Laudator Temporis Acti

Frances Anne Kemble (1809-1893), Records of Later Life (New York Henry Holt and Company, 1882), p. 220:

I remember, at a party, being seated by Sydney Smith, when Mrs. Grote entered with a rose-colored turban on her head, at which he suddenly exclaimed, "Now I know the meaning of the word grotesque!"

Another version, the earliest I can find, of this oft-repeated anecdote, from an unsigned article, "English Singing-Birds in Florence," Scribner's Monthly 4.5 (September 1872) 616-620 (at 617):

Of professional jokers, [Charles] Lever was the most obstinate and obstreperous and iterative. Flashes of silence were as rare with him as they were with Macaulay himself. The jokes were always uttered, too, with overwhelming assurance that they could never become stale or flat. There was a pun of Sydney Smith's, and not a very eminent one, which he seemed never to tire of telling. Mrs. Grote, the wife of the distinguished historian, appeared once at a soirée with a queer sort of turban on her accomplished head. "Look at that," said Sydney, "that's the origin of the word grotesque."

Id., p. 616:

In 1855 there was quite a nest of English singing-birds in Florence...

Sydney Smith died in 1845.

Sydney Smith (1771-1845), sermon preached at St. Paul's Cathedral (July 28, 1844), quoted in Hesketh Pearson, The Smith of Smiths: Being the Life, Wit and Humour of Sydney Smith (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1934), p. 319:

I never take leave of anyone, for any length of time, without a deep impression upon my mind of the uncertainty of human life, and the probability that we may meet no more in this world.

Sydney Smith, Letter to Georgiana Morpeth (Feb. 16, 1820):

Dear Lady Georgiana,

Nobody has suffered more from low spirits than I have done—so I feel for you. Here are my prescriptions.

1st. Live as well as you dare.

2nd. Go into the shower-bath with a small quantity of water at a temperature low enough to give you a slight sensation of cold, 75° or 80°.

3rd. Amusing books.

4th. Short views of human life—not further than dinner or tea.

5th. Be as busy as you can.

6th. See as much as you can of those friends who respect and like you.

7th. And of those acquaintances who amuse you.

8th. Make no secret of low spirits to your friends, but talk of them freely—they are always worse for dignified concealment.

9th. Attend to the effects tea and coffee produce upon you.

10th. Compare your lot with that of other people.

11th. Don't expect too much from human life—a sorry business at the best.

12th. Avoid poetry, dramatic representations (except comedy), music, serious novels, melancholy, sentimental people, and every thing likely to excite feeling or emotion, not ending in active benevolence.

13th. Do good, and endeavour to please everybody of every degree.

14th. Be as much as you can in the open air without fatigue.

15th. Make the room where you commonly sit gay and pleasant.

16th. Struggle by little and little against idleness.

17th. Don't be too severe upon yourself, or underrate yourself, but do yourself justice.

18th. Keep good blazing fires.

19th. Be firm and constant in the exercise of rational religion.

20th. Believe me, dear Lady Georgiana, Very truly yours,—Sydney Smith

Sydney Smith, letter to Francis Jeffrey (1814), in A Memoir of the Reverend Sydney Smith. By His Daughter Lady Holland. With a Selection from His Letters, Edited by Mrs. Austin, 3rd ed., Vol. II: Letters (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1855), p. 121:

I am truly glad to read of your pleasure from your little girl and your château. The haunts of Happiness are varied, and rather unaccountable; but I have more often seen her among little children, and home firesides, and in country houses, than anywhere else,—at least, I think so. God bless you!

Sydney Smith (1771-1845), quoted in A Memoir of the Reverend Sydney Smith. By His Daughter Lady Holland. With a Selection of His Letters, Edited by Mrs. Austin, Vol. I (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1855), p. 382:

The Lemon-squeezers of society—people who act on you as a wet blanket, who see a cloud in the sunshine, the nails of the coffin in the ribbons of the bride, predictors of evil, extinguishers of hope; who, where there are two sides, see only the worst—people whose very look curdles the milk, and sets your teeth on edge.

Sydney Smith (1771-1845), letter to Countess Grey (February 19, 1823), in A Memoir of the Reverend Sydney Smith. By His Daughter Lady Holland. With a Selection of His Letters, Edited by Mrs. Austin, Vol. II (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1855), pp. 235-236:

For God's sake, do not drag me into another war! I am worn down, and worn out, with crusading and defending Europe, and protecting mankind; I must think a little of myself. I am sorry for the Spaniards—I am sorry for the Greeks—I deplore the fate of the Jews; the people of the Sandwich Islands are groaning under the most detestable tyranny; Bagdad is oppressed—I do not like the present state of the Delta—Thibet is not comfortable. Am I to fight for all these people? The world is bursting with sin and sorrow. Am I to be champion of the Decalogue, and to be eternally raising fleets and armies to make all men good and happy?

