'Many thanks, my dear sir, for your kind present of game. If there is a pure and elevated pleasure in this world, it is the roast pheasant and bread sauce—barn-door fowls for Dissenters, but for the real Churchman, the thirty-nine times articled clerk—the pheasant, the pheasant!
'Ever yours,
'Sydney Smith.'
The pheasant for rectors, the fowl for Dissenters—a characteristic bit of chaff from Peter Plymley to Tom Ingoldsby. In these days, after wonderful rapidity of movement, when the questions which troubled the last generation have been merged in others far deeper and wider, it is pleasant to think of Whig and Tory in the same cathedral precinct—Tory sending Whig some game, and Whig replying with a gibe at all dwellers without the orthodox limits. Few years have passed, yet the atmosphere is marvellously clearer; there is not precisely the same relation between Conformist and Nonconformist. The pheasant and the barn-door fowl are rather more equally distributed, perhaps.
Mr. Barham's son and biographer thus states his determination not to record his father's clerical life. 'With the details of his experience as a clergyman, rarely suitable for publication as such particulars are, I do not propose to deal. Of course, an outline will be given of his professional progress; but the reader must, once for all, be requested to bear in mind that it is intended, in the following pages, simply to throw together some slight records of his leisure hours and recreative pursuits.' This design has been very well executed; but we certainly think that more might be done. However, we must perforce accept the editor's view of the matter, and learn what we can of his father by sidelong glimpses of him. Taken solely as a man of letters, Barham is well worth study. Taken as husband and father, he is delightful. His correspondence with his children is equal to Tom Hood's letters to infant friends, though in quite a different style. His nonsense, prose or verse, was always pleasant nonsense. Thus he writes to his daughter Fanny:
'What do you think of Mr. Sydney Smith having offered me his residentiary house to live in, together with a garden at the back—magnificent for London—containing three polyanthus roots, a real tree, a brown box border, a snuff-coloured jessamine, a shrub which is either a dwarf acacia or an overgrown gooseberry bush, eight broken bottles, and a tortoiseshell tom-cat asleep in the sunniest corner; the whole, as George Robins would say, capable of the greatest improvement; with a varied and extensive prospect of the back of the Oxford Arms, and a fine hanging wood (the new drop at Newgate) in the distance, all being situate in the midst of a delightful neighbourhood, and well worth the attention of any capitalist wishing to make an investment....
There is work enough cut out for you, I promise you, when you get back: eighteen jars of onions to pickle, as many double-damson cheeses to press, some dozen niggers to boil into black currant jelly, and jams and marmalades to make without end; for, unfortunately for you and all other females connected with the family, the new house is provided with that domestic curse, a roomy store-closet. So, my dear old Fan, make hay or dirt pies, which is the same thing, while you can, in comfort.'
Pater peramans, evidently. Here again is a pleasant piece of chaff addressed to the same young lady, on 'having nothing to say' in a letter:—
'As your correspondence increases, my dear girl, you will find that this having nothing to say, and being obliged to say it, will be one of the great and incipient stumbling blocks of your literary life. Nothing, in fact, is so difficult to express—that is, with any degree of propriety—as nothing; and when once you have attained a proficiency in this, your education may be considered to be to a certain extent completed. Till then many people may think, and may assure you, that you know nothing, but do not believe them. You may know, and I dare say do, very little; but to be thoroughly acquainted with nothing requires not only a great deficiency of talent far below the common run of intellect, but also a want of application which, though it is possible you may possess it in a very considerable degree, I have never yet seen in you to the extent absolutely requisite.'
So easy and regular was the course of Barham's life, that there is really nothing to say about it. As landowner, Canon of St. Paul's, parson of a City church, he moved pleasantly in society, and had only to encounter life's inevitable troubles. We remember him in our hot youth, at the long-extinct Chapter Coffee-house in St. Paul's churchyard, whose landlord bore the appropriate name of Faithful, improvising marvellous verses over a glass of antique port. Perhaps his life was almost too facile; perhaps men of serious temperament would regard such productions as the 'Ingoldsby Legends' as things intolerable: but Barham had his mission, depend on it, and if you go to a 'Penny Reading' in the country any winter evening, the chances are that you will get selections from 'Pickwick' or from 'Ingoldsby,' whatever else may greet your ear. Everybody knows Sam Weller and Tiger Tim—both typical man-servants:—
'Tiger Tim was clean of limb,