the nature of the
argumentum ad hominem absolutely requires,--Would you, Sir, if a Jew of
a godfather had proposed the name for your child, and offered you his
purse along with it, would you have consented to such a desecration of
him?--O my God! he would say, looking up, if I know your temper right,
Sir,--you are incapable of it;--you would have trampled upon the
offer;--you would have thrown the temptation at the tempter's head with
abhorrence.

Your greatness of mind in this action, which I admire, with that
generous contempt of money, which you shew me in the whole transaction,
is really noble;--and what renders it more so, is the principle of
it;--the workings of a parent's love upon the truth and conviction
of this very hypothesis, namely, That was your son called Judas,--the
forbid and treacherous idea, so inseparable from the name, would have
accompanied him through life like his shadow, and, in the end, made a
miser and a rascal of him, in spite, Sir, of your example.

I never knew a man able to answer this argument.--But, indeed, to speak
of my father as he was;--he was certainly irresistible;--both in his
orations and disputations;--he was born an orator;--(Greek).--Persuasion
hung upon his lips, and the elements of Logick and Rhetorick were
so blended up in him,--and, withal, he had so shrewd a guess at the
weaknesses and passions of his respondent,--that Nature might have stood
up and said,--'This man is eloquent.'--In short, whether he was on the
weak or the strong side of the question, 'twas hazardous in either case
to attack him.--And yet, 'tis strange, he had never read Cicero, nor
Quintilian de Oratore, nor Isocrates, nor Aristotle, nor Longinus,
amongst the antients;--nor Vossius, nor Skioppius, nor Ramus, nor
Farnaby, amongst the moderns;--and what is more astonishing, he had
never in his whole life the least light or spark of subtilty struck into
his mind, by one single lecture upon Crackenthorp or Burgersdicius or
any Dutch logician or commentator;--he knew not so much as in what the
difference of an argument ad ignorantiam, and an argument ad hominem
consisted; so that I well remember, when he went up along with me to
enter my name at Jesus College in...,--it was a matter of just
wonder with my worthy tutor, and two or three fellows of that learned
society,--that a man who knew not so much as the names of his tools,
should be able to work after that fashion with them.

To work with them in the