Dear Mike,

You've probably seen the headlines:

CROWD GOES WILD AFTER SMALL BIRD LANDS ON BERNIE SANDERS' PODIUM

I think of the remark of Sydney Smith in a preface to a collection of sermons (1801):

The cry of a child, the fall of a book, the most trifling occurrence, is sufficient to dissipate religious thought, and to introduce a more willing train of ideas: a sparrow fluttering about the church is an antagonist which the most profound theologian in Europe is wholly unable to overcome.

See his daughter's Memoir of the Rev. Sydney Smith (London, 1855, second edition), vol. 1 p.50.

As ever,

Ian [Jackson]

---

Servius on Vergil, Aeneid 1.398 (my translation):

Augurium is intentional and is revealed by specific birds, auspicium is accidental and is shown by any bird.

augurium petitur et certis avibus ostenditur, auspicium qualibet avi demonstratur et non petitur.

Sydney Smith, "Professional Education" in his Works, Vol. I (London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans, and Roberts, 1859), pp. 166-175 (at 170-171):

The bias given to men's minds is so strong, that it is no uncommon thing to meet with Englishmen, whom, but for their grey hairs and wrinkles, we might easily mistake for school-boys. Their talk is of Latin verses; and it is quite clear, if men's ages are to be dated from the state of their mental progress, that such men are eighteen years of age, and not a day older. Their minds have been so completely possessed by exaggerated notions of classical learning, that they have not been able in the great school of the world, to form any other notion of real greatness. Attend, too, to the public feelings—look to all the terms of applause. A learned man!—a scholar!—a man of erudition! Upon whom are these epithets of approbation bestowed? Are they given to men acquainted with the science of government? thoroughly masters of the geographical and commercial relations of Europe: to men who know the properties of bodies, and their action upon each other? No: this is not learning; it is chemistry, or political economy—not learning. The distinguishing abstract term, the epithet of Scholar, is reserved for him who writes on the Æolic reduplication, and is familiar with the Sylburgian method of arranging defectives in ω and μι. The picture which a young Englishman, addicted to the pursuit of knowledge, draws—his beau idéal of human nature—his top and consummation of man's powers—is a knowledge of the Greek language. His object is not to reason, to imagine, or to invent; but to conjugate, decline, and derive. The situations of imaginary glory which he draws for himself, are the detection of an anapaest in the wrong place, or the restoration of a dative case which Cranzius had passed over, and the never-dying Ernesti failed to observe. If a young classic of this kind were to meet the greatest chemist or the greatest mechanician, or the most profound political economist of his time, in company with the greatest Greek scholar, would the slightest comparison between them ever come across his mind?—would he ever dream that such men as Adam Smith and Lavoisier were equal in dignity of understanding to, or of the same utility as, Bentley and Heyne? We are inclined to think, that the feeling excited would be a good deal like that which was expressed by Dr. George about the praises of the great King of Prussia, who entertained considerable doubts whether the King, with all his victories, knew how to conjugate a Greek verb in μι.

If you go to the gym after a day at work, you'll probably see young, thin, well-muscled bodies (and a few old, fat, flabby ones) hard at work on the treadmills. A time traveller from ages past might find this an odd and comical sight.

William Cubitt invented the treadmill as a punishment for prisoners. Sydney Smith, "Cruel Treatment of Untried Prisoners," Edinburgh Review (1824), attacked the practice of forcing prisoners awaiting trial to work on the treadmill, grinding flour:

A prisoner may be a tailor, a watchmaker, a bookbinder, a printer, totally unaccustomed to any such species of labour. Such a man may be cast into jail at the end of August, and not tried till the March following, is it no punishment to such a man to walk up hill like a turnspit dog, in an infamous machiine, for six months? and yet there are gentlemen who suppose that the common people do not consider this as punishment!—that the gayest and most joyous of human beings is a treader, untried by a jury of his countrymen, in the fifth month of lifting up the leg, and striving against the law of gravity, supported by the glorious information which he receives from the turnkey, that he has all the time been grinding flour on the other side of the wall!

Elsewhere in the essay Smith calls the treadmill the "rack and wheel of Cubitt," its inventor.

Long before Cubitt invented the treadmill in its modern form, the ancient Greeks and Romans punished slaves by making them grind corn. For example, in Lysias 1.18, the defendant Eratosthenes mentions how he threatened his servant girl with a choice between two punishments, to be whipped or to be put to work at a mill, and in Terence, Phormio 249, the slave Geta lists as punishments grinding in the mill, getting a whipping, and wearing fetters.

