ing his friend's blood up,
and hearing his emphatic and bright speech, and watching his flashing
eye. Then he never spared him; criticized and sometimes quizzed--for he
had great humor--his style, as well as debated and weighed his
apprehendings and exegeses, shaking them heartily to test their
strength. He was so thoroughly independent of all authority, except that
of reason and truth, and his own humor; so ready to detect what was
weak, extravagant, or unfair; so full of relish for intellectual power
and accuracy, and so attached to and proud of my father, and bent on his
making the best of himself, that this trial was never relaxed. His firm
and close-grained mind was a sort of whetstone on which my father
sharpened his wits at this weekly "setting."

The very difference of their mental tempers and complexions drew them
together--the one impatient, nervous, earnest, instant, swift, vehement,
regardless of exertion, bent on his goal, like a thorough-bred racer,
pressing to the mark; the other leisurely to slowness and provokingness,
with a constitution which could stand a great deal of ease,
unimpassioned, still, clear, untroubled by likings or dislikings,
dwelling and working in thought and speculation and observation as ends
in themselves, and as their own rewards:[17] the one hunting for a
principle or a "divine method;" the other sapping or shelling from a
distance, and for his pleasure, a position, or gaining a point, or
settling a rule, or verifying a problem, or getting axiomatic and
proverbial.

[17] He was curiously destitute of all literary ambition or show;
like the _cactus_ in the desert, always plump, always taking
in the dew of heaven, and caring little to give it out. He
wrote many papers in the _Repository_ and _Monitor_, an
acute and clever tract on the Voluntary controversy,
entitled _Calm Answers to Angry Questions_, and was the
author of a capital bit of literary banter--a Congratulatory
Letter to the Minister of Liberton, who had come down upon
my father in a pamphlet, for his sermon on "There remaineth
much land to be possessed." It is a mixture of Swift and
Arbuthnot. I remember one of the flowers he culls from him
he is congratulating, in which my father is characterized as
one of those "shallow, sallow souls that would swallow the
bait, without perceiving the cloven foot!" But a man lik