongly developed in Sydney Smith. He admired the beauties of a smiling landscape, such as he saw in the Vale of Taunton, and hated grimness and barrenness such as he remembered at Harrogate. "I thought it the most heaven-forgotten country under the sun when I saw it; there were only nine mangy fir-trees there, and even they all leaned away from it." He enjoyed bright colours and sweet scents, and had a passion for light. His views of Art were primitive. We have seen that he preferred gas to Correggio. He admired West,[160] and did not admire Haydon.[161] He bought pictures for the better decoration of his drawing-room, and, when they did not please him, had them altered to suit his taste,—
"Look at that sea-piece, now; what would you desire more? It is true, the moon in the corner was rather dingy when I first bought it; so I had a new moon put in for half-a-crown, and now I consider it perfect."
This perhaps may be regarded as burlesque, and so may his sympathetic remark to the gushing connoisseur—
"I got into dreadful disgrace with him once, when, standing before a picture at Bowood, he exclaimed, turning to me, 'Immense breadth of light and shade!' I innocently said, 'Yes;—about an inch and a half.' He gave me a look that ought to have killed me."
But his gratitude to his young friend Lady Mary Bennet, who covered the walls of his Rectory with the sweet products of her pencil, is only too palpably sincere. It may perhaps be imputed to him for æsthetic virtue that he considered the national monuments in St. Paul's, with the sole exception of Dr. Johnson's, "a disgusting heap of trash." It is less satisfactory that he found the Prince Regent's "suite of golden rooms" at Carlton House "extremely magnificent."