is not a hair’s-breadth space between any two of his words, nor is there a single expression either ill-chosen or out of its place.  He speaks without stopping to take breath, with ease, with point, with elegance, and without “spinning the thread of his verbosity finer than the staple of his argument.”  He may be said to weave words into any shapes he pleases for use or ornament, as the glass-blower moulds the vitreous fluid with his breath; and his sentences shine like glass from their polished smoothness, and are equally transparent.  His style of eloquence, indeed, is remarkable for neatness, for correctness, and epigrammatic point; and he has applied this as a standard to his written compositions, where the very same degree of correctness and precision produces, from the contrast between writing and speaking, an agreeable diffuseness, freedom, and animation.  Whenever the Scotch advocate has appeared at the bar of the English House of Lords, he has been admired by those who were in the habit of attending to speeches there, as having the greatest fluency of language and the greatest subtlety of distinction of any one of the profession.  The law-reporters were as little able to follow him from the extreme rapidity of his utterance as from the tenuity and evanescent nature of his reasoning.

Mr. Jeffrey’s conversation is equally lively, various, and instructive.  There is no subject on which he is not au fait:  no company in which he is not ready to scatter his pearls for sport.  Whether it be politics, or poetry, or science, or anecdote, or wit, or raillery, he takes up his cue without effort, without preparation, and appears equally incapable of tiring himself or his hearers.  His only difficulty seems to be not to speak, but to be silent.  There is a constitutional buoyancy and elasticity of mind about him that cannot subside into repose, much less sink into dulness.  There may be more original talkers, persons who occasionally surprise or interest you more; few, if any, with a more uninterrupted flow of cheerfulness and animal spirits, with a greater fund of information, and with fewer specimens of the bathos in their conversation.  He is never absurd, nor has he any favourite points which he is always bringing forward.  It cannot be denied that there is something bordering on petulance of manner, but it is of that least offensive kind which may be accounted for from merit and from success, and implies no exclusive pretensions nor the least particle of ill-will to others.  On the contrary, Mr. Jeffrey is profuse of his encomiums and admiration of others, but still with a certain reservation of a right to differ or to blame.  He cannot rest on one side of a question:  he is obliged by a mercurial habit and disposition to vary his point of view.  If he is ever tedious, it is from an excess of liveliness:  he oppresses from a sense of airy lightness.  He is always setting out on a fresh scent:  there are always relays of topics;