st," and this is undoubtedly
true. Politics, indeed, according to their usual custom,
sometimes rather acidulated his good humour; but anybody
possessed of the noun, with the least allowance of the
adjective, should be propitiated by the way in which the
almost Radical reformer of _Peter Plymley's Letters_ in 1807
became the almost Tory and wholly conservative maintainer of
ecclesiastical rights in those to Archdeacon Singleton
thirty years later.

Both, however, were "Letters" of the sophisticated kind: but
we have plenty of perfectly genuine correspondence, also
agreeable and sometimes extremely amusing. Whether Sydney
(his friends always abbreviated him thus, and he accepted
the Christian name) describes the makeshifts of his
Yorkshire parish or the luxuries of his Somerset one;
whether he discusses the effect of a diet of geraniums on
pigs or points out that as Lord Tankerville has given him a
whole buck "this takes up a great deal of my time"--he is
always refreshing. He has no great depth, but we do not go
to him for that: and he is not shallow in the offensive
sense of the word. His gaiety does not get on one's nerves
as does that of some--perhaps most--professional jokers:
neither, as is too frequently the case with them, does it
bore. His letters are not the easiest to select from: for
they are usually short and their excellence lies rather in
still shorter _flashes_ such as those glanced at above; as
the grave proposition that "the information of very plain
women is so inconsiderable that I agree with you in setting
no store by it;" or as this other (resembling a short
newspaper paragraph) "The Commissioner will have hard work
with the Scotch atheists: they are said to be numerous this
season and in great force, from the irregular supply of
rain." But the following specimens are fairly
representative. They were written at an interval of about
ten years: the first from Foston, the second from Combe
Florey. "Miss Berry," the elder of the famous sisters who
began by fascinating Horace Walpole and ended by charming
Thackeray: "Donna Agnes" was the younger. "Lady Rachel," the
famous wife of the person who suffered for the Rye House
plot (Lady Rachel Wriothesley, of Rachel Lady Russell, but
Miss Berry had written a