scholar, the placable spirit of an eager child.

I said "Johnsonian"--yet even in the great Doctor as we have him
recorded there were a certain truculence and vehemence that are a
little foreign to B----'s habit. Fearless champion as he is, there
is always a gentleness about him. Even when his voice deepens and he
is well launched on a long argument, he is never brutally dogmatic,
never cruelly discourteous.

The beauty of B----'s talk, the quality that would make it a
delight to listen to him all a summer afternoon, is that he gives,
unconsciously, a perfect exhibition of a perfect process, a great mind
in motion. His mind is too full, too crowded, too ratiocinative, for
easy and frugal utterance. Sometimes, unless one is an acute listener,
he is almost incoherent in his zeal to express all the phases and
facets of the thought that flashes upon him. And yet, if one could
(unknown to him) have a stenographer behind the arras to take it all
down, so that his argument could be analyzed at leisure, it would show
its anatomical knitting and structure. Do you remember how Burke's
speech on Conciliation was parsed and sub-headed in the preface to the
school-texts? Just so, in I and II and III, A. B. and C, ([alpha]),
([beta]), and ([gamma]), i, ii, and iii, we could articulate the
strict and bony logic that vertebrates B----'s talk. Reservations,
exceptions, qualifications, parentheses, sub-clauses, and humorous
paraphrases swim upon him as he goes, and he deals with each as it
comes. Sometimes, one thinks, he has lost the spine of the discourse,
is mazed in a ganglion of nerves and sinews. But no! give him time and
back he comes to the marrow of his theme!

What a happiness this is to listen to--he (bless his heart) now and
then apologizing for his copiousness, little dreaming that we are
all better men for hearing him; that his great gray head and clear
kindly eye ("His mild and magnificent eye": whose is that phrase?)
are to us a symbol of Socratic virtue and power; that there is not
one of us who, after an hour or so with him, does not depart with
private resolutions of honour and fidelity to wisdom. How he
irrigates his subject, whatever it is.

I'll tell you who Time gallops withal! It is when B---- sits down at
a corner table of some chophouse, and (the rest of us seeing to it
that the meal gets ordered, and now and then saying something about
the food so that he will remember to eat) we marvel to watch the
glow