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Updated: June 26, 2025
Abraham Plymley, my sister, will be led away captive by an amorous Gaul; and Joel Plymley your firstborn, will be a French drummer. Out of sight, out of mind, seems to be a proverb which applies to enemies as well as friends. This is precisely the method in which the English have acted during the whole of the revolutionary war.
Sydney Smith, writing as Peter Plymley, said, 'You cannot seriously suppose the people to be so degraded as to look for their safety from a man who proposes to subdue Europe by keeping it without Jesuit's Bark." SIR SPENCER WALPOLE, Life of Lord John Russell. In 1839 Sydney Smith pronounced this "a very unjust imputation on Lord Castlereagh."
In October 1844 Eugène Robin, reviewing Sydney Smith in the Revue des Deux Mondes, wrote as follows: "Caché sous le pseudonyme de Peter Plymley il adresse ces nouvelles provinciales
Stephen Orcott, of Plymley Rise farm, near Barlingford, being at a loss what to do with a somewhat refractory younger son, resolved upon planting his footsteps in the path so victoriously trodden by Philip Sheldon.
Out of that splendid list of unattainable posts, Peter Plymley chooses, to illustrate his theme, the offices of Sheriff and Deputy-Sheriff in Ireland. No one he says, who is unacquainted with that country, can conceive the obstacles to justice which exclusion from these offices entails.
When he came to dealing publicly with a political opponent, he seems to have thought that, the coarser were his illustrations, the more domestic and personal his allusions, the better for the cause which he served. The Letters of Peter Plymley abound in medical and obstetrical imagery. The effect of the Orders in Council on the health of Europe supplies endless jokes.
But time brings changes in religious, as well as in social, manners, and Peter Plymley prophesied nearly thirty years before Keble's sermon on "National Apostasy" had started the second revival of the English Church. No one who has studied the character and career of Sydney Smith would expect him to be very sympathetic with the work which bore the name of Pusey.
In the next year appeared the first letter of Peter Plymley to his brother Abraham on the subject of the Irish Catholics. These letters fell, we are told, like sparks on a heap of gunpowder. All London, and soon all England, was alive to the sound reason recommended by a lively wit.
Was he a York attorney coming to be preyed upon, or a beggar coming to prey upon me, a barber to solicit the dressing of my wig, or a collector for the Jews' Society? Down I went, and to my utter amazement beheld the Smith of Smiths, Sydney Smith, alias Peter Plymley.
Abraham Plymley has been talking of the concessions which Roman Catholics hare already received, and their shameless ingratitude in asking for more. To the cry of ingratitude Peter thus replies. There is a village, he says, in which, once a year, the inhabitants sit down to a dinner provided at the common expense.
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