ast, a quarter of an hour after we
had all done, he suddenly nudged me, exclaiming, 'I see _now_ what you
meant, Mr. Smith; you meant a joke.' 'Yes,' I said, 'sir; I believe I
did.' Upon which he began laughing so heartily, that I thought he
would choke, and was obliged to pat him on the back."

A graver fault than this boyish love of punning is the undeniable vein of
coarseness which here and there disfigures Sydney Smith's controversial
method. In 1810 he wrote, very characteristically, about his friend Lord
Grey--"His deficiency is a want of executive coarseness." This is a fault
with which he could never have charged himself. His own "executive
coarseness" is referable in part to the social standard of the day, when
ladies as refined as the Miss Berrys "d----d" the too-hot tea-kettle, and
Canning referred to a political opponent as "the revered and ruptured
Member." In a similar vein Sydney jokes incessantly about skin-disease in
Scotland; writes of a neighbour whose manners he disliked that "she was as
cold as if she were in the last stage of blue cholera"; and, after his
farmers had been dining with him, says that "they were just as tipsy as
farmers ought to be when dining with the parson."

When he came to dealing publicly with a political opponent, he seems to
have thought that, the coarser were his illustrations, the more domestic
and personal his allusions, the better for the cause which he served. The
_Letters of Peter Plymley_ abound in medical and obstetrical imagery. The
effect of the Orders in Council on the health of Europe supplies endless
jokes. Peter roars with laughter at the thought of his sister-in-law, Mrs.
Abraham Plymley, "led away captive by an amorous Gaul." Nothing can be
nastier (or more apt) than his comparison between the use of humour in
controversy and that of the small-tooth comb in domestic life; nothing less
delicate than the imaginary "Suckling Act" in which he burlesques Lord
Shaftesbury's Ten Hours Bill. He barbs his attacks on an oppressive
Government by jokes about the ugliness of Perceval's face and the poverty
of Canning's relations--the pensions conferred on "Sophia" and "Caroline,"
their "national veal" and "public tea"; and the "clouds of cousins arriving
by the waggon." When a bishop has insulted him, he replies with an
insinuation that the bishop obtained his preferment by fraud and
misrepresentation,[153] and jeers at him for having begun life as a
noblema