As to sagacity, I should say that his judgment respecting the warmest place and the softest cushion in a room is infallible; his punctuality at meal-times is admirable; and his pertinacity in jumping on people's shoulders, till they give him some of the best of what is going, indicates great firmness.
XVIII
SOME LETTERS AND TABLE TALK
My father's letters were seldom without a dash of playfulness or humour somewhere; a thing always fresh and spontaneous, unlike the calculated or laboured playfulness sometimes to be observed in the epistolary touch of literary folk. A capital example is a note to Matthew Arnold, at whose house he had left his umbrella. Arnold, it may be added, had recently been critically engaged upon the works of Bishop Wilson:—
Look at Bishop Wilson on the sin of covetousness, and then inspect your umbrella stand. You will there see a beautiful brown smooth-handled umbrella which is not your property.
Think of what the excellent prelate would have advised, and
bring it with you next time you come to the Club. The porter
will take care of it for me.
Sometimes the words will come trippingly from the pen as if they were flung out in a brilliant flash of talk, like the following sketch of human character:—
Men, my dear, are very queer animals, a mixture of horse-nervousness, ass-stubbornness, and camel-malice—with an angel bobbing about unexpectedly like the apple in the posset—and when they can do exactly as they please they are very hard to drive.
As to his conversation, that, wrote the late Wilfrid Ward,
was singularly finished and (if I may so express it) clean cut; never long-winded or prosy; enlivened by vivid illustrations. He was an excellent raconteur, and his stories had a stamp of their own which would have made them always and everywhere acceptable. His sense of humour and economy of words would have made it impossible, had he lived to ninety, that they should ever have been disparaged as symptoms of what has been called "anecdotage."