he was! how kind! He
put water into his wine. Let us respect the moderation of the
Establishment."

But the agreeableness which I had in my mind when I took upon myself to
discourse of agreeable clergymen was not an official but a personal
agreeableness. We have been told on high authority that the Merriment of
Parsons is mighty offensive; but the truth of this dictum depends
entirely on the topic of the merriment. A clergyman who made light of
the religion which he professes to teach, or even joked about the
incidents and accompaniments of his sacred calling, would by common
consent be intolerable. Decency exacts from priests at least a semblance
of piety; but I entirely deny that there is anything offensive in the
"merriment of parsons" when it plays round subjects outside the scope of
their professional duties.

Of Sydney Smith Lord Houghton recorded that "he never, except once, knew
him to make a jest on any religious subject, and then he immediately
withdrew his words, and seemed ashamed that he had uttered them;" and I
regard the admirable Sydney as not only the supreme head of all
ecclesiastical jesters, but as, on the whole, the greatest humorist
whose jokes have come down to us in an authentic and unmutilated form.
Almost alone among professional jokers, he made his merriment--rich,
natural, fantastic, unbridled as it was--subserve the serious purposes
of his life and writing. Each joke was a link in an argument; each
sarcasm was a moral lesson.

_Peter Plymley's Letters_, and those addressed to Archdeacon Singleton,
the Essays on _America_ and _Persecuting Bishops_, will probably be read
as long as the _Tale of a Tub_ or Macaulay's review of Montgomery's
Poems; while of detached and isolated jokes--pure freaks of fun clad in
literary garb--an incredible number of those which are current in daily
converse deduce their birth from this incomparable Canon.

When one is talking of facetious clergymen, it is inevitable to think of
Bishop Wilberforce; but his humour was of an entirely different quality
from that of Sydney Smith. To begin with, it is unquotable. It must, I
think, have struck every reader of the Bishop's Life, whether in the
three huge volumes of the authorized Biography or in the briefer but
more characteristic monograph of Dean Burgon, that, though the
biographers had themselves tasted and enjoyed to the full the peculiar
flavour of his fun, they utterly failed in the attempt to convey it to
th