Macaulay described his "rapid, loud, laughing utterance,"
and adds--"Sydney talks from the impulse of the moment, and his fun is
quite inexhaustible." He was, I think, the greatest humourist 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_, 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.
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