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 and business of a mind so great paired with a heart so simple.

"My idea is this," he says, "subject to an exception which I will
state in a moment." Taking up his exception, he makes it so lucid,
so pregnant, so comprehensive, so irresistible, that it seems to us
the whole and satisfying dogma; and then, suddenly turning it
inside-outward, he reveals the seams, and we remember that it was