on hearing him that he had ransacked
Johnson to find out the finest and loftiest words in which to express
his ideas, so far as he has any. The regions in which ordinary mortals
move are too mundane for him; so he rises aloft in flights of winged
verbiage, causing those who listen below to wonder whither he is going,
until he has passed away into the clouds, beyond their peering ken. At
other times he speaks in such grandiloquence of terms as make his
hearers open their eyes and mouths in vacant and manifold interjections!
"How sublime! How grand! How surpassingly eloquent! Was it not
magnificent?"

I will give the reader a few illustrations of this talker, as gathered
from a variety of sources.

"That was a masterly performance," said Mr. Balloon to his friend Mr.
Gimblett, as they came out of church one Sunday morning, when the Rev.
Mr. German had been preaching on the _Relation of the Infinite to the
Impossible_.

"Yes," replied Mr. Gimblett, "I suppose it was very fine; but much
beyond my depth. I confess to being one of the sheep who looked up and
were not fed."

"That's because you haven't a metaphysical mind," said Mr. Balloon,
regarding his friend with pity; "you have got a certain faculty of mind,
but I suspect you have not got the _logical grasp_ requisite for the
comprehension of such a sermon as that."

"I am afraid I have not," said Mr. Gimblett.

"I tell you what it is," continued Mr. Balloon, "Mr. German has a
_head_. He's an intellectual giant, I hardly know whether he is greater
as a subjective preacher, or in the luminous objectivity of his
_argumentum ad hominem_. As an instructive reasoner, too, he is
perfectly great. With what synthetical power he refuted the Homoiousian
theory. I tell you Homoiousianism will be nowhere after that."

"To tell the truth," said Mr. Gimblett, "I went to sleep at that long
word, and did not awake until he was on Theodicy."

"Ah, yes," said Mr. Balloon, "that was a splendid manifestation of
ratiocinative word-painting. I was completely carried away when, in his
magnificent, sublime, and marrowy style he took an analogical view of
the anthropological." But at this point Mr. Balloon soared away into the
air, and left Mr. Gimblett standing with wondering vision as to whither
he had gone.

At the time the Atlantic telegraph was first laid a certain preacher
thought proper to use it as an illustration of the connection between
heaven and earth, thus: "When the sul