e. There is something
jovial and pleasant in the sight of a round face! What conspiracy
could succeed when its head was a lean and hungry-looking fellow, like
Cassius? If the Roman patriots had had Uncle Jack amongst them, perhaps
they would never have furnished a tragedy to Shakspeare. Uncle Jack was
as plump as a partridge,--not unwieldy, not corpulent, not obese,
not vastus, which Cicero objects to in an orator, but every crevice
comfortably filled up. Like the ocean, "time wrote no wrinkles on his
glassy [or brassy] brow." His natural lines were all upward curves, his
smile most ingratiating, his eye so frank, even his trick of rubbing his
clean, well-feel, English-looking hands, had something about it coaxing
and debonnaire, something that actually decoyed you into trusting your
money into hands so prepossessing. Indeed, to him might be fully applied
the expression--Sedem animce in extremis digitis habet,--"He had his
soul's seat in his finger-ends." The critics observe that few men have
ever united in equal perfection the imaginative with the scientific
faculties. "Happy he," exclaims Schiller, "who combines the enthusiast's
warmth with the worldly man's light:" light and warmth, Uncle Jack
had them both. He was a perfect symphony of bewitching enthusiasm and
convincing calculation. Dicaeopolis in the "Aeharnenses," in presenting
a gentleman called Nicharchus to the audience, observes: "He is small,
I confess, but, there is nothing lost in him: all is knave that is not
fool." Parodying the equivocal compliment, I may say that though Uncle
Jack was no giant, there was nothing lost in him. Whatever was not
philanthropy was arithmetic, and whatever was not arithmetic was
philanthropy. He would have been equally dear to Howard and to Cocker.
Uncle Jack was comely too,--clear-skinned and florid, had a little
mouth, with good teeth, wore no whiskers, shaved his beard as close as
if it were one of his grand national companies; his hair, once somewhat
sandy, was now rather grayish, which increased the respectability of his
appearance; and he wore it flat at the sides and raised in a peak at the
top; his organs of constructiveness and ideality were pronounced by Mr.
Squills to be prodigious, and those freely developed bumps gave great
breadth to his forehead. Well-shaped, too, was Uncle Jack, about five
feet eight,--the proper height for an active man of business. He wore
a black coat; but to make the nap look the fresher, h