Читать книгу A Commonplace Book of Thoughts, Memories, and Fancies - Mrs. (Anna) Jameson - Страница 58

At dinner to-day there was an attempt made by two very clever men to place Theodore Hook above Sydney Smith. I fought with all my might against both. It seems to me that a mind must be strangely warped that could ever place on a par two men with aspirations and purposes so different, whether we consider them merely as individuals, or called before the bar of the public as writers. I do not take to Sydney Smith personally, because my nature feels the want of the artistic and imaginative in his nature; but see what he has done for humanity, for society, for liberty, for truth—for us women! What has Theodore Hook done that has not perished with him? Even as wits—and I have been in company with both—I could not compare them; but they say the wit of Theodore Hook was only fitted for the company of men—the strongest proof that it was not genuine of its kind, that when most bearable, it was most superficial. I set aside the other obvious inference, that it required to be excited by stimulants and those of the coarsest, grossest kind. The wit of Sydney Smith almost always involved a thought worth remembering for its own sake, as well as worth remembering for its brilliant vehicle: the value of ten thousand pounds sterling of sense concentrated into a cut and polished diamond.

It is not true, as I have heard it said, that after leaving the society of Sydney Smith you only remembered how much you had laughed, not the good things at which you had laughed. Few men—wits by profession—ever said so many memorable things as those recorded of Sydney Smith.