Another thing you might observe at the gym is the presence of tattoos on some of those exercising. The passages collected by C.P. Jones, "Stigma: Tattooing and Branding in Graeco-Roman Antiquity," Journal of Roman Studies 77 (1987) 139-155, reveal that three classes of persons wore tattoos in ancient times — barbarians, slaves, and prisoners.

According to Xenophon, Anabasis 5.4.32 (tr. Carleton L. Brownson):

And when the Greeks, as they proceeded, were among the friendly Mossynoecians, they would exhibit to them fattened children of the wealthy inhabitants, who had been nourished on boiled nuts and were soft and white to an extraordinary degree, and pretty nearly equal in length and breadth, with their backs adorned with many colors and their fore parts all tattooed with flower patterns.

Xenophon goes on to say about the Mossynoecians (5.4.34):

They were set down by the Greeks as the most uncivilized [barbarotatous] people whose country they traversed, the furthest removed from Greek customs.

Seneca, On Anger 3.3.6, lists cruelties inflicted on slaves by angry masters and includes "writings on foreheads" (inscriptiones frontium), i.e. tattoos.

Plato, Laws 9.854 D (tr. A.E. Taylor), prescribes tattoos as one of the penalties for the crime of sacrilege:

Whosoever shall be taken in sacrilege, shall, if slave or alien, have his misfortune branded on hands and forehead, be scourged with such number of stripes as the court shall think proper, and cast forth naked beyond the borders.

It's curious how at the gym one can observe people, in their pastimes and their adornments, voluntarily adopting practices that used to be visited on prisoners as punishments.

Hesketh Pearson, The Smith of Smiths, being The Life, Wit and Humour of Sydney Smith (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1934), p. 319:

In June [1844] he was laid up with the gout and one of his callers, Thomas Moore, was amused and surprised to find him studying French, a copy-book open upon the table, with all the verbs, their moods and tenses, written out neatly in his own hand. Moore thought it an odd pastime for a septuagenarian.

I don't find it odd at all, and I hope I have enough of my wits about me in my later years to do something similar.

A Memoir of the Reverend Sydney Smith. By his Daughter, Lady Holland, Vol. I (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1855), pp. 350-351:

On meeting a young lady who had just entered the garden, and shaking hands with her: "I must," he said, "give you a lesson in shaking hands, I see. There is nothing more characteristic than shakes of the hand. I have classified them. Lister, when he was here, illustrated some of them. Ask Mrs. Sydney to show you his sketches of them when you go in. There is the high official,—the body erect, and a rapid, short shake, near the chin. There is the mortmain,—the flat hand introduced into your palm, and hardly conscious of its contiguity. The digital,—one finger held out, much used by the high clergy. There is the shakus rusticus, where your hand is seized in an iron grasp, betokening rude health, warm heart, and distance from the Metropolis; but producing a strong sense of relief on your part when you find your hand released and your fingers unbroken. The next to this is the retentive shake,—one which, beginning with vigour, pauses as it were to take breath, but without relinquishing its prey, and before you are aware begins again, till you feel anxious as to the result, and have no shake left in you. There are other varieties, but this is enough for one lesson."

Sydney Smith (1771-1845), letter to Mrs. Grote (August 31, 1843):

You seem to have had a very amusing life, with singing and dancing; but you cannot excite my envy by all the descriptions of your dramas and melodramas; you may as well paint the luxuries of barley-meal to a tiger, or turn a leopard into a field of clover. All this class of pleasures inspires me with the same nausea as I feel at the sight of rich plum-cake or sweetmeats; I prefer the driest bread of common life.

Sydney Smith (1771-1845), letter to Miss Georgiana Harcourt (1838):

The summer and the country, dear Georgiana, have no charms for me. I look forward anxiously to the return of bad weather, coal fires, and good society in a crowded city. I have no relish for the country; it is a kind of healthy grave. I am afraid you are not exempt from the delusions of flowers, green turf, and birds; they all afford slight gratification, but not worth an hour of rational conversation; and rational conversation in sufficient quantities is only to be had from the congregation of a million of people in one spot.

His letter to Lady Holland (January 3, 1841):

I do all I can to love the country, and endeavour to believe those poetical lies which I read in Rogers and others, on the subject; which said deviations from truth were, by Rogers, all written in St. James's-place.

His letter to Mrs. Meynell (December, 1841):

You may laugh, dear G., but, after all, the country is most dreadful! The real use of it is to find food for cities; but as for a residence of any man who is neither butcher nor baker, nor food grower in any of its branches, it is a dreadful waste of existence and abuse of life.

