and when the Count came to hear of it, he said it was a
pleasant conceit, _and that the Bishops were right cunning men,
and had ding'd the Canons well_."

Even in the Singleton Letters, however, there are some little lapses of
the same kind (worse, indeed, because these letters were signed) as the
attack on Canning in the Plymley Letters. Sydney Smith exclaiming
against "derision and persiflage, the great principle by which the world
is now governed," is again edifying. But in truth Sydney never had the
weakness (for I have known it called a weakness) of looking too
carefully to see what the enemy's advocate is going to say. Take even
the famous, the immortal apologue of Mrs. Partington. It covered, we are
usually told, the Upper House with ridicule, and did as much as anything
else to carry the Reform Bill. And yet, though it is a watery apologue,
it will not hold water for a moment. The implied conclusion is, that the
Atlantic beat Mrs. Partington. Did it? It made, no doubt, a great mess
in her house, it put her to flight, it put her to shame. But when I was
last at Sidmouth the line of high-water mark was, I believe, much what
it was before the great storm of 1824, and though the particular Mrs.
Partington had no doubt been gathered to her fathers, the Mrs.
Partington of the day was, equally without doubt, living very
comfortably in the house which the Atlantic had threatened to swallow
up.

It was, however, perhaps part of Sydney's strength that he never cared
to consider too curiously, or on too many sides. Besides his inimitable
felicity of expression (the Singleton Letters are simply crammed with
epigram), he had the sturdiest possible common sense and the liveliest
possible humour. I have known his claim to the title of "humourist"
called in question by precisians: nobody could deny him the title of
good-humourist. Except that the sentimental side of Toryism would never
have appealed to him, it was chiefly an accident of time that he was a
polemical Liberal. He would always and naturally have been on the side
opposite to that on which most of the fools were. When he came into the
world, as the straitest Tory will admit, there were in that world a
great many abuses as they are called, that is to say, a great many
things which, once useful and excellent, had either decayed into
positive nuisances, or dried up into neutral and harmless but
obstructive rubbish. There were also many silly and some mischievo