hips, and when he is in London he
flits from Lady Hayter's tea-table to Mr. Goschen's bureau, analyzes at
the Athenaeum the gossip which he has acquired at Brooks's, and by
dinner-time is able, if only he is willing, to tell you what Spain
intends and what America; the present relations between the Curia and
the Secret Societies; how long Lord Salisbury will combine the
Premiership with the Foreign Office; and the latest theory about the
side of Whitehall on which Charles I. was beheaded.

The ranks of our good talkers--none too numerous a body at the best, and
sadly thinned by the losses which I described in a former chapter--have
been opportunely reinforced by the discovery of Mr. Augustine Birrell.
For forty-eight years he has walked this earth, but it is only during
the last nine--in short, since he entered Parliament--that the admirable
qualities of his conversation have been generally recognized. Before
that time his delightful _Obiter Dicta_ had secured for him a wide
circle of friends who had never seen his face, and by these admirers his
first appearance on the social scene was awaited with lively interest.
What would he be like? Should we be disillusioned? Would he talk as
pleasantly as he wrote? Well, in due course he appeared, and the
questions were soon answered in a sense as laudatory as his friends or
even himself could have desired. It was unanimously voted that his
conversation was as agreeable as his writing; but, oddly enough, its
agreeableness was of an entirely different kind. His literary knack of
chatty criticism had required a new word to convey its precise effect.
To "birrell" is now a verb as firmly established as to "boycott," and it
signifies a style light, easy, playful, pretty, rather discursive,
perhaps a little superficial. Its characteristic note is grace. But when
the eponymous hero of the new verb entered the conversational lists it
was seen that his predominant quality was strength.

An enthusiastic admirer who sketched him in a novel nicknamed him "The
Harmonious Blacksmith," and the collocation of words happily hits off
the special quality of his conversation. There is burly strength in his
positive opinions, his cogent statement, his remorseless logic, his
thorough knowledge of the persons and things that he discusses. In his
sledge-hammer blows against humbug and wickedness, intellectual
affectation, and moral baseness, he is the Blacksmith all over. In his
geniality, his sociabi