s a link in an argument; each sarcasm was a moral lesson.
_Peter Plymley_, and the _Letters to Archdeacon Singleton_, the essays on
America and on Persecuting Bishops, will probably be read as long as the
_Tale of a Tub_ or Macaulay's review of "Satan" Montgomery; while of
detached and isolated jokes--pure freaks of fun clad in literary garb--an
incredible number, current in daily converse, deduce their birth from this
incomparable clergyman.[150] "In ability," wrote Macaulay in 1850, "I
should say that Jeffrey was higher, but Sydney rarer. I would rather have
been Jeffrey; but there will be several Jeffreys before there is a Sydney."

It would of course be absurd to pretend that all his jokes were of an
equally high order. In his essays and public letters he is always and
supremely good; in his private letters and traditional table-talk he
descends to the level of his correspondent or his company. Thus, in spite
of his own protests against playing on words, he found his clerk "a man of
great amen-ity of disposition." He complimented his friends Mrs. Tighe and
Mrs. Cuffe as "the cuff that every one would wear, the tie that no one
would loose." His fondness for Lord Grey's family led him to call himself
"Grey-men-ivorous." When the Hollands were staying with him, "his house
was as full of hollands as a gin-shop." He nicknamed Sir George Philips's
home near Manchester Philippi. He ascribed his brother's ugly mansion at
Cheam to "Chemosh, the abomination of Moab." In 1831 he wrote to his friend
Mrs. Meynell that "the French Government was far from stable--like
Meynell's[151] horses at the end of a long day's chase." When a lady asked
him for an epitaph on her pet dog Spot, he proposed "Out, damned Spot!"
but, "strange to say, she did not think it sentimental enough." When
William Cavendish,[152] who had been Second Wrangler, married Lady Blanche
Howard, Sydney wrote--"Euclid leads Blanche to the altar--a strange choice
for him, as she has not an angle about her." It was with reference to this
kind of pleasantry that he said:--

"A joke goes a great way in the country. I have known one last pretty
well for seven years. I remember making a joke after a meeting of the
clergy, in Yorkshire, where there was a Rev. Mr. Buckle, who never
spoke when I gave his health. I said that he was a buckle without a
tongue. Most persons within hearing laughed, but my next neighbour sat
unmoved and sunk in thought. At l