In November 1834, the King dismissed the Whig Government, and sent for Sir Robert Peel.  A General Election took place at Christmas.  In the spring of 1835 Peel’s Government was displaced by a vote of the House of Commons, and a Whig Government was formed again under Lord Melbourne.  Henry Labouchere,[116] M.P. for Taunton, accepted office, and thereby vacated his seat.  On seeking re-election, he was opposed, unsuccessfully, by Benjamin Disraeli.  “The Jew spoke for an hour The boys called out ‘Old Clothes’ as he came into the town, and offered to sell him sealing-wax and slippers."[117]

As soon as the Election was over, the country relapsed into its normal calm.  On the 3rd of June Sydney wrote:—­

“We are going through our usual course of jokes and dinners.  One advantage of the country is that a joke once established is good for ever; it is like the stuff which is denominated everlasting, and used as pantaloons by careful parents for their children.”

In the following autumn the Smiths paid a flying visit to France, The crossing from Dover was terrific; but Sydney comforted himself with the reflection that, “as I had so little life to lose, it was of little consequence whether I was drowned, or died, like a resident clergyman, from indigestion.”

France gave him the same pleasure as it had always given him.—­

“Paris is very full.  I look at it with some attention, as I am not sure I may not end my days in it.  I suspect the fifth act of life should be in great cities:  it is there, in the long death of old age, that a man most forgets himself and his infirmities.”

“I care very little about dinners, but I shall not easily forget a matelote at the Rochers de Cancale, an almond tart at Montreuil, or a poulet a la Tartare at Grignon’s, These are impressions which no changes in future life can obliterate.”

Before the year ended, he was established in London.  The remaining ten years of his life saw him, in spite of some bodily infirmities, at the summit of his social fame.  An immense proportion of the anecdotes relating to his conversation belong to this period.  “It was,” wrote Mr. Gladstone in 1879, “in the year 1835 that I met Mr. Sydney Smith for the first time at the table of Mr. Hallam.  After dinner Mr. Smith was good enough to converse with me, and he spoke, not of any general changes in the prevailing tone of doctrine, but of the improvement which had then begun to be remarkable in the conduct and character of the clergy.  He went back upon what they had been, and said, in his vivid and pointed way of illustration, ’Whenever you meet a clergyman of my age, you may be quite sure he is a bad clergyman.’"[118]