Of Sydney Smith Lord Houghton recorded that "he never, except once, knew him to make a jest on any religious subject, and then he immediately withdrew his words, and seemed ashamed that he had uttered them;" and I regard the admirable Sydney as not only the supreme head of all ecclesiastical jesters, but as, on the whole, the greatest humorist 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's Letters_, and those addressed to Archdeacon Singleton, the Essays on _America_ and _Persecuting Bishops_, will probably be read as long as the _Tale of a Tub_ or Macaulay's review of Montgomery's Poems; while of detached and isolated jokes--pure freaks of fun clad in literary garb--an incredible number of those which are current in daily converse deduce their birth from this incomparable Canon. When one is talking of facetious clergymen, it is inevitable to think of Bishop Wilberforce; but his humour was of an entirely different quality from that of Sydney Smith. To begin with, it is unquotable. It must, I think, have struck every reader of the Bishop's Life, whether in the three huge volumes of the authorized Biography or in the briefer but more characteristic monograph of Dean Burgon, that, though the biographers had themselves tasted and enjoyed to the full the peculiar flavour of his fun, they utterly failed in the attempt to convey it to the reader. Puerile puns, personal banter of a rather homely type, and good stories collected from other people are all that the books disclose. Animal spirits did the rest; and yet, by the concurrent testimony of nearly all who knew him, Bishop Wilberforce was not only one of the most agreeable but one of the most amusing men of his time. We know from one of his own letters that he peculiarly disliked the description which Lord Beaconsfield gave of him in _Lothair_, and on the principle of _Ce n'est que la vérité qui blesse_, it may be worth while to recall it: "The Bishop was particularly playful on the morrow at breakfast. Though his face beamed with Christian kindness, there was a twinkle in his eye which seemed not entirely superior to mundane self-complacency, even to a sense of earthly merriment. His seraphic raillery elicited sympathetic applause from the ladies, especially from the daughters of the house, who laughed occasionally even before his angelic jokes were well launched."