deeper oath. With persons of dignity,
especially with women, to whom he was always very gallant, he had
courtly delicate manners, verging towards the wire-drawn and elaborate;
on common occasions, he bloomed out at once into jolly familiarity of
the gracefully boisterous kind, reminding you of mess-rooms and old
Dublin days. His off-hand mode of speech was always precise, emphatic,
ingenious: his laugh, which was frequent rather than otherwise, had a
sincerity of banter, but no real depth of sense for the ludicrous; and
soon ended, if it grew too loud, in a mere dissonant scream. He was
broad, well-built, stout of stature; had a long lowish head, sharp gray
eyes, with large strong aquiline face to match; and walked, or sat, in
an erect decisive manner. A remarkable man; and playing, especially in
those years 1830-40, a remarkable part in the world.

For it may be said, the emphatic, big-voiced, always influential and
often strongly unreasonable _Times_ Newspaper was the express emblem of
Edward Sterling; he, more than any other man or circumstance, _was_
the _Times_ Newspaper, and thundered through it to the shaking of the
spheres. And let us assert withal that his and its influence, in those
days, was not ill grounded but rather well; that the loud manifold
unreason, often enough vituperated and groaned over, was of the surface
mostly; that his conclusions, unreasonable, partial, hasty as they might
at first be, gravitated irresistibly towards the right: in virtue of
which grand quality indeed, the root of all good insight in man, his
_Times_ oratory found acceptance and influential audience, amid the loud
whirl of an England itself logically very stupid, and wise chiefly by
instinct.

England listened to this voice, as all might observe; and to one who
knew England and it, the result was not quite a strange one, and was
honorable rather than otherwise to both parties. A good judge of men's
talents has been heard to say of Edward Sterling: "There is not a
_faculty of improvising_ equal to this in all my circle. Sterling rushes
out into the clubs, into London society, rolls about all day, copiously
talking modish nonsense or sense, and listening to the like, with the
multifarious miscellany of men; comes home at night; redacts it into a
_Times_ Leader,--and is found to have hit the essential purport of the
world's immeasurable babblement that day, with an accuracy beyond all
other men. This is what the multifarious Ba