Related posts:

• Life in the Country
• Kick a Tree for Me
• Aversion from Solitude and Rural Scenes
• The City versus the Country

Sydney Smith (1771-1845), Elementary Sketches of Moral Philosophy (London: Printed for Private Distribution, [1849]), pp. 99-100:

If we are to read, it is a very important rule in the conduct of the understanding that we should accustom the mind to keep the best company, by introducing it only to the best books. But there is a sort of vanity some men have, of talking of, and reading, obscure half-forgotten authors, because it passes as a matter of course, that he who quotes authors which are so little read, must be completely and thoroughly acquainted with those authors which are in every man's mouth. For instance, it is very common to quote Shakespeare; but it makes a sort of stare to quote Massinger. I have very little credit for being well acquainted with Virgil; but if I quote Silius Italicus, I may stand some chance of being reckoned a great scholar. In short, whoever wishes to strike out of the great road, and to make a short cut to fame, let him neglect Homer, and Virgil, and Horace, and Ariosto, and Milton, and, instead of these, read and talk of Fracastorius, Sannazarius, Lorenzini, Pastorini, and the thirty-six primary sonneteers of Bettinelli;—let him neglect everything which the suffrage of ages has made venerable and grand, and dig out of their graves a set of decayed scribblers, whom the silent verdict of the public has fairly condemned to everlasting oblivion. If he complain of the injustice with which they have been treated, and call for a new trial with loud and importunate clamour, though I am afraid he will not make much progress in the estimation of men of sense, he will be sure to make some noise in the crowd, and to be dubbed a man of very curious and extraordinary erudition.

Then there is another piece of foppery which is to be cautiously guarded against—the foppery of universality—of knowing all sciences and excelling in all arts—chemistry, mathematics, algebra, dancing, history, reasoning, riding, fencing, Low Dutch, High Dutch, natural philosophy, and enough Spanish to talk about Lope de Vega: in short, the modern precept of education very often is, "Take the Admirable Crichton for your model; I would have you ignorant of nothing!" Now my advice, on the contrary, is, to have the courage to be ignorant of a great number of things, in order to avoid the calamity of being ignorant of everything. I would exact of a young man a pledge that he would never read Lope de Vega; he should pawn to me his honour to abstain from Bettinelli, and his thirty-five original sonneteers; and I would exact from him the most rigid securities that I was never to hear anything about that race of penny poets who lived in the reigns of Cosmo and Lorenzo di Medici.

Related post: A Reputation for Profound Learning and Exquisite Taste.

Sydney Smith (1771-1845), letter to Miss Lucy ——— (July 22, 1835):

What would life be without arithmetic, but a scene of horrors?

Sydney Smith (1771-1845), letter to Sir Wilmot Horton (1835):

It is impossible now to be universal: men of the greatest information and accuracy swarm in the streets,—mineralogists, astronomers, ornithologists, and lousologists; the most minute blunder is immediately detected.

Sydney Smith (1771-1845), letter to Francis Horner (November 25, 1816):

I endeavour in vain to give them more cheerful ideas of religion; to teach them that God is not a jealous, childish, merciless tyrant; that he is best served by a regular tenour of good actions,—not by bad singing, ill-composed prayers, and eternal apprehensions. But the luxury of false religion is, to be unhappy!

John Brown (1810-1882), Horae Subsecivae. Second Series (Edinburgh: David Douglas, 1884), p. 400:

If our young medical student would take our advice, and for an hour or two twice a week take up a volume of Shakspere, Cervantes, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Cowper, Montaigne, Addison, Defoe, Goldsmith, Fielding, Scott, Charles Lamb, Macaulay, Jeffrey, Sydney Smith, Helps, Thackeray, etc., not to mention authors on deeper and more sacred subjects—they would have happier and healthier minds, and make none the worse doctors. If they, by good fortune—for the tide has set in strong against the literae humaniores—have come off with some Greek or Latin, we would supplicate for an ode of Horace, a couple of pages of Cicero or of Pliny once a month, and a page of Xenophon. French and German should be mastered either before or during the first years of study. They will never afterwards be acquired so easily or so thoroughly, and the want of them may be bitterly felt when too late.

Sydney Smith (1771-1845), letter to the Countess of Morley (1831):

——— has been to Cambridge to place his son; in other words, he has put him there to spend his money, to lose what good qualities he has, and to gain nothing useful in return. If men had made no more progress in the common arts of life than they have in education, we should at this moment be dividing our food with our fingers, and drinking out of the palms of our hands.

See also his letter to Mrs. Meynell (1839):

I feel for ——— about her son at Oxford; knowing, as I do, that the only consequences of a University education are, the growth of vice and the waste of money.

Sydney Smith (1771-1845), "Letters on American Debts," in his Works, 3rd ed. Vol. III (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1845), p. 446:

There really should be lunatic asylums for nations as well as for individuals.