We have dwelt on Milnes’s early years at some length, because their history throws considerable light on his subsequent career, and accounts for most of the difficulties that he experienced when he made his first entrance into London society. ‘Conceive the man,’ said Carlyle: ‘a most bland-smiling, semi-quizzical, affectionate, high-bred, Italianised little man, who has long olive-blonde hair, a dimple, next to no chin, and flings his arm round your neck when he addresses you in public society!’ If the rough Scotch moralist was not in an unusually bad humour when he wrote these words, it is not to be wondered at that Milnes was regarded for a time as a dangerous person, ‘anxious to introduce foreign ways and fashions into the conservative fields of English life.’ But this dislike of him was very transient, and in less than a year after his return to England he had ‘made a conquest of the social world.’ That he was still looked upon as an oddity seems certain, and even his intimate friend Charles Buller could exclaim: ‘I often think how puzzled your Maker must be to account for your conduct;’ but people soon became willing to accept him on his own terms for the sake of his wit and brilliancy, and, we may add, of his kind heart. Some nicknames that survived long after their application had lost its point, are worth remembering as illustrations of what was once thought of him; perhaps still more for the sake of the letter which Sydney Smith wrote on being accused, quite groundlessly, of having invented them. ‘DEAR MILNES,—Never lose your good temper, which is one of your best qualities, and which has carried you hitherto safely through your startling eccentricities. If you turn cross and touchy, you are a lost man. No man can combine the defects of opposite characters. The names of “Cool of the evening,” “London Assurance,” and “In-I-go Jones,” are, I give you my word, not mine. They are of no sort of importance; they are safety-valves, and if you could by paying sixpence get rid of them, you had better keep your money. You do me but justice in acknowledging that I have spoken much good of you. I have laughed at you for those follies which I have told you of to your face; but nobody has more readily and more earnestly asserted that you are a very agreeable, clever man, with a very good heart, unimpeachable in all the relations of life, and that you amply deserve to be retained in the place to which you had too hastily elevated yourself by manners unknown to our cold and phlegmatic people. I thank you for what you say of my good-humour. Lord Dudley, when I took leave of him, said to me: “You have been laughing at me for the last seven years, and you never said anything that I wished unsaid.” This pleased me. ‘Ever yours, ‘SYDNEY SMITH[86].’