second lady called Estella; whereas he has really been sleeping
with a third lady called Amelrosa."

Among the most important of these essays are the two famous ones on
Methodism and on Indian missions, which gave far more offence to the
religious public of evangelical persuasion than all Sydney's jokes on
bishops, or his arguments for Catholic emancipation, and which (owing to
the strong influence which then, as now, Nonconformists possessed in the
counsels of the Liberal party) probably had as much to do as anything
else with the reluctance of the Whig leaders, when they came into power,
to give their friend the highest ecclesiastical preferment. These
subjects are rather difficult to treat in a general literary essay, and
it may perhaps be admitted that here, as in dealing with poetry and
other subjects of the more transcendental kind, Sydney showed a touch of
Philistinism, and a distinct inability to comprehend exaltation of
sentiment and thought. But the general sense is admirably sound and
perfectly orthodox; and the way in which so apparently light and
careless a writer has laboriously supported every one of his charges,
and almost every one of his flings, with chapter and verse from the
writings of the incriminated societies, is very remarkable. Nor can it,
I think, be doubted that the publication, in so widely read a
periodical, of the nauseous follies of speech in which well-meaning
persons indulged, had something to do with the gradual disuse of a style
than which nothing could be more prejudicial to religion, for the simple
reason that nothing else could make religion ridiculous. The medicine
did not of course operate at once, and silly people still write silly
things. But I hardly think that the Wesleyan body or the Church
Missionary Society would now officially publish such stuff as the
passage about Brother Carey, who, while in the actual paroxysm of
sea-sickness, was "wonderfully comforted by the contemplation of the
goodness of God," or that about Brother Ward "in design clasping to his
bosom" the magnanimous Captain Wickes, who subsequently "seemed very
low," when a French privateer was in sight. Jeffrey was, it seems, a
little afraid of these well-deserved exposures, which, from the
necessity of abundant quotation, are an exception to the general
shortness of Sydney's articles. Sydney's interest in certain subjects
led him constantly to take up fresh books on them; and thus a series of
series might be