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 last, 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.”