create for you a view you never held, and then furiously fall on you for holding it.  These, at least, are my two favourites, and both are loud, copious intolerant talkers.  This argues that I myself am in the same category; for if we love talking at all, we love a bright, fierce adversary, who will hold his ground, foot by foot, in much our own manner, sell his attention dearly, and give us our full measure of the dust and exertion of battle.  Both these men can be beat from a position, but it takes six hours to do it; a high and hard adventure, worth attempting.  With both you can pass days in an enchanted country of the mind, with people, scenery and manners of its own; live a life apart, more arduous, active and glowing than any real existence; and come forth again when the talk is over, as out of a theatre or a dream, to find the east wind still blowing and the chimney-pots of the old battered city still around you.  Jack has the far finer mind, Burly the far more honest; Jack gives us the animated poetry, Burly the romantic prose, of similar themes; the one glances high like a meteor and makes a light in darkness; the other, with many changing hues of fire, burns at the sea-level, like a conflagration; but both have the same humour and artistic interests, the same unquenched ardour in pursuit, the same gusts of talk and thunderclaps of contradiction.

Cockshot[17] is a different article, but vastly entertaining, and has been meat and drink to me for many a long evening.  His manner is dry, brisk and pertinacious, and the choice of words not much.  The point about him is his extraordinary readiness and spirit.  You can propound nothing but he has either a theory about it ready-made, or will have one instantly on the stocks, and proceed to lay its timbers and launch it in your presence.  “Let me see,” he will say.  “Give me a moment.  I should have some theory for that.”  A blither spectacle than the vigour with which he sets about the task, it were hard to fancy.  He is possessed by a demoniac energy, welding the elements for his life, and bending ideas, as an athlete bends a horseshoe, with a visible and lively effort.  He has, in theorising, a compass, an art; what I would call the synthetic gusto; something of a Herbert Spencer,[18] who should see the fun of the thing.  You are not bound, and no more is he, to place your faith in these brand-new opinions.  But some of them are right enough, durable even for life; and the poorest serve for a cock-shy—­as when idle people, after picnics, float a bottle on a pond and have an hour’s diversion ere it sinks.  Whichever they are, serious opinions or humours of the moment, he still defends his ventures with indefatigable wit and spirit, hitting savagely himself, but taking punishment like a man.  He knows and never forgets that people talk, first of all, for the sake of talking; conducts himself in the ring, to use the old slang, like a thorough “glutton,"[19] and honestly enjoys