words in "osity" and "ation". All was simplicity, ease, and
vigour. He uttered his short, weighty, and pointed sentences
with a power of voice, and a justness and energy of emphasis, of
which the effect was rather increased than diminished by the
rollings of his huge form, and by the asthmatic gaspings and
puffings in which the peals of his eloquence generally ended.
Nor did the laziness which made him unwilling to sit down to his
desk prevent him from giving instruction or entertainment orally.
To discuss questions of taste, of learning, casuistry, in
language so exact and so forcible that it might have been printed
without the alteration of a word, was to him no exertion, but a
pleasure. He loved, as he said, to fold his legs and have his
talk out. He was ready to bestow the overflowings of his full
mind on anybody who would start a subject, on a fellow-passenger
in a stage coach, or on the person who sate at the same table
with him in an eating-house. But his conversation was nowhere so
brilliant and striking as when he was surrounded by a few
friends, whose abilities and knowledge enabled them, as he once
expressed it, to send him back every ball that he threw. Some of
these, in 1764, formed themselves into a club, which gradually
became a formidable power in the commonwealth of letters. The
verdicts pronounced by this conclave on new books were speedily
known over all London, and were sufficient to sell off a whole
edition in a day, or to condemn the sheets to the service of the
trunk-maker and the pastry-cook. Nor shall we think this strange
when we consider what great and various talents and acquirements
met in the little fraternity. Goldsmith was the representative
of poetry and light literature, Reynolds of the arts, Burke of
political eloquence and political philosophy. There, too, were
Gibbon, the greatest historian, and Jones, the greatest linguist,