o had seen him on different days might
dispute about him as the travellers in the fable disputed about the
chameleon.

In one thing, as far as I observed, he is always the same and that is
the warmth of his domestic affections. Neither Mr. Wilberforce, nor
my uncle Babington, come up to him in this respect. The flow of his
kindness is quite inexhaustible. Not five minutes pass without some fond
expression, or caressing gesture, to his wife or his daughter. He has
fitted up a study for himself; but he never goes into it. Law papers,
reviews, whatever he has to write, he writes in the drawing-room, or
in his wife's boudoir. When he goes to other parts of the country on a
retainer he takes them in the carriage with him. I do not wonder that
he should be a good husband, for his wife is a very amiable woman. But I
was surprised to see a man so keen and sarcastic, so much of a scoffer,
pouring himself out with such simplicity and tenderness in all sorts of
affectionate nonsense. Through our whole journey to Perth he kept up
a sort of mock quarrel with his daughter; attacked her about
novel-reading, laughed her into a pet, kissed her out of it, and laughed
her into it again. She and her mother absolutely idolise him, and I do
not wonder at it.

His conversation is very much like his countenance and his voice, of
immense variety; sometimes plain and unpretending even to flatness;
sometimes whimsically brilliant and rhetorical almost beyond the license
of private discourse. He has many interesting anecdotes, and tells them
very well. He is a shrewd observer; and so fastidious that I am not
surprised at the awe in which many people seem to stand when in his
company. Though not altogether free from affectation himself, he has
a peculiar loathing for it in other people, and a great talent for
discovering and exposing it. He has a particular contempt, in which
I most heartily concur with him, for the fadaises of bluestocking
literature, for the mutual flatteries of coteries, the handing about
of vers de societe, the albums, the conversaziones, and all the other
nauseous trickeries of the Sewards, Hayleys, and Sothebys. I am not
quite sure that he has escaped the opposite extreme, and that he is not
a little too desirous to appear rather a man of the world, an active
lawyer, or an easy careless gentleman, than a distinguished writer. I
must own that, when Jeffrey and I were by ourselves, he talked much and
very well on literary top