AN APTITUDE FOR LOGIC AND FOR GREEK.
May 20.—To-day again to the trial, to which I took MISS Young, her majesty having given me two tickets very late overnight. Miss Young is singularly, as far as I can see, the reverse of her eccentric parents she is moderation personified.
Mr. Windham again spoke in the course of this morning’s business, which was chiefly occupied in debating on the admissibility of the evidence brought forward by the prosecutors. The quickness and aptness of his arguments, with the admirable facility and address with which he seized upon those of his opponents, the counsel, were strong marks of that high and penetrating capacity so strikingly his characteristic. The only defect in his speaking is the tone of his voice, which, from exertion, loses all its powers of modulation, and has a crude accent and expression very disagreeable.
During the examination of Mr. Anderson, one of Mr. Hastings’s best friends,—a sensible, well-bred, and gentlemanlike man,—Mr. Windham came up to my elbow.
“And can this man,” cried he, presently, “this man—so gentle—be guilty?”
I accused him of making a point to destroy all admiration of gentleness in my opinion. “But you are grown very good now!” I added, “No, very bad I mean!” He knew I meant for speaking; and I then gave him burlesqued, various definitions of good, which had fallen from Mr. Fox in my hearing, the most contradictory, and, taken out of their place, the most ridiculous imaginable.
He laughed very much, but seriously confessed that technical terms and explanations had better have been wholly avoided by them all, as the counsel were sure to out-technicalise them, and they were then exposed to greater embarrassments than by steering clear of the attempt, and resting only upon their common forces.
“There is one praise,” I cried, “which I am always sure to meet in the newspapers whenever I meet with your name; and I begin to quite tire of seeing it for you,-your skill in logic!” “O, I thank you,” he cried, earnestly “I am indeed quite ashamed of the incessant misappropriation of that word.”
“No, no,” cried I; “I only tire of it because they seem to think, when once the word logic and your name are combined, they have completely stated all. However, in what little I have heard, I could have suspected you to have been prepared with a speech ready written, had I not myself heard just before all the arguments which it answered.”
I then added that I was the less surprised at this facility of language, from having heard my brother declare he knew no man who read Greek with that extraordinary rapidity—no, not Dr. Parr, nor any of the professed Grecians, whose peculiar study it had been through life.
This could be nothing, he said, but partiality.
“Not mine, at least,” cried I, laughing, “for Greek excellence is rather Out Of my sphere of panegyric!”
“Well,” cried he, laughing too at my disclaiming, “‘Tis’ your brother’s partiality. However, ’tis one I must try not to lose. I must take to my Greek exercises again.”
They will do you a world of good, thought I, if they take you but from your prosecution-exercises.