d the arrangement of his garments seemed more the result of accident than
design."

His manner in society was cordial, unrestrained, and even boisterous. "I
live," he said in an admirable figure, "with open doors and windows." His
poor parishioners regarded him with "a curious mixture of reverence and
grin."[147] His daughter says that, "on entering the pulpit, the calm
dignity of his eye, mien, and voice, made one feel that he was indeed, and
felt himself to be, 'the pastor standing between our God and His people,'
to teach His laws, to declare His judgments, and proclaim His mercies."

Enough has been quoted from his writings to give the reader a clear notion
of his style. In early life it was not scrupulously correct,[148] and to
the end it was marked here and there by an archaism such as "I have
strove," and "they are rode over." It was singularly uninvolved and
uncomplicated, and was animated, natural, and vigorous in the highest
degree. As years went on, it gained both in ease and in accuracy, but never
lost either its force or its resonance. It ran up and down the whole gamut
of the English tongue, from sesquipedalian classicisms (which he generally
used to heighten a comic effect) to one-syllabled words of the homeliest
Anglo-Saxon. His punctuation was careless, and the impression produced by
his written composition is that of a man who wrote exactly as he spoke,
without pause, premeditation, or amendment; who was possessed by the
subject on which he was writing, and never laid down the pen till that
subject lived and breathed in the written page.[149] Here and there,
indeed, it is easy to note an unusual care and elaboration in the structure
of the sentences and the cadence of the sound, and then the style rises to
a very high level of rhetorical dignity.

Enough too has been quoted, both from his writings and from his
conversation, to illustrate the quality and quantity of his humour. It
bubbled up in him by a spontaneous process, and flowed over into whatever
he wrote or said. 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 wa