wish to reach
it cheaply, or quickly, or without the tussle and effort Wherein
pleasure lies.

The very best talker, with me, is one whom I shall call Spring-Heel'd
Jack. I say so, because I never knew any one who mingled so largely the
possible ingredients of converse. In the Spanish proverb, the fourth man
necessary to compound a salad, is a madman to mix it: Jack is that
madman. I know not which is more remarkable: the insane lucidity of his
conclusions, the humorous eloquence of his language, or his power of
method, bringing the whole of life into the focus of the subject
treated, mixing the conversational salad like a drunken god. He doubles
like the serpent, changes and flashes like the shaken kaleidoscope,
transmigrates bodily into the views of others, and so, in the twinkling
of an eye and with a heady rapture, turns questions inside out and
flings them empty before you on the ground, like a triumphant conjuror.
It is my common practice when a piece of conduct puzzles me, to attack
it in the presence of Jack with such grossness, such partiality and such
wearing iteration, as at length shall spur him up in its defence. In a
moment he transmigrates, dons the required character, and with
moonstruck philosophy justifies the act in question. I can fancy nothing
to compare with the _vim_ of these impersonations, the strange scale of
language, flying from Shakespeare to Kant, and from Kant to Major
Dyngwell--

"As fast as a musician scatters sounds
Out of an instrument--"

the sudden, sweeping generalisations, the absurd irrelevant
particularities, the wit, wisdom, folly, humour, eloquence and bathos,
each startling in its kind, and yet all luminous in the admired disorder
of their combination. A talker of a different calibre, though belonging
to the same school, is Burly. Burly is a man of great presence; he
commands a larger atmosphere, gives the impression of a grosser mass of
character than most men. It has been said of him that his presence could
be felt in a room you entered blindfold; and the same, I think, has been
said of other powerful constitutions condemned to much physical
inaction. There is something boisterous and piratic in Burly's manner of
talk which suits well enough with this impression. He will roar you
down, he will bury his face in his hands, he will undergo passions of
revolt and agony; and meanwhile his attitude of mind is really both
conciliatory and receptive; and after Pistol has be