circle-squarer of our day. He will not owe this distinction to his being an
influential and respected member of the commercial world of Liverpool, even
though the power of publishing which his means give him should induce him
to issue a whole library upon one paradox. Neither will he owe it to the
pains taken with him by a mathematician who corresponded with him until the
joint letters filled an octavo volume. Neither will he owe it to the notice
taken of him by Sir William Hamilton, of Dublin, who refuted him in a
manner intelligible to an ordinary student of Euclid, which refutation he
calls a remarkable paradox easily explainable, but without explaining it.
What he will owe it to I proceed to show.

Until the publication of the _Nut to Crack_ Mr. James Smith stood among
circle-squarers in general. I might have treated him with ridicule, as I
have done others: and he says that he does not doubt he shall come in for
his share at the tail end of my Budget. But I can make a better job of him
than so, as Locke would have phrased it: he is such a very striking example
of something I have said on the use of logic that I prefer to make an
example of his writings. On one point indeed he well deserves the
_scutica_,[210] if not the _horribile flagellum_.[211] He tells me that he
will bring his solution to me in such a form as shall compel me to admit it
as _un fait accompli_ [_une faute accomplie?_][212] {117} or leave myself
open to the humiliating charge of mathematical ignorance and folly. He has
also honored me with some private letters. In the first of these he gives
me a "piece of information," after which he cannot imagine that I, "as an
honest mathematician," can possibly have the slightest hesitation in
admitting his solution. There is a tolerable reservoir of modest assurance
in a man who writes to a perfect stranger with what he takes for an
argument, and gives an oblique threat of imputation of dishonesty in case
the argument be not admitted without hesitation; not to speak of the minor
charges of ignorance and folly. All this is blind self-confidence, without
mixture of malicious meaning; and I rather like it: it makes me understand
how Sam Johnson came to say of his old friend Mrs. Cobb,[213]--"I love Moll
Cobb for her impudence." I have now done with my friend's _suaviter in
modo_,[214] and proceed to his _fortiter in re_[215]: I shall show that he
_has_ convicted himself of ignorance and folly, with an honesty a