But the agreeableness which I had in my mind when I took upon myself to discourse of agreeable clergymen was not an official but a personal agreeableness.  We have been told on high authority that the Merriment of Parsons is mighty offensive; but the truth of this dictum depends entirely on the topic of the merriment.  A clergyman who made light of the religion which he professes to teach, or even joked about the incidents and accompaniments of his sacred calling, would by common consent be intolerable.  Decency exacts from priests at least a semblance of piety; but I entirely deny that there is anything offensive in the “merriment of parsons” when it plays round subjects outside the scope of their professional duties.

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 verite 